為せば成る naseba naru Try and You Will Succeed

為す is the old verb to do, to bring about, and 為せば its conditional, if one does; 成る is to come about, to be accomplished. The line is the first of a thirty-one-syllable poem the whole country half-knows, なせばなる なさねばならぬ 何事も ならぬは人の なさぬなりけり: do it and it gets done, leave it and it does not; whatever it is, what stays undone is what nobody did.

The words carry the first line alone because the reader supplies the rest, and the force of the poem is in its last line, which turns a failure into a choice.

The dictionaries set beside it a line of the Chinese Book of Documents, without doing, what is done, as the same thought in an older book. Every design brushes the kanji form 為せば成る, the dictionary headword; the poem itself is usually written in kana. Try and You Will Succeed is the sense in English idiom; the literal line is do it and it gets done.

The poem closes a wall-writing the Yonezawa lord Uesugi Yōzan 上杉鷹山 gave his heir's attendants, as two records of the document copy it, one of them the domain's own, which dates it 1789; in popular print it ran from 1880 as an old poem, as nobody's and under other names, and that he composed it is received, not proven.

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