FROM PROVERB TO GREATNESS

Having been talking about language and metaphors, and mentioning Grigori Permyakov in this connection, it makes sense to continue this little series by talking about language and proverbs, and by mentioning Grigori Permyakov in this connection again.

This entry is dedicated to my late friend and mentor Grigori Lvovich Permyakov-German. It does not touch upon my personal experience with Grigori Lvovich, which belongs not here, but in the Mirror section. I am therefore limiting it just to the professional side of his scholarly achievement, which is in semiotics, structural linguistics, and folklore, and broadly in anthropology. Permyakov was a genius, in my opinion, whose revolutionary thinking went far beyond the realm of proverbs, which must not diminish the value of proverbs as one of the pillars of human language, and every scholar and philosopher knows that the scientific value of language reaches well beyond linguistics, permeating every possible aspect of thought as such. It is therefore my duty to pass to my reader this memory of Permyakov’s lifetime achievement, as I am convinced that otherwise his name may remain unknown, and virtually impossible to come by in non-specific internet explorations.

Choosing folklore as his primary field for structural-linguistic study, Permyakov recognized that proverbs are highly complex entities, which ought to be approached from a combined variety of angles. At the same time, the fact remains that proverbs, and other such entities, are set clichés, whose meaning can sometimes be deduced from their component parts, but often cannot, being largely dependent on their association with the original contexts, from which they have been removed to start functioning on their own. It is the precise contextual meaning of these clichés which constitutes their linguistic value as basic, that is atomic, “signs of situations.” Whereas in the first case (where the meaning can be deduced from the component parts) the clichés of this nature are generally comprehensible to all people, regardless of their culture and language, the clichés of the second type will be completely incomprehensible outside their language and associations circle. A good example of the second kind is the Russian proverbial phrase “Demyanova ukha,” “Damian’s fish soup,” which is traced back to Ivan Krylov’s original eponymous fable, and signifies an act of kindness that “overdoes” it. By the same token, most Biblical clichés, such as, say, “loaves and fishes,” would have been equally vague, had they not become universally recognizable entities, predictably evoking in each of us virtually identical associations.

While there are numerous such clichés where the meaning of the whole can by no means be deduced from the component parts, there are equally numerous cases where strikingly different component parts produce clichés virtually identical in meaning. Compare the following proverbs:

You cannot wash blackness off coal even with rose water (Indonesian).

Aloe cannot be made sweet (Swahili).

No matter how hard you polish a tile, it will never become a gemstone (Japanese).

Even the mightiest bull cannot become king (Korean).

A donkey will not become a horse even if you put a fine harness on it (Bengali).

It is pretty obvious that all of these proverbs convey the same meaning, except by very different imagery. If you translate the Indonesian proverb above into, say, Korean by changing coal into a bull, and so on, your listener will get exactly the same meaning from your translation as was conveyed by the so very dissimilar original.

At this point I cannot help but bring the reader’s attention to the genius of Nietzsche the linguist, in Jenseits 268, where he makes an observation which is remarkably relevant to Permyakov’s theory of clichés:

“What, in the end, is common? Words are vocal symbols for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite image signs for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for groups of sensations. It is not sufficient to use the same words in order to understand one another: one must also use the same words for the same kind of inner experiences, one must in the end have experiences in common. On this account, the people of one nation understand one another better than those belonging to different nations, even when they use the same language; or rather, when people have lived long together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, requirement, toil), what results from this is an entity that “understands itself,” namely, a nation.”

What Permyakov offers in part, with his approach, is the possibility of intercultural translation, which is not a word-for-word translation, but one that translates a specific set of experiences of one particular nation into a corresponding set of experiences of another particular nation, thus achieving a cross-national understanding. This is precisely how I profited from Permyakov’s theory, and, having discussed my take on his theory with Permyakov himself, had received his agreement, appreciation, and blessing to continue to develop my take on his theory along my own lines of research.

Permyakov’s structural paroemiology, or, as he called it, his “general theory of clichés,” has a broad variety of far-reaching implications, and, as I just said, my own special theory in political linguistics, expressed with a deliberate vagueness as “non-traditional methods of political analysis” in its academic codification by the Soviet Academy of Science and my USA-Canada Institute, owes its starting point to Permyakov’s scientific genius.

For more specific details of his groundbreaking theory, I must direct my reader to Permyakov’s own works, many of which have been translated into English. But I want to end this entry by quoting from his groundbreaking book From Proverb to Folk-Tale, published in English translation in 1979 by Moscow’s Nauka Publishing House:

“Paroemiologists have long been intrigued by the remarkable capacity and internal structural complexity of proverbs. Indeed, for all their outward simplicity, proverbs and proverbial phrases are far from simple. On the one hand they are language phenomena similar to ordinary phraseological units, yet, on the other hand, they are logical units (propositions and conclusions). Moreover, they are also artistic miniatures, reflecting living reality in a graphic, finely-etched form. This accounts for the fact that proverbial expressions have attracted the attention of the linguist, the folklorist, and the logical philosopher alike. The triple nature of the proverbs calls for a three-pronged approach in which they are looked upon as phenomena of language, of thought and of folklore, the more so since these three aspects are largely autonomous. It is the failure to take account of this circumstance that has in my view crippled most paroemiological studies, being largely responsible for the inadequacy of existing classifications of proverbs. The following notes are not intended to fill that gap, but merely to find an approximation to such a general theory. I believe that the most likely answer is to be found in the semiological approach to the material. It is semiotics, and probably, semiotics alone, that can throw some light on the features common to all complex language signs, such as the above mentioned phraseological, paroemiological and other colloquial and folk clichés used in speech.”