Gracián's Proverbial Wisdom Book (with download)

A work in the wisdom literature genre that deserves to be more widely known is Spanish philosopher Balthasar Gracián’s 1647 Oráculo Manual, AKA The Art of Worldly Wisdom. It consists of 300 numbered paragraphs, each starting with a very short proverbial saying and then explaining some insight about human nature and how to get on in the world. As the title suggests, it is definitely on the pragmatic side, with surprisingly few expressions of traditional piety, especially considering that Gracián was a Jesuit. It has some of the literary DNA of Machiavelli, though not nearly as ruthless and more focused on the individual.

My journey with this work began when I stumbled across a charmingly bound pocket-size English edition in my local used bookstore, slipcover and all. Check it out:

“The wise are always grouchy…” I knew it!

This is a mid-20th century translation by one Martin Fischer, who was a medical doctor and professor at the University of Cincinnati. I read the whole thing through a little at a time over a period of months. In the end, however, I found this translation to be overly literal; it seems to be trying too hard to imitate Gracian’s extremely terse style. Fischer admits this and tries to justify his approach in the introduction, but to my taste he still goes too far, to the point of having some real head-scratchers of sentences. When I compared it to other translations, I could even see that in some places Fischer outright missed the meaning of the Spanish idiom. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually liked the 1892 translation by Joseph Jacobs better, though I’m not qualified to evaluate it critically.

Which leads us to the reason this post is here: I found this work sufficiently edifying that I wanted to come back to it. There are public domain texts of the Oraculo and translations available online, but I specifically wanted it in a format that I could print and underline and take notes in. I also thought the original text could provide a good opportunity for me to improve my Spanish (or at least to not lose the little knowledge I have.) So I took the original Spanish text and Jacobs’ translation, and pasted them into tables in a LibreOffice Writer document to make my own “parallel edition”, suitable for printing on 8-1/2 by 11-inch paper or reading online as a PDF. I am not a skilled desktop publisher or anything, but anyway, here it is for anyone else who might be interested.