It's been a few months since I last posted about the Japanese "Iroha Karuta" card matching game of proverbs. Last time, I got as far as the ninth card, which is "Ri," (り) the ninth hiragana in the traditional hiragana syllabary. Here is the blog post:
@hirohurl/index-4-index-how-to-tell-if-someone-is-honest
However, in some cases the selected proverb can vary from deck to deck, and "Ri" (り) is one of those cases, so today I will show you another "kotowaza" (proverb) that is commonly used for the ninth hiragana syllable. It goes like this:
Kotowaza 9: "Ryou-yaku kuchi ni nigashi."
And here it is in Japanese:
良薬口に苦し
We can break it down into three parts:
- 良薬 = りょうやく (hiragana) = ryou + yaku = "good" + "medicine"
- 口に = くちに (hiragana) = kuchi ni = "mouth" + "in"
- 苦し = にがし (hiragana) = "nigashi" = "bitter"
From that we can build up our translation starting at the most bare and literal version:
Good medicine, in the mouth, bitter.
To turn "good medicine, in the mouth, bitter" into a sentence that respects the concision of the original Japanese and keeps each element in its place, I agree with those versions that replace "in the mouth" with the verb, "taste":
Good medicine / tastes / bitter.
That's it! Nice and easy: Good medicine tastes bitter.
The translation that Michael L. Maynard came up with for his book, 101 Japanese Idioms (see photos, above) seems far too wordy; I guess he wanted to keep the literal translation of "kuchi in" ("in the mouth") and ended up with a redundancy, "tastes ... in the mouth" - like, where else but in the mouth does the sense of taste operate?
This particular kotowaza reminds me of a famous quotation by the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who used the medicine metaphor to defend her government's program of public spending cuts in the 1980s:
Gentlemen, if we don't cut spending we will be bankrupt. Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it in order to live. Should we withhold the medicine? No. We are not wrong. We did not seek election and win in order to manage the decline of a great nation.
Today the UK national debt is much bigger than it was in her day, and is now bigger than the UK's annual GDP. If ever any medicine is applied, it will have to be very bitter indeed.
One sweetener I propose to my UK friends: Grow your Hive holdings!
Cheers!
David Hurley