‘Don’t blame the mirror for your ugly face’: why foreign idioms rule

Human brains make the same observations across place, time and culture. I collect these phrases as others do stamps

There’s a group of professionals that I have a particular respect for: translators. Those who work to bring us the speeches and press-conference utterances of foreign leaders (hopefully avoiding geopolitical disasters by not making mistakes – though there have been some close calls); and literary translators responsible for gifting me Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, the brilliant Polish Nobel prize-winner by Olga Tokarczuk (which itself includes a subplot about translating William Blake), or the poetry of Anna Akhmatova.

Some of the most crucial translations, though, are those of proverbs. Idioms, adages, aphorisms from languages all over the world. These must be handled with care, like family heirlooms passed from generation to generation. Oral stories and national myths, too.

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