The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [225]
J. Hammond Trumbull, LL.D., L.H.D.
TITLE
Chinese: He li shán ching yŭ: tung sin ní pien kin. Literally, By combined strength, a mountain becomes gems: by united hearts, mud turns to gold.
[A maxim often painted on the door-posts of a Chinese firm—which may be freely translated—Two heads, working together, out of commonplace materials, bring The Gilded Age.]
CHAPTER 1
Chippeway: “He owns much land.”—Baraga.
CHAPTER 2
Ethiopic: “It behoveth Christian people who have not children, to take up the children of the departed, whether youths or virgins, and to make them as their own children,” etc.
The Didascalia (translated by T. Platt), 121.
CHAPTER 3
Old French: [Pantagruel and Panurge, on their voyage to the Oracle of Bacbuc, are frightened by seeing afar off, “a huge monstrous physeter.” “Poor Panurge began to cry and howl worse than ever:] Babillebabou, said he, [shrugging up his shoulders, quivering with fear, there will be the devil upon dun.] This will be a worse business than that the other day. Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me, if it is not Leviathan, described by the noble prophet Moses, in the life of patient Job. It will swallow us all like a dose of pills. . . . Look, look, it is upon us. Oh! how horrible and abominable thou art! . . . Oh, oh! Devil, Sathanas, Leviathan! I cannot bear to look upon thee, thou art so abominably ugly.”— Motteux’s Translation.
CHAPTER 5
Sindhi: “Having removed the little daughter, and placed her in their own house, they instructed her.”—Life of Abdul-Latif, 46 (cited in Trumpp’s Sindhi grammar, p. 356).
French Proverb: He would dry snow in the oven, to sell it for table salt.— Quitard, 193.
CHAPTER 6
Chinese: [Shap neen tseen sze, ke fan sun.] The affairs of ten years past, how often have they been new.
Chippeway:
“So blooms the human face divine,
When youth its pride of beauty shows:
Fairer than Spring the colors shine,
And sweeter than the virgin rose.”
Ojibwa Hymns. (Am. Tract Society), p. 78.
CHAPTER 9
Italian: When I saw thee for the first time, it seemed to me that paradise was opened, and that the angels were coming, one by one, all to rest on thy lovely face, all to rest on thy beautiful head; Thou bindest me in chains, and I cannot loose myself.
J. Caselli, Chants popul de l’Italie, 21.
Choctaw: “Now therefore divide this land for an inheritance.” —Joshua, xiii. 7.
Eskimo (Greenland), from Fabricius’s translation of Genesis:—“And when he had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people.”
First Book of Moses, xlix. 32.
CHAPTER 10
Eskimo:—“And said, ‘Whose daughter art thou? tell me, I pray thee.’ ”—Gen. xxiv. 23.
Massachusetts Indian (Eliot’s version of Psalm xlv. 10): “Harken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear; forget also thine own people, and thy father’s house.”
Italian:—“Jeannette answered: ‘Madame, you have taken me from my father and brought me up as your own child, and for this I ought to do all in my power to please you.’ ”
CHAPTER 11
Japan: Though he eats, he knows not the taste of what he eats.
CHAPTER 12
Egyptian (from the Book of the Dead, or Funereal Ritual, edited by Lepsius from the Turin papyrus; translated by Birch). “The Preparation in the West. The Roads of the West.”
CHAPTER 14
From Thomas Makin’s Description of Pennsylvania (Descriptio Pennsylvaniæ) 1729. Translated [?] by Robert Proud:
“Fair Philadelphia next is rising seen,
Between two rivers plac’d, two miles between,
The Delaware and Sculkil, new to fame,
Both ancient streams, yet of a modern name.
The city, form’d upon a beauteous plan,
Has many houses built, tho’ late began;
Rectangular the streets, direct and fair;
And rectilinear all the ranges are.”
Italian (translated by Wiffen—from Tasso):
“Of generous thoughts and principles sublime,
Amongst them in the city lived a maid,
The flower of virgins, in her ripest prime,
Supremely beautiful! but that she made
Never her care, or beauty only weighed
In worth with virtue.”
Jerusalem