Is this originally a French proverb? And is my grammar correct?

June 30, 2013 2:38 PM

"Beauty is the sister of vanity and the mother of lust". My translation in to French: "La beauté est la soeur de la vanité et la mère de la luxure." I originally saw this phrase in French as "La beauté est la sœur de vanité, et la mére et la luxure". So that would roughly translate as "Beauty is the sister of vanity and the mother of lust". I have also seen it expressed in English as "Beauty's sister is vanity, and its daughter lust." My translation would be: "La beauté est la sœur de vanité, et la fille de la luxure." I asked on Yahoo Answers if my grammar was correct, but one of the responses said it should be "la mère" and not "la fille". Hence, my question. Is it originally French in origin? And if so, is it mother of lust or daughter of lust? Either way my translation would be: "La beauté est la soeur de la vanité et la mère de la luxure." Or La beauté est la soeur de la vanité et la fille de la luxure. Are these two translations grammatically correct? Also, is La necessary before "beauté"?
posted by mrducts to Writing & Language (9 answers total)

Best answer: You often need to use grammatical particles in French where you do not in English. Yes, La beauté is normal in French where we would just say "Beauty..." in English.

Google tells me "La beauté est soeur de la vanité et mère de la luxure" is a Russian proverb.
posted by zadcat at 2:48 PM on June 30, 2013

Best answer: I don't know the original quote, but "...its daughter lust" means the same thing as "the mother of lust" - it means that beauty is the originator and lust is the progeny. That might be where the confusion is coming from. Google translate suggests, "La sœur de la beauté est vanité, et sa fille, la luxure"
posted by muddgirl at 2:50 PM on June 30, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Your first translation "La beauté est la soeur de la vanité et la mère de la luxure." is correct.

"La" is necessary before "beauté".

"its daughter lust" is equivalent to "beauty's daughter is lust" which means that "beauty is the mother of lust" ... so, the two are the same and your second translation is certainly not correct.

What you say you originally saw in French "La beauté est la sœur de vanité, et la mére et la luxure" is certainly not correct as the accent on mère is wrong and the second "et" does not make sense.

If you wanted an alternate translation that used "daughter" instead, if would be "La beauté est la soeur de la vanité et sa fille est la luxure."
posted by aroberge at 2:51 PM on June 30, 2013 [1 favorite]

What you say you originally saw in French "La beauté est la sœur de vanité, et la mére et la luxure" is certainly not correct as the accent on mère is wrong and the second "et" does not make sense.

Agreed. Is it possible that the second "et" here might actually have been an "est"? That would make it mean "beauty is the sister of vanity, and the(ir, presumably) mother is luxury."
posted by dizziest at 3:39 PM on June 30, 2013

On googling, scratch that suggestion; it's definitely just meant to be a "de."
posted by dizziest at 3:47 PM on June 30, 2013

Best answer: As zadcat says above, a number of quotes in the French media point to a 1905 French collection of Russian proverbs called La Russie en proverbes, except that the searchable copy of this book doesn't seem to contain the words "vanité" and "luxure". An American collection of "racial proverbs" (!) from 1963 also lists it as Russian (the snippet corresponds to the page of Russian proverbs), which seems the earliest trace of it in Google. Some people have even tried to find the original version or retranslate it back to Russian. Perhaps Russian mefites could help us here, though it could be bogus, like so many of those "foreign" quotes. Amusingly, the only vice that seems to be the traditional "mère de la luxure" in early texts is gluttony (Gula genitrix est luxuriae or Gula libidinis est mater).
posted by elgilito at 2:33 AM on July 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for all of the answers. Since it's somewhat two pronged, it's hard to pick a best answer. Is it required? I actually have more questions than I did before with the Russian twist. I never would have guessed that was the original source. At least I have good idea that my grammar is somewhat correct.
posted by mrducts at 9:04 PM on July 2, 2013

it's hard to pick a best answer. Is it required?

No, you can pick no comments as best answer, or you can (rather unintuitively) mark ALL comments as best answer. Or somewhere in between. It's up to you.
posted by muddgirl at 6:10 AM on July 3, 2013

Response by poster: I want to leave this open and maybe someone else will chime in. But in response to elgilito as to the searchable copy of the book, there are other French words that could be used, at least for lust: convoitise (which is more of a longing I believe), désir sexuel, envie and désir.

I tried all of those words in the search of "La Russie en proverbes" and didn't get a hit on any of those either. Google translate's luxure displays lust and lechery as synonyms which is why I would think that that word would fit the translation better than the others.

I'm no Francophile, the language confounds me, although I do find it to be beautiful, articulate and very expressive. Most of the French I know comes from wine and Cognac bottles or food. I remember hearing a story about the meaning, the "true" meaning of "savoir faire" although I can't remember it. It was more of a joke than a story, but it really brought home that certain words or expressions of world languages aren't translatable in the definition/dictionary sense into English. Case in point "saudade". It's more of a feeling than a word.

Maybe someone will find this and expound some more. Whether it's French, Russian or something someone made up after smoking a bowl of something, I think it is a nice phrase and it sounds and reads really nicely in French.
posted by mrducts at 10:11 PM on July 3, 2013