A critique of Amsal and Hikam (Proverbs and wisdom)

One of the most accredited sources of Persian popular literature is the book titled “Amsal and Hikam”(proverbs and wisdom)written by Dehkhoda.His book consists of more than thirty thousand proverbs, wisdom, idioms, metaphors, news, and sayings. This is the result of his continuous study and research and demonstrates his perseverance, acuity, talent and presence of mind. The book makes the reader full of surprised admiration, particularlyknowing thatthe contents of the book were collected when there was no access to such facilities as the computer and the Internet search engines. However, since it is not devoid of problems, it is urgent to take steps to amend and modify the erroneous parts of this noteworthy book. The errors include mixing proverb entries according to the subjects, using Arabic proverbs without their references, and the mismatch between Persian proverbs and Arabic equivalences. The present study is an attempt to accomplish only a fraction of this huge undertaking by scrutinizing and analyzing some Persian proverbs and their Arabic equivalences. Incidentally, the Arabic proverbs sampled here have been documented. The main reason why Dehkhodahas made mistakes in choosing appropriate equivalences for proverbs is that he has mostly taken account of the subjects of proverbs and neglected the contexts in which these proverbs are used. Some other reasons can be listed as follows: taking into account only a part of the stories behind the proverbs, putting the proverbs into the wrong category with respect to their subjects, and considering only some sections or vocabularies of a given proverb.