Ìwà lẹwà.
Character as the ground of a person
Original
Ìwà lẹwà.
Glosa literal
- Ìwà character lẹwà is-the-beauty.
Inglés idiomático
"Character is beauty."
La fuente no nombra a ningún traductor.
Qué significa
Beauty is a property of character, not of appearance.
Se usa cuando
Spoken to correct someone weighing a person, especially a prospective spouse, by looks. Owomoyela glosses it "A person is as beautiful as his or her character is good"
Notas sobre la traducción
The near-rhyme of ìwà and ẹwà carries the claim phonetically and English cannot reproduce it. Because ìwà is built on wà, to exist, the sentence also reads "existence is beauty," and Yorùbá does not force a choice between the two readings the way a translation must. This is the single most-quoted Yorùbá proverb on character and it appears in almost every collection.