Lost in translation? These proverbs never were | Pt. 5

Every culture has its idioms – compact, metaphor-rich phrases carrying an entire philosophy in a sentence.

In Chinese, they're known as 成语 (chengyu), four-character expressions drawn from classical texts, historical episodes and philosophical treatises, many of them more than two thousand years old.

Their age, though, is not what makes them interesting.

The fun begins when you put them next to proverbs from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Caucasus and the Slavic world, cultures that developed in other landscapes and under different political and intellectual traditions.

And yet, they keep arriving at the same conclusions and lessons, which raises an interesting question: if we have been saying many of the same things for centuries, why do we spend so much energy insisting on how different we are? Today's chengyu is "The cow that wouldn't listen" or 对牛弹琴 (dui niu tan qin).

Picture the countryside outside an ancient Chinese town.

Soft mist rolls over the mountains as lush green grass sways with the cool breeze.

A musician named Gong Mingyi is walking with his guqin under his arm as he comes across a grazing cow.

Mesmerized by the serenity of the scene, he sits down right there on the grass and begins to play, pouring all his skill into the performance that could make a room full of people go quiet in awe.

The cow, however, has other priorities.

It does not even lift its head and just keeps chewing, completely indifferent to the music.

Mingyi is stunned, perhaps even a bit offended.

He has given the performance everything he has.

How could it simply fail to land? He tries again, then again, working his way through every tune he knows.