I came across a Turkish proverb in my textbook today, mentioned it to somebody, and realised at once that it could not decently be kept to myself.
We say: “He that would eat the kernel must crack the nut.” Or, in the flatter modern idiom, no pain, no gain. Do the work first; eat afterwards.
A Turk, in exactly the same circumstances, will tell you: “Ekmek aslanın ağzında.”—“The bread is in the lion’s mouth.”
Do you see the difference?
What stands between you and dinner
The English proverb puts its emphasis on effort. The Turkish one puts it on danger.
Our obstacle is a shell. It is hard, but it is inanimate, it is patient, and above all it does not object. Crack it and the kernel is yours. Nobody else has any claim on the nut; it was lying there.
The Turkish obstacle is a lion. The bread is not unclaimed—it is already in somebody’s possession, and not just anybody’s. Your options are limited: steal it, beg for it, or become a lion-tamer.
Different perceptions of the world, different baseline anxieties, different histories of staying alive.
And then there is the food itself
Look at what each language chose to put at the end of the sentence.
- A nut, in English—the food of woods and hedgerows, of people who gathered. Something you find, not something you grow. The labour is in the opening.
- Bread, in Turkish—the symbol of Anatolia, the homeland of wheat and of agriculture itself. Not found but made, by a whole chain of hands, and therefore worth guarding. Which is perhaps why a lion is standing over it.
(Russian, for what it is worth, chooses a third thing again: “You can’t even pull a fish from the pond without effort.” A river people’s answer—the pond belongs to nobody, go and fish.)
So the proverbs are not merely three ways of saying the same thing. They are three answers to the question of what, exactly, is in the way: a shell, a predator, or simply the water.
In conclusion
As Hamlet had it:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…
—including, it now appears, a Turkish lion with a loaf in its mouth.
