Five Latvian Proverbs, Global and PersonalGUNTIS ŠMIDCHENS

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Folkloristics offers an effective method for glimpsing the world from another person's perspective. A starting point for folklorists is to let people speak for themselves, recording and transcribing the exact words that they say. People's own words can continue to be an effective primary source even if those people who once spoke are no longer with us, living on only in our memories.

Folklore Texts as a Rrtai to OnePerson's Worldview: Five Examples

Here's an example. My vecpaps (grandpa) Peteris Pūlinš passed away three decades ago at age 84.1 often think about my time with him and things he told me. I'd like to recall every detail. But I don't have a recording of grandpa's voice. Not that I didn't think about it—I asked him once if I could interview him with my cassette tape recorder, and he said no, too many people are writing their memoirs nowadays who shouldn't, and he didn't want to write his memoirs, neither on paper nor on cassette tape. So nowadays I can retell things he told me, but that's me talking, not him. Sometimes, however, I do remember specific words he said – pithy sayings that shared fragments of his philosophy.

GUNTIS ŠMIDCHENS is Kazickas Family Endowed Professor in Baltic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His 2014 book, The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution, was recently published in Latvian translation.

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When I put these proverbs together, I see taking shape a living, speaking portrait.

I see a face, creased and suntanned, smiling at me. We're outdoors on a hot summer day by the end of the bam where he kept shovels, hoes, rakes, a roto-tiller and lawnmowers. I don't remember which job we were discussing. He said,

# 1 Darbs nav zakis – tas nekur neaizskries [Work is not a rabbit – it won't run away].

Farm work was not something that could ever be finished. There will always be more than enough work, no need to fight over who gets to do it. He appreciated my wish to help, but it was okay, or maybe preferable for me to spend my time playing in the woods and bam, riding my bicycle, reading, or doing nothing.

He had purchased these twenty acres in Kansasville, Wiscon­sin, with money saved up from his two jobs in Chicago – janitor during the week and lawn mower/gardener over weekends, and moved there when he and grandma retired in 1969. We, grand­kids, spent our summers out there. He wanted that farm, he later said, so that his grandchildren could experience life and work in the countryside. He would, for example, cut and dry hay in the traditional way, so that we could sleep in the hayloft as he had once done back in Latvia. He introduced us to his favorite berries: strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, black currants, and the "queen of berries," red currants. His vegetables tasted best, he said, because they were "cooked, baked, steamed in the sun" on hot summer days. He woke at daybreak and spent most of the time working – gardening, tending chickens, grow­ing flowers for grandma. To us he would occasionally assign tasks like weeding, watering, harvesting or mowing.

He was -good at saving money, never buying food that he could grow or preserve himself, making hard cost/benefit deci­sions on whether to repair versus replace, investing money in safe, predictable-interest bank accounts. But he was not a miser.

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Every summer he wrote out checks to "pay" his grandchildren for the "work" they did in his garden. He said,

# 2 Tapée nauda ir apala, lai tã ripo [That's why money is round, so that it keeps rolling].

Money circulates, and it must circulate. Trying to hold on to it is futile. That's what this proverb says, seemingly lamenting the fact that he was losing money. But he easily managed with­out his grandchildren's work, and didn't have to pay even when they did do some chores. He gave his money with a smile, and not as payment for services. The money should roll to their pock­ets, he thought, even while summer on the farm was meant to be a vacation. Gardening work was a good excuse to give it to them. But their real job was school, and later college. He said,

# 3 Kas tev galva iekšä, to neviens tev neatnems [What you have in your head, nobody can take from you].

The value of our learning was much greater than any money in his pocket. Vecpaps himself had spent many years as a mūžigais students [eternal student], partying at his fraternity house and occasionally taking interesting courses to stay enrolled at the Uni­versity of Latvia for many years, but he never finished a degree. He didn't need to, he would think back then, because he had, after all, the business savvy and drive to earn enough and pay off his father's mortgage, marry and live comfortably with his fami­ly, and cover fraternity dues to boot. Until the Communists came, and then the war, leaving him with no things. His wife Margota, who in Latvia earned a master's degree in English, would, unlike him, later find a solid office job in the USA. And his children and grandchildren too should get the education and skills that they could carry with them wherever life might take them.

In the last few years his body slowed, stiff joints wracked by gout, heart broken and flower gardens abandoned after grandma's death in 1982. When I dropped by, he offered his guest a very simple meal of meatloaf (mix a pound of ground beef, an egg, salt, and breadcrumbs in a bread pan, bake for about 45 minutes until ready), and for dessert a SaraLee frozen cheescake. Way

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back when, on Christmas Eves years earlier, he would cook up banquets while his wife, three children, their spouses with his eight grandkids were at church. But that kind of heavy work was no longer an option, and after all, just sitting in the living room and chatting, or watching the news on TV with his guest was more important than what we ate. He said,

# 4 Cilvëks nedzïvo, lai estu, bet gan ëd, lai dzïvotu [A person does not live to eat, but rather, eats to live].

In eating, moderation is best. Enjoying good food is not bad, but focusing too much on this pleasure is not a recipe for life fulfilment. Tying happiness to food would depend on things that are out of a person's own control. This proverb he learned from his father, who said it whenever his second wife (grandpa's step­mother) worried that dinner hadn't turned out well.1 She had not been a great cook, and on most days she served soup (this is why when grandpa married he asked grandma to not make soup too often). The proverb also connects to his memories of scrounging and begging for food during the war, saving the best tidbits for his children while he himself lived for a month off of a sack of kohlrabi that he gotten somewhere (in his gardens he experimented with every kind of squash, tomato, potato, turnip, lettuce, zucchini and com, but never kohlrabi). If you have some­thing tasty to fill your stomach, life is good.

He once shared a definition of happiness, the best life that a human can hope for. While I cannot remember the specific oc­casion, I nevertheless remember the exact words he said,

# 5 Garu můžu nodzïvot, bernu bernus piedzïvot [To live a long life, to meet your children's children]. .

1 He told me at least twice about this proverb that his father said to his step­mother, as recorded in my notes from August 21 and November 22, 1986. He also remembered another proverb his father used at such times, Veders nav granata! [A stomach is not a book!], but I do not recall him ever saying this one in conversation; a character in Mara Zlte’s recent novel explains this proverb, "a stomach is not as fine a thing as a book is. A book is a fine and precious thing, which can't be compared to a stomach,"Five Fingers, 115.

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Generations depend on each other. Young people depend on their elders to support and teach them how to survive, and an old person can ward off despair if he sees that he has nurtured life in others who continue when he no longer does. Where there's life, there's hope.

These five proverbs together offer a glimpse into vecpaps's worldview, expressed in his own words as I remember them. Strangely, my mother and uncles know most of these proverbs but do not connect them to their father (laikam vinš vairãk ar padominiem dalijas ar mazbėrniem, writes my imele Juris – appar­ently he shared his tidbits of advice more with his grandchildren). All three of my sisters vaguely remember him saying proverb #1, and my older sister recalls three others that I do not remem­ber,2 but nobody besides me remembers #2, 3, 4, and 5. So it could be that these were words he said only to me as spur-of- that-moment utterances. But this is not the case. Somebody else said them to him first, and he remembered them.

2 My sister Inga remembered three other sayings: (1) Nemet jaunu naudu pakolvecai, [Don't throw new money after old], which he said, for example, while debating whether her old car was worth fixing; it relates to a Latvian variant,Labak no jauna darti пека vécu lobot [Better to make from new than to repair1 old], in Kokare, Latviešu sakãmvãrdi, #3128; and the American proverb, Throwgood money after bad, Bartlett Jere Whiting, Early American Proverbs and Pro­verbial Phrases, #M219; and it also echoes the Biblical Nobody puts a piece of new cloth into an old garment, Matt. 9:16 and Mark 3:21, referenced in Mieder, Not by Bread Alone, 72. (2) Nauda ir izdošanai, kapa nev aj adzes [Money is for spending, it won't be needed in the grave], a variant of Kapa paliks zelta kalns, kapanabaga tarba [A pile of gold, or beggar's sack, both will go to the grave] Kokare, Latviešu sakãmvãrdi, #6659. And (3) Kapec èst saldo êdienu beigãs – viss tarii paša vêderã saiet! [Why eat dessert last? It all goes to the same stomach!].

The Comparative Method in Folklore Studies: Proof that a Text is Traditional

I can easily prove that veepaps did not invent any of these say­ings. He must have heard, remembered, and repeated them from

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somewhere else, because all of them were spoken or written long before he was bom. Veepaps was not alone: he shared all of these proverbs with people speaking different languages in many countries. Matti Kuusi's index of proverb types reveals that these five proverbs share themes with many other proverbs used by humans in response to comparable situations, and index notes help map the outlines of a given proverb's geographic dissemination.3 Standard reference books help find internation­al variants, as documented in this section. In summary, four of vecpaps's proverbs appear in Wolfgang Mieder's standard ref­erence dictionary (a book grandpa did not have), and more variants from other languages appear in Emanuel Strauss's three volumes of European proverbs. National compilations offer vari­ants within a single language or region: for example, four of these five proverbs exist also in Estonian (a language grandpa did not speak), and at least three were known in North Amer­ica long before he immigrated:

#1 has variants in German, Polish and Czech, as well as Karelian, Estonian, Vepsian and Livonian.4 Russian variants typically have a wolf or bear, not rabbit.5 Estonian and Lithuanian proverbs

3 The five proverbs discussed here fall under the following subgroups in Mat­ti Kuusi's Type Index: M7e "There will always be more than enough work— and sleep", K2g "Money circulates; people grow richer and poorer", M3a "The value of wisdom, knowledge, intelligence and reason", D3i "Moderation is best > overeating is bad for your health", T3c "Trusting in the future, preparing for the future, dreaming, optimism and pessimism" and G2c "The mutual dependence of generations" in Lauhakangas, The M6 international type system of proverbs; see also Lauhakangas, The Matti-Kuusi international type system of proverbs.

4 Mieder lists Work is not a hare, it won't run away as a Latvian proverb in The Prentice-Hall Encyclopedia of World Proverbs, #18311. Kokare compiles three Latvian and three German variants in Latviešu un vãeu sakãmvãrdu paraleles, #20; German, Polish and Czech variants appear in Strauss, Dictionary of Eu­ropean Proverbs, #1395; Kuusi, Proverbia septentrionalia, #362. Matti Kuusi's type M7e, (see footnote 3 above) is common in North and East Europe.

5 Work isn't a wolf, it won't run off into the forest (Russian), Mieder, Prentice Hall Encyclopedia, #18312, Permiakov, 300 obshcheupotrebitel'nykh russkikh poslovits i pogovorok, #189.

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may also replace the rabbit with a wolf, bear or frog, and among the many Latvian variants there is even one in which the animal that won't run away is a cat6

# 2 is traditional in a large territory, from Europe to Asia.7 It has variants in English, German, Yiddish, French, Spanish, Rumanian, Polish and Estonian,8 and has also been recorded in oral tradition, in Washington and Wisconsin of the United States.9

# 3 has variants in Philippine, Estonian, Lithuanian and American ' tradition.10

# 4 is known across European and Islamic cultures.11 Variants are documented in Latin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Ger-

6 Ega tilo janes pole, iest ärä ei juokse [Work is not a rabbit, it won't run away] Krikmann, Eesti vanasõnad, #12416 B,aș; see also #12418 and #12503; Darbas – ne zuikis, nepabėgs [Work is not a rabbit, it won't run away], 35 variants in Grigas, Lietuvių patarlės ir priežodžiai, #2054; Darbs nav zakis, projmn neskries, [Work is not a rabbit, it won't run away] in Straubergs, Latviešu tautas mildas, sakãmvãrdi un poruñas, #979, and Kokare, Latviešu sakãmvãrdi un poruñas: blasé, #1778; Darbs nav kakis, projăm neskries [Work is not a cat, it won't run away], Latviešu Folkloras Krtuve (on-line), #LFK-1404-613.

7 Matti Kuusi’s Type K2g 10, "Money is roundish so that it can move."8 Mieder, Prentice Hall Encyclopedia, #11164 Money is round (English); #11165

Money is round and rolls easily (Rumanian); #11166 Money is round; it must roll (French); and #11167 Money is round; it rolls away from you (Yiddish). Strauss, Dictionary, #1466 adds other English variants such as Money is round and meant to roll and German Das Geld ist rund und muss rollen [money is round and must roll], along with French, Spanish and Polish variants. See also Estonian variants in Krikmann, Eesti vanasõnad, #9476. Vita Džekčioriūtė- Medeišienė reports that no variants have been collected in the Lithuanian Folklore Archive, e-mail to author, February 2, 2018.

9 Money is round and rolls away, Mieder, Dictionary, 416.10 Learning is wealth that can't be stolen (Philippine), Mieder, Prentice-Hall Ency­

clopedia, #9013; Mes inimene oppeb, see ei lad kunage hukka [What a person learns will never be destroyed), Krikmann, Eesti vanasõnad, #2169:1; Vita Džekčio- riūtė-Medeišienė reports that the Lithuanian Folklore Archives contain eight unpublished variants, among them "Ką išmoksi, to nė ugnis nesudegins, né vagis nepavogs [What you leam, neither fire will bum, nor a thief steal], re­corded by J. Vencius in 1932, LTR 390 (140/1068). 11. If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him, Mieder, Dictionary, #491. Kuusi’s Type M3a 19 "Good sense costs money and cannot be bought with money" is a global proverb, found in all human cultural areas.

11 Kuusi Type D3i 28, "Some eat to live, others live to eat."

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man, Dutch, and Polish, as well as Estonian and Latvian.12 The proverb first appeared in writing seven centuries ago, and in North America it was first written down in 1693 by William Penn; it continues a vibrant life in current American English.13

#5 does not appear in the standard proverb reference collections, but its connections to international traditions are clear: It is syn­onymous14 with two Biblical proverbs,15 and shares a common

12 Mês edam, lai dzïvotu, bet ne dzïvojam, lai ėstu [We eat to live, but we do not live to eat], Kokare, Latviešu sakãmvãrdi, #5403. Me ei ela selleks, et süüa, vaid sööme selleks, et dada [We do not live to eat, but eat to live], Krikmann, Eesti vanasõnad, #561; Vita Džekčioriūtė-Medeišienė reports that the Lithuanian Folklore Archives hold nine variants, among them Žmogus gyvena ne tam, kad valgytų [A person does not live to eat], Lietuvių tautosakos rankraštynas, 3533 (843); see also Gyvenk ne tam, kad valgytum, tik valgyk, kad gyventum [Do not live to eat, only eat to live], Lietuvių patarlės ir priežodžiai, elektroninis sąvadas (on-line), 6 Lithuanian variants in Grigas, Lietuvių patarlės, #5026. Whiting quotes Eat to live and not live to eat, from Benjamin Franklin in 1733, Early American Proverbs, #E20; Mieder, Prentice-Hall Encyclopedia, #4341; Strauss, Dictionary, #903.

13 Mieder, Dictionary, #175. A search for "eat to live" in the Corpus of Contem­porary American English turns up 9 variants of the proverb.

14 The three terms, "synonymous," "shared structure", and "common basic core” (images and phrases have the same meaning) refer to criteria that for Matti Kuusi proved a proverb's traditionality, in Lauhakangas, The Matti Kuusi in­ternational type system of proverbs, 24. The proverb is not listed in Mieder or Strauss's compilations. Its basic core inverts Kuusi's Type G3d 20 "Children beget children to the nuisance of their parents." In some contexts, it may be synonymous with Kuusi's Type T3c 25 "Trust in the future," or more broad­ly Type T3c, "Where there's life, there's hope"; Mieder identifies While there's life, there's hope as an English proverb, Prentice Hall Encyclopedia, #9210.

15 Related texts in the Bible include One generation passes away, and another generation comes, Eccles. 1:4, Mieder, Not by Eread Alone, 48; and Children's children are the crown of old men, Proverbs 17: 6, with variants in three Latvi­an Bible translations: Behmu Behmi irr to Wezzako krohnis [Children's children are the crown of the elders], 1689, Sirmgalwju kronis ir behmu-behmi [The crown of gray-haired people is children's children], 1945, and Vécu cilvêku vainagojums ir vipu berni [The crowning of old people is their children], 1965. This proverb is not listed in the standard references, but it has a traditional structure: "X is Y's crown," shared with the Old Testament proverb A virtu­ous wife is a crown to her husband, Prov. 12:4, Mieder, Not by Bread Alone, 1990, 71; see also Kuusi's type G5f 38, "A good wife is a goodly prize".

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core – images that have the same meaning – with other Biblical passages as well as expressions in current American English.16

16 in Psalm 128:6, a good man will live long and "see thy children's children." The Corpus of Contemporary American English reports that the saying. May they

live to see their children's children, was used by the author Timothy P. O'Malley in 2012, and "His eyes lingered on his children, and his grandchildren, whose children's children he would likely live to see," by Robert J. Sawyer in 2006.

17 ’ Lauhakangas, Matti Kuusi System, 76-77.18 Paczolay, European proverbs: in 55 languages.19 Kuusi, Proverbia septentrionalia; Uvarov's proverb #39281 refers to a wolf, not

rabbit; Entsiklopediia narodnoi múdrosti.20 Beyer, Sprichwörterlexiam.

And so, with a quick check of some standard folklore refer­ence works I've proven that my grandpa's five proverbs have been shared by many people over large distances in time and space. Studying my own grandpa thüs also means studying shared traditions of humankind.17 But the main questions in folk­loristics are not only about whether the speaker invented or bor­rowed a proverb, or fisting all places and languages in which a proverb exists. A folklorist investigates how an individual per­former adapts a text to suit a particular context.

The Comparative Method, Continued:Proof of Individuality

Although the five proverbs listed above are traditional and found in numerous languages, they are by no means common. None of the five appears in Gyula Paczolay’s fist of the 106 most wide­spread European proverbs.18 Only one (#1), appears in Matti Kuu- si's list of 900 proverbs widely shared among the Finno-Ugric lan­guages spoken to Latvia's north and that same proverb is the only one appearing in Uvarov's recent collection of 54,000 late-twenti- eth-twenty first century Russian proverbs.19 Annelies Beyer's stan­dard collection of German proverbs also lists only one (#4).20 Nor are any of these five proverbs common in the English-speaking

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world.21 And, strangely, only two of the proverbs (#1 and #4) appear in the standard collections of Latvian proverbs compiled by Strau- bergs and Kokare (cited above). So, it is difficult to classify this group of proverbs as typically'"Latvian" or "European", because three have not been not documented among other Latvian speakers, and four are not well known in many European languages.

They are definitely not all in any particular nation's or ethnic group's (including Latvians) "paremiological minimum," a core set of proverbs known and actively used by adults in these soci­eties.22 One would thus not look to these proverbs as a reflection of the "mentality" of any ethnic group or nation. Nor can we know the relationship between this one speaker and the larger corpus of Latvian proverbs23 – for that, we would need to know more about his proverb repertoire, which certainly was larger than the five texts quoted here but can no longer be reconstructed.

Four of grandfather's proverbs do have variants in Estonia, Latvia's northern neighbor, and three find parallel texts in Lith­uania. He did not know these languages, and to my knowledge he never traveled to those countries. Did proverbs #l-#4 some­how travel from Estonia into grandfather's repertoire? Did #1, #3 and #4 travel from somewhere else to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? Or were these proverbs created independently by vecpaps and other speakers in different places? We do not know. We can not know the history of how these proverbs were creat­ed or traveled over time and space.

21 None appear in Mieder’s list of 75 high-frequency American proverbs, Prov­erbs: A Handbook, 129—130, or Haas's list of 313 "familiar" American proverbs, "Proverb Familiarity in the United States," 337-343.

22 Grigor Permiakov, "On the Question of a Russian Paremiological Minimum," 91-102. Permiakov estimated that a language has about 800 proverbs or proverbial phrases that are understood by all speakers; he published a list of 300 such Russian proverbs as an aid to students studying Russian as a foreign language, 300 obshcheupotrebitel'nykh russkikh pòslovits. Comparable lists have been compiled for other languages, as summarized by Mieder, Behold the Proverbs, Ώ.

12 Brandes, "The Selection Process in Proverb Use," 167-186; Mieder, Proverbs: A Handbook, 135-137

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We do know that all five proverbs appeared in my grandpa's ! conversations with me, and that the combination of these par­, ticular proverbs in one person's repertoire is unique. We can

examine how one proverb resonates with the others, and hy­pothesize about meanings that vecpaps may have associated with them. We might then open a small window into his worldview.24

1 That’s what I'll try to do here.

Words are Shared, but Meanings Often Aren't

Although the meaning of any proverb may seem obvious at first, ; folklore studies prove otherwise: Lithuanian folklorists, for ex­

ample, asked people to explain the meaning of #1 above, "work is not a rabbit (wolf, bear)," and what might be the situation where a person would say it. They heard a variety of replies, ranging from anti-procrastination to pro-procrastination. In the words of seven individuals from the Lithuanian folk:

(A) a lazy person says this;(B) sometimes one says it, maybe even resentfully, when

urged to work;(C) they say this when they postpone chores to a different

hour, dragging their feet;(D) if you don't do work then it will remain undone;(E) no need to rush;(F) "Stay a while, visit" – "I can't, work is waiting for me" –

"Work is not."(G) you'll manage.25

24 The study of how proverbs are used by individuals has up to now centered mostly on people who produce large corpuses of writings and recorded speeches – literary authors or political leaders. From their writings a folklo­rist can extract a proverb repertoire and paint a detailed picture of that person's creative innovations and poetic style, rhetorical skill, or ideology. This essay, based as it is on only five proverbs documented only in my own memory, cannot approach the depth of classic studies such as Wolfgang Mieder’s analyses of proverbs in the repertoires of American presidents.

25 Kartais net su užsigavimu sako raginamas dirbti; sako tinginys; jeigu nepada­rysi darbo, tai jis ir liks nepadarytas; šitaip sako, kai darbus vis atideda kitai

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A five-second internet search reveals even more variants cur­rently circulating in Latvian. "Work is not a rabbit," for example, may be quoted in different ways:• It is a subtitle in a list of "signs that a relationship might fail";

forming a relationship may be problematic if one's partner is not actively looking for a job (i.e. he is lazy and might use this proverb to justify unemployment)26.

• It is quoted to argue that a person should slow down and less­en stress: "Advice to workaholics: How to make life easier"27.

• It is the title of a video showing a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat, wishing viewers a happy Year of the Rabbit.28

• It has entirely lost its connection to work or rabbits, and is merely an online sound file demonstrating correct pronunci­ation for Latvian language students.29

A proverb's meaning emerges from its context – the words and actions that surround it. So, which meaning applies to my grandpa's proverb? To answer, I need to revisit the proverb's specific context as I sift through possible meanings documented by earlier folklorists. I noted above that grandpa worked very hard, never leaving for tomorrow work he could do today. He said this proverb about work while referring to his grandson not working in the garden. It could first appear that he had negative feelings about a lazy grandchild, as in Lithuanian definitions A and D. But in my memory of vecpaps's proverb repertoire it also connects to other proverbs related to the importance of school, and gifts of money – indicating that he may not have been scold­ing me when he said this one. I'll add some information about the "texture" of his words: He said it with a sly smile, his voice hinting at a joke that he knew I would understand.

valandai, velka; suspėsi; nepabėgs, nėra ko skubinties; „Pabūk, pasvečiuok" – „Negaliu, darbas laukia" – „Darbas ne…"; Sakoma, kai kas skuba dirbti, o antrasis pašnekovas nori paplepėti. Grigas, Lietuvių patarlės ir priežodžiai, #2054.

26 "Darbs nav zakis – neaizbėgs" (on-line).27 Ibid.28 "Darbs nav zakis… daudz laimes un prieka!" (on-line).29 "How to pronounce darbs nav zakis, mežä neaizbėgs." (on-line).

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I cannot today ask vecpaps to explain what his proverb meant. But I can apply methods of folklore studies to produce a reason­able conjecture. I'm now ready to interpret the meaning, based on my description of the proverb's (a) text, (b) its texture and (c) its context, enriched by (d) comparative study of the proverb's variants and (e) variant meanings in different contexts, and by (f) exploration of its connections to other proverbs in grandpa's repertoire. I think this is how he might explain the meaning: • You and I know that people who don't work are lazy, and

laziness is not good. Not working on my farm might be seen as being lazy, and what I'm saying might sound like scolding, but actually you and I know that I'm not expecting you to do my work. You and I know that you're not lazy and if I asked you to work more, you would. But you're on vacation from school, which is the most important work you're doing, and I think you should take a break and have some fun.

In a way, this definition includes all of the meanings collected by Lithuanian folklorists, from A to G. But the meaning is not a sum total of all meanings. In any specific performance context, too, the speaker and listener deduce and select which meaning or combination of meanings is true to their conversation.

Describing and Empathizing with People's Folklore and Shared Identity: Mission Possible?

I think the "you and I know" portion of my explication is import­ant. The group in which this proverb was shared was not a na­tional or ethnic group, but rather, it was a group of only two people.30 The joking context was tied to something we shared beyond language. These were "inside jokes."He trusted me to know that what he was saying was all in fun. And trust, not ex­pressed in words, strengthens bonds between people, building a

30 Oring, "Dyadic Traditions," 19-28.

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shared identity. I think many other folklore traditions work this way. While people share, borrow, and perform folklore texts, the act of sharing and understanding these texts is a bridge of under­standing between speaker and listener, performer and audience. If we can describe and understand other people's traditions, we can share their identity, and see their world as they see it, from their "insider's point of view".

I hope that now, after reading my ethnographic description of five traditional proverbs, you can sense what it's like to be me or my immigrant grandpa, chatting in his native language. I think the methods of folklore studies demonstrated here can easily be applied to the study of any and all humans, and I hope you'll try these methods out for yourself. And that someday, when we all become folklorists, all humans will know how to understand each other.

Author’s Note

I am interested in hearing about proverbs in Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian families. If you'd like to share your traditions, please write to me, [email protected].

I am grateful to Wolfgang Mieder for his comments on a draft of this essay, and to Vita Džekčioriūtė-Medeišienė and Outi Lau­hakangas for their help and suggestions in finding international variants of proverbs quoted here.

Works Cited

BEYER, ANNELIES. Sprichwörterlexicon. München: C.H.-Beck, 1985.BRANDES, STANLEY, "The Selection Process in Proverb Use: A Spanish

Example." Southern Folklore Quarterly, 38 (3), 1974.Corpus of Contemporary American English, Accessed 7 September 2017.

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