SICILIAN PROVERBStranslated into English by Arthur V. Dieli
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Several years before my retirement from Jefferson Community College in Watertown, New York, my daughter gave me a book of Sicilian proverbs on her return from a trip to Caltagirone, Sicily, where she and her aunt began the search of our family history. While I was thrilled with the prospect of digging into the Sicilian because of my interest in language, the book necessarily sat undisturbed until after I retired. Once I had the time to read it, I was astonished to discover that I could understand much of the Sicilian, a language I had not used since childhood. Suddenly I had a project I could sink my teeth into as I made the transition into retirement, so I set about translating the proverbs into English. Some of the proverbs date things by saint's feast days or church festival days. For example: La prima a tutti li Santi e l'urtima a sant'Andria. Or: Lupa ppi Santu Vitu, puoi chiudiri 'u trappitu. While most of us probably know that Saint Valentine's day is on the 14th of February, I doubt that many of us know when when Saint Andrew's day occurs. To help us over that hurdle I've included an alphabetical listing of feast and festival days and their calendar dates. Before I knew it, I was searching libraries and making use of inter-library loan, to read other collections of proverbs. At the San Francisco Public Library I was able to borrow the three volume work of Giuseppe Pitrè (1841-1916) and felt like I had arrived. Pitrè, who by profession was a practicing doctor of medicine, somehow managed, in his travels through Sicily and in his correspondence with other folklorists, to amass a collection in excess of 13,000 proverbs. Pitrè accompanies each Sicilian proverb with its approximate Tuscan equivalent. |
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