Morning all,
The Illustrated Book of Sayings is Ella Frances Sanders’s follow up to Lost In Translation, a book that searched every corner of the planet for fascinating words with no literal English translation. The review I’ll post later this week is very simple – I’ve highlighted a few expressions I liked, grouped them into some basic categories, and picked out a winner at the end.
Before I start, however, I want to highlight a comment from the book’s introduction. Sanders suggests that words have the power to plant themselves in people and grow into something new. As I reflected on this comment, I thought back to her previous book and realized how the idea applied to the way some of the non-English words I learned from it changed my life. The change could be as simple as observing instances of the Japanese word komorebi (the sunlight filtering through a leafy tree). The book also changed the way I notice emotions that may once have passed by unacknowledged (like saudade, the Portuguese word for nostalgia about something that never existed).
I’m looking forward to returning to Lost In Translation soon and taking note of any other words that, in hindsight, were seeds for what have grown into the leafy trees through which I filter the sunlight of the world. I’m expecting a similar result from some of the expressions I learned from Sanders’s newest book. Sometime in the future, reader, I’ll be back with more details on exactly how this aspect of my growth played out.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
