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Japanese Proverbs - #1

猿も木から落ちる。

 

  • Saru mo ki kara ochiru.
  • Literally: Even monkeys fall from trees.
  • Meaning: Everyone makes mistakes. / Nobody’s perfect.

(taken from Wikiquote)

This is one of my favorite Japanese proverbs. It is simple and straightforward, and at the same time quite powerful. However, I’m not sure I agree with the meaning given above. For me the imagery is something deeper than ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ which is cliche and in any case trivially true of all humans.

 

A subtle but more interesting point is that a monkey who never falls out of a tree is not considered perfect, or even great, because climbing trees is what monkeys do. ‘Nobody’s perfect’ seems to forgive us for not achieving stellar results every time, but that’s not what’s going on in the original proverb, which points out that circumstances can make even a routine task rather difficult, or even impossible, to accomplish.

 

 

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This entry was written by Steven Nishida and posted on February 24, 2007 at 8:53 am and filed under human nature, perspective, japan, philosophy, quotes, nature, learning. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1. Thank you for not leaving the translation alone, for expanding on it. I was also left with the nagging, “that’s not exactly a true translation” feeling and was satisfied by your follow-up. K

    1. Kelly on March 11th, 2007 at 3:28 pm

  2. Hi Kelly, and welcome!

    Nice to know that people are reading and getting something out of my (often self-indulgent) ramblings:-)

    Re: imperfect translations, I am constantly reminding my students that words and concepts don’t generally translate so nicely from one language to the next. There is always a fair amount of contextual information to consider when trying to translate, and in many cases you simply can’t capture the whole meaning. Getting comfortable with the imperfections of linguistic communication in general is a big step toward becoming a great foreign languge student.

    2. realityonastick on March 12th, 2007 at 9:12 am

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