I HAVE an old Grammar of the Panjabi Language dated 1851, Lodiâna Mission Press, to which is appended a "selection from Panjabi Proverbs, with explanations by a native." These explanations are in Panjabi, and, I may add, are as difficult to understand as the proverbs themselves.
In this paper I give all these proverbs, with some more that I have collected myself. They are presented in a transliterated form exactly as found in the original, but the renderings are all my own, and are free, not literal. The explanations and illustrations I am also responsible for, as it would be useless to give a translation of the "native" explanations in a paper meant for readers in England. The illustrations are not meant to be English renderings of the native originals, but to shew how we express the same idea in our idioms and proverbs, e.g. proverb No. 8; our phrase "carrying coals to Newcastle" conveys the same idea as the Panjabi "the beggar stands at the beggar's door," viz., the doing of a useless thing: and so again proverb No. 14; the idea expressed by our "still waters run deep" is the same as that in the Panjabi "the empty pot rattles, the full one is silent."
As the point of a proverb necessarily lies in the aptness of its reference to the surroundings of those who compose and use it, the rendering of proverbs idiomatically into a foreign language is always a difficult and delicate matter. In the case of Indian proverbs the difficulty is the greater as the fundamental difference between our habits and those of the natives are more complete than elsewhere. If therefore in some cases I have failed to convey the sense of the originals I plead the great difficulties of the task.
