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| (c) 2015 N. Sharief |
We seldom hear
high-octane proverbs being uttered nowadays. Mostly, to describe our mood or
feeling for the day, we shop for some quips from some websites, grab one that
titillates us and post it to our timeline to be shared to our friends and be
done with it. That's okay in this assembly-line age. We can be forgiven by our
friends. They understood.
Ah, but I dig the
home-brewed concoctions of the old folks, mostly. They have a telltale grit and
a bite that dwell in our thoughts long after they'd been said.
"The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their
proverbs," so said Francis Bacon (1561-1626). And the Ranaū-Iranūn is no
exception. They're seldom heard as a drop of rain in the desert. But, oh, when
you hear them, it's an oasis you can shelter in all your life.
It was the last week
of the hajj season in 1996 (as it is now in 2015). After the farewell
circuit of the Ka'aba, the hajjis were thinning out in the radius of
Makkah as they started to trickle down to Jeddah on their way home. Soon, after the last prayer rug had been
folded, the yards around the Grand Mosque are picked clean that you can
literally eat off the white tiles. And the place slowly being reclaimed by the
pigeons, the air filling with their chatter.
I found myself
walking to the Souk al Dahab just near across the headquarters of the Islamic
Development Bank in Jeddah. I was accompanying an octogenarian hajj from
Piagapo whom I had earlier promised to take to the gold market. She had wanted to
buy a few token bracelets for her granddaughter. Our progress from the car park was tortuously
slow because old as she was, she had also sprained her right ankle during the
tawaf. Earlier during our drive to the souk, she had confided to me that she
was anxious the other hajjis might have bought off all the gold there was in
the market. I laughed and assured her they have literally mountains of gold to
spare for her.
It was evening when
we reached the place and she stopped to gaze at the gold souk. You have to be
overawed by the yellow-orange reflection that the display windows cast into the
pitch black night. The souk, a good two hectares of it, blazed like the womb of
a Caribbean pirate treasure cave.
"Is this
real?" she said.
I nodded with a
smile.
"This place
must be ensorcelled," she said.
And I laughed.
"So this is why
you people stay here for so long without ever going back to the Philippines,
eh?"
"We earn our
modest living here," I said, "and we can send our children to school."
We went inside one of the shops, and it didn't take
her long to choose six slim bracelets, given her budget. "My Dayangimpa
will love these," she said as she put them on.
On our drive back to
her hotel, she told me something about her granddaughter. Dayangimpa was slated
to wed a civil engineer who worked at the Dar al Handasah, one of the big
construction consultants in Saudi. This was in 1984 when mail-order brides in Lanao
was at its height, and many would-be grooms at home got broken-hearted as their
sweethearts get ferreted away to a faraway never-land called the Middle East. But the
wedding didn't happen as a feud erupted between the two clans. Now twelve years
later, Dayangimpa was matched to another man in the opposing clan as part of a
package to mend the feud between them. And she could not afford to be
choosy as she was no longer as young as she used to be.
At the lobby of her
hotel, the old woman thanked me profusely for having volunteered to help her. Now, is
there anything I want from her? she asked. Do I need a bride mailed to me? I had to laugh again and said, Nothing. I just
want to help hajjis out whenever it’s the season.
"Well then,"
she said, "let me leave you a proverb to ponder on while you are here in
Saudi."
Minsan oray bolawan ī oran sa di ta ingěd, na mapagiroy taděman so tarintik sa ňgganatan.
"Howbeit it showers gold in distant lands, still one yearns for the drizzle in one's sod."
This proverb is a
classic one. The handy equivalent, obviously, is "there is no place like
home." It sums up everything, but it's too pedestrian a placeholder as it
robs the proverb of its meat.
Old Ranaū-Iranūn
sayings are chock-full of contrasts, parallelism, and other devices. The keyword
here is oran (rain) and tarintik (drizzle) and iroy ( yearn, pine, or crave).
The strategic device
used by the ancients in this proverb was opposing hypernyms against hyponyms.
So in our rendition, to uphold the contrast, we oppose "shower"
against a mere "drizzle." To enhance it further, we oppose
ingěd (country, again a generic hypernym like rain) to "sod" (ganatan
is a place a person specifically hails from). Sod is a surface layer of ground
containing a matte of grass and grass roots. It also means turf. The downbeat,
we hope, reinforces the yearning theme of the proverb. Ditto, we avoided the
negative "di ta ingěd" (not one's country) in favor of "distant
lands" for musicality (a lá Elton John in the song Skyline Pigeon).
The last hurdle in
the proverb is approximating the equivalent of Minsan
oray. This is a tough nut. We're all too aware of the pitfall of trying to
translate idioms and proverbs directly. I shopped around, couldn't quite locate
the word I want, but I settled for "Howbeit."
The word adds a dollop of antiquity into the proverb without hurting its
integrity.
Finally, we put
together the structure, and ripple the keys if it sounds musical to us. If it
sounds strained in the host language, and not fluid and natural,
then the translation failed. Let's see:
"Howbeit it showers gold in distant lands, still one yearns for the drizzle in one's sod."
The proverb is about
pining for home when one is so far away. The employment of the word rain and
gold provides the engine that drives the narrative home. Nothing is as enticing
as gold, yet the pitter-patter of the rain above you on the roof especially if
it's a nipa house makes you sad. In Lanao, you watch by the window wrapped
inside your malong up to the neck as it's cold some 3,000 feet or so above sea level.
In the Middle East, it's not the rain-patter you're hearing but the steady humming of the air conditioner which drives you insane. OFW workers in the 80s
summed it up tersely on their shirts:
"$ versus homesickness."
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