I’ve been fishing around for some new activity to replace my year-long effort to translate the 108 Buddhist aphorisms. The 108 were the right level of difficulty – they were quite hard in some ways, but because I was somewhat familiar with the subject matter (i.e. Buddhism) and they were predictable (they followed patterns) I could manage them.
I’ve been looking at various lists of Korean proverbs and aphorisms. Every time I try to understand one (without looking at the translation), I don’t do very well. But I’m still tempted to mess with it, because I like proverbs and aphorisms, and they give a lot of insight into culture.
Here’s a proverb from one of those lists.
맨끝에 정든다
only-end-AT attachment-begins
“Only at the end does one grow attached.”
I take the verb to based on the root 들다 which would mean it’s irregular in a way I didn’t realize (dropping -ㄹ)
I think the 정 [jeong] here is the same 정 (情) [sentiment, attachment, love] I’ve discussed previously.
I didn’t select this proverb because it seemed particularly relevant to any of my current life events – I only selected it because it popped out of the list as something I might be able to figure out in a reasonable amount of time.
Maybe I’ll try to do a more-or-less randomly selected proverb a couple times a week. We’ll see how that develops.
