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For many years, Melinda Takeuchi, professor of Japanese art history at Stanford, regularly competed with horse and carriage in combined driving events.  Here's an example of what the sport looks like.

Not long ago, her carriage driving days came to an abrupt end due to an accident, which she describes thus:

I had a horrendous carriage wreck a couple of years ago — 5 dashing deer spooked my horse and she bolted. carriage flipped. i was life-flighted to stanford emergency where they discovered 8 broken ribs and a malignant cyst in the pancreas. by one of those crazy serendipitous miracles, the cancer was discovered in time to blitz it. so i survived against all odds, but my daredevil days are over. thank the goddess for horses in these days of shelter in place.

Melinda's harrowing tale matches one of the most famous Chinese set phrases (chéngyǔ 成語, often misleadingly called "idioms"):  sàiwēngshīmǎ 塞翁失馬 ("the old man at the pass loses his horse", i.e., "blessing in disguise").

A fuller expression of the phrase reads thus:

sàiwēngshīmǎ yān zhī fēi fú 塞翁失馬焉知非福

Google Translate (GT) gives this funny translation for the long version:  "Seeon loses his mind".  That really did make me chuckle, though I sympathize with GT, since asking Mandarin translation software to comprehend Classical Chinese would be like tasking Modern English translation software with making sense of Beowulf.  It's interesting, though, that GT gets the perfect gist of the shorter version:  "blessing in disguise".  It says nothing about an old man losing his horse at the pass, which is the literal meaning of the expression, but it understands the deeper meaning.

How is that possible?  It's simply because "sàiwēngshīmǎ 塞翁失馬" ("the old man at the pass loses his horse", i.e., "blessing in disguise") has been borrowed into Mandarin as a unit, virtually as a quadrisyllabic word or term.

As for the meaning of the second half of the expanded version of the set phrase, viz., yān zhī fēi fú 焉知非福, it is "how could you know it is not a blessing?"

If I ask GT to translate "And there are no territorial limits to the reach of habeas corpus articulated in the text" into German, this is what it will give me:  "Und der Reichweite des im Text artikulierten Habeas Corpus sind keine territorialen Grenzen gesetzt."  The software does not attempt, nor need, to translate "Habeas Corpus" into German because this is an English Latinate legal term that has been borrowed into German.

To fully understand a Chinese set phrase (chéngyǔ 成語) like sàiwēngshīmǎ 塞翁失馬 ("the old man at the pass loses his horse", i.e., "blessing in disguise"), one should know the historical context, i.e., the story or account recorded in the ancient text where it first occurred.  In the present instance, that would be this tale from the Huainan Zi 淮南子 (before 139 BC):

Fū huòfú zhī zhuǎn ér xiāngshēng, qí biàn nán jiàn yě.

Jìn sāi shàng zhī rén yǒu shàn shù zhě, mǎ wúgù wáng ér rù hú. Rén jiē diào zhī.

Qí fù yuē:`Cǐ hé jù bù wéi fú hū?'

Jū shù yuè, qí mǎ jiāng hú jùnmǎ ér guī. Rén jiē hè zhī.

Qí fù yuē:`Cǐ hé jù bù néng wéi huò hū?'

Jiā fù liáng mǎ, qí zi hào qí, duò ér zhé qí bì. Rén jiē diào zhī.

Qí fù yuē:`Cǐ hé jù bù wéi fú hū?'

Jū yī nián, hú rén dà rù sāi, dīng zhuàng zhě yǐn xián ér zhàn, jìn sè zhī rén, sǐzhě shí jiǔ, cǐ dú yǐ bǒ zhī gù, fùzǐ xiāng bǎo.

Gù fú zhī wèi huò, huò zhī wéi fú, huà bù kě jí, shēn bù  kě cè yě.

夫禍福之轉而相生，其變難見也。
近塞上之人有善術者，馬無故亡而入胡。人皆吊之。
其父曰：「此何遽不為福乎？」
居數月，其馬將胡駿馬而歸。人皆賀之。
其父曰：「此何遽不能為禍乎？」
家富良馬，其子好騎，墮而折其髀。人皆吊之。
其父曰：「此何遽不為福乎？」
居一年，胡人大入塞，丁壯者引弦而戰，近塞之人，死者十九，此獨以跛之故，父子相保。
故福之為禍，禍之為福，化不可極，深不可測也。more ▼

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It can be difficult to foresee the twists and turns which compel misfortune to beget fortune, and vice versa.
There once was a (father), skilled in divination, who lived close to the frontier (with his son). One of his horses accidentally strayed into the lands of the Xiongnu, so everyone consoled him.
(But) the father said, “Why should I hastily (conclude) that this is not fortunate?”
After several months, the horse came back from the land of the Xiongnu, accompanied by another fine horse, so everyone congratulated him.
(But) the father said, “Why should I hastily (conclude) that this can not be unfortunate?”
His family had a wealth of fine horses, and his son loved riding them. One day (the son) fell off the horse, and broke his leg, so everyone consoled (the father).
(But) the father said, “Why should I hastily (conclude) that this is not fortunate?”
One year later, the Xiongnu invaded the frontier, and all able-bodied men took up arms and went to war. Of the men from the frontier (who volunteered), nine out of ten men perished (from the fighting). It was only because of (the son's) broken leg, that the father and son were spared (this tragedy).
Therefore, misfortune begets fortune, and fortune begets misfortune. This goes on without end, and its depths can not be measured. (Wiktionary translation)

Source

People use set phrases much less frequently nowadays than they did a hundred years ago.  One reason is that they are no longer so well educated in classical learning, so they don't know the literary allusions that provide the background for the set phrases, or, putting it in the obverse, they no longer evoke the historical contexts whence they emerged.  Another reason is that the entire style of writing shifted from Classical / Literary to Vernacular a hundred years ago, for which see:

Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, ed.  Remembering May Fourth:  The Movement and its Centennial Legacy.  Series:  Ideas, History, and Modern China, Volume 23.  Leiden:  Brill, March 2020.

 

Selected readings

• "Eighty-one Cantonese proverbs in one picture" (2/27/14)
  
• "Too tired to love: new set phrases in Pinyin" (12/23/19)
• "Chinese proverbs" (1/19/16)
• "More literary troubles for Xi Jinping" (1/3/19) — see especially this comment for the sharply diminished usage of set phrases in contemporary speech and writing
• "A [class.] zoo" (1/18/15)
• "Mistakes in English and in Chinese" (2/13/18)
• "How to learn to read and write Chinese" (8/13/19)
• "Excessive quadrisyllabicism" (2/17/18) — I was reminded of this post by this tweet from the author of the following famous article
• "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (8/27/91)

May 2, 2020 @ 5:10 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Idioms, Language and history, Language and literature, Proverbs, Style and register

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