勇者は幸運に恵まれる yūsha wa kōun ni megumareru Fortune Favors The Brave
This is a philological study of a Roman proverb in Japanese dress, 勇者は幸運に恵まれる (yūsha wa kōun ni megumareru). It spans five ancient Latin witnesses and a dozen Japanese renderings between 1888 and 1946, none of them fixed, and examines a Japanese sentence that turns out to be a machine-generated dictionary gloss with no printed source behind its exact words.
Abstract
勇者は幸運に恵まれる, the brave are blessed with good fortune, is not a Japanese proverb: it is a modern Weblio machine-dictionary gloss for the English equation fortune favors the brave, which itself translates a Latin proverb already old when Cicero called it vetus proverbium in 45 BC. The Latin line runs from Ennius through Terence, Virgil and the younger Pliny to a medieval audaces form; the Japanese side has at least a dozen renderings between 1888 and 1946, each translator giving Fortune a different Japanese face — Heaven, a god of luck, or plain chance — and none of them fixed. The Japanese proverb tradition's own line on fortune, 運は天にあり, says the opposite: it resigns fortune to Heaven and moves anyway.
Overview
The sense. The Latin claim is that boldness moves fortune. What moved in Japanese is Fortuna. She became Heaven in 1888 and 1946, a god of luck in 1909, the god of fortune and Heaven side by side in 1911, and plain luck in 1918, and the two are not the same claim: 天は勇者を祐く says the moral order rewards courage; 運は勇者を助く says the dice do. The sentence 勇者は幸運に恵まれる says neither; it says the brave are blessed, and leaves the blesser out.
The words. 勇者, yūsha, is a person of courage, a word as old as the 平治物語 of about 1220 and the Analects' 勇者不懼, the brave do not fear; to a Japanese reader under fifty its first association today is the hero of a game or a manga, a different color from the Latin fortis. 幸運, kōun, is good fortune, a lucky turn, the abstract noun; it is not Fortuna. 恵まれる, megumareru, is to be blessed with, the ordinary construction for being fortunate in something. So the Japanese says the brave are blessed with good fortune, a statement about the brave. The Latin, and every Japanese dictionary rendering from 1888 to 1946, is a statement about Fortune, who helps, loves or favors the brave.
The proverb in English. Fortune favours the brave is the standing English equation across the Japanese bilingual dictionaries from 1904, with the bold for audaces and the daring for audentes in 1909, and Saitō Hidesaburō 斎藤秀三郎's dictionary of 1915 already sets it against 運は勇者を助く [1]. The English proverb has a history of its own, in Chaucer about 1385 before any printed Latin collection [2], and the English books of Japanese proverbs carry Saitō's sentence as if it were a Japanese one, from Buchanan 1965 to Galef 2012 [3] [4].
The historical record
Second century BC. Ennius, Annals, book seven. Fortibus est fortuna viris data, fortune is given to brave men, in hexameter, quoted by Macrobius four centuries later as the model for Virgil's line [5].
161 BC. Terence, Phormio, line 203. A slave, Geta, urging a young man to act: fortis fortuna adiuvat, fortune helps the brave. The oldest line surviving whole [6].
45 BC. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.11. "Fortes" enim non modo "fortuna adiuvat", ut est in vetere proverbio, sed multo magis ratio, for not only does fortune help the brave, as the old proverb has it, but much more does reason. Already a proverb, and already old [7].
19 BC. Virgil, Aeneid 10.284. Turnus, ordering a charge that will fail: audentis Fortuna iuvat, Fortune helps the daring [8].
About AD 107, of the year 79. Pliny the Younger, Letters 6.16.11. His uncle, sailing toward Vesuvius to his death, to a frightened helmsman: 'Fortes' inquit 'fortuna iuvat: Pomponianum pete.' So the four classical witnesses are a soldier's saying, a slave's encouragement, a doomed king and a doomed admiral [9].
The twelfth century onward. The audaces form. Alan of Lille's Parabolae, Albertanus of Brescia in 1238, and John Owen's epigram of 1606 all have Audaces fortuna iuvat, Fortune helps the bold. This is the schoolbook form; a rendering that reorders it as fortuna audaces iuvat follows no historical word order [10].
1888. An English-Japanese Lexicon, appendix of Greek, Latin and modern foreign phrases, page 1069. The earliest known Japanese rendering: Audaces fortuna juvat. 〔羅〕天運ハ勇者ヲ愛ス, 天勇者ニ與ミス, Heaven's fortune loves the brave; Heaven sides with the brave. Fortuna becomes the Confucian Heaven [11].
1901. Sassa Masakazu 佐々政一, 修辞法, a rhetoric manual, pages 230 to 231. A school essay on the set topic 運命は勇者を愛す, fate loves the brave, and its critic's complaint that the student forgot his proposition and wrote about fate alone. The line was a topic, not a saying [12].
1909. Kanda Naibu 神田乃武 and Nannichi Tsunetarō 南日恒太郎, 英和双解熟語大辞典, appendix pages 38 to 39 and 12 to 13. Three Latin forms, three Japanese: fortes fortuna adjuvat, 勇者には幸栄あり, with the Terence address; audentes fortuna juvat, 福神は勇者に幸ひす, with Virgil's; audaces fortuna juvat, 福神は勇敢なる者に幸ひす. Fortuna becomes 福神, a god of luck [13].
1911. The dictionary Nitobe Inazō 新渡戸稲造 oversaw, 英和俗語熟語故事大辞典, pages 1716 to 1717. Fortes fortuna juvat. 運の神は勇者を愛顧す; 天は勇者を祐く, and beside it Fortuna favet fatuis, 幸運は愚者を祐く, Fortune favors fools. The Western shelf holds both, and the Japanese copied both [14].
1915 to 1946. A dozen more. Saitō (1915 and 1918): 運は勇者を助く [1] [15]. A composition dictionary (1925): 幸運は勇者を寵す, marked 西諺, a Western proverb [16]. Ethics textbooks of 1928 to 1939: 天は勇者に幸する, and one teacher's guide supplies the English original for the Japanese proverb, Heaven favours the brave, which is the whole reception in one sentence [17]. A world-maxim anthology (1932): 運は勇者を寵愛す, credited to Virgil [18]. The 1946 Standard: 天運ハ勇者ニ幸スル [19]. Twelve renderings in sixty years, none of them fixed.
What is not a source. There is no Japanese proverb under this sentence. The Japanese proverb tradition's own line on fortune says the opposite and is said in the same situation, before a charge: 運は天にあり, fortune is Heaven's, from the 太平記 of the fourteenth century, 運は天にあり、一足も引く事有るべからず。只討死をせよ, fortune is Heaven's; do not retreat a step; only die fighting. The Roman claims that boldness moves fortune; the Japanese resigns fortune to Heaven and moves anyway. The Edo parodies, fortune is Heaven's and the rice cakes are on the shelf, mock the resignation. 勇者は懼れず, the brave do not fear, from the Analects and the first Japanese proverb book, is a real Japanese proverb about the brave and says nothing about fortune. Seneca's letter 94, which the web cites, is not among the witnesses; Erasmus's Adagia is, below [20].
The dictionaries today. kotobank has no headword for any Japanese form of the line. Weblio's machine-generated English-Japanese dictionary, which says of itself that a program produces its entries, glosses fortune favors the brave as 勇者は幸運に恵まれる, the exact wording this history examines; the archive of seven thousand nine hundred and eighty-five books has it in none. Neither Fujii Otoo 藤井乙男's proverb dictionary of 1910 nor Nakano Yoshihei 中野吉平's of 1933 files any form of the line [21].
The proverb in English
1915. Saitō, Saito's Idiomological English-Japanese Dictionary, page 463, under fortune. Fortune favours the brave. 運は勇者を助く。 The English proverb and its plainest Japanese, side by side in a dictionary made for Japanese learners of English; the 1918 printing repeats it [1].
1958. Okada, Japanese Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, Japan Travel Bureau. Under 笑う門には福来る: There is a saying that fortune favors the brave, but we know of no such English proverb as "fortune favors the cheerful." The English proverb as the measure of a Japanese one [22].
1965. Daniel Crump Buchanan, Japanese Proverbs and Sayings, University of Oklahoma Press, page 51. Un wa yūsha wo tasuku: "Fate assists the courageous." English parallel: Fortune favors the brave. Saitō's rendering, filed as a Japanese proverb, under the heading Courage; the layer reads yiisha and tasu\u, read as yūsha and tasuku [3].
1974. Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, fourth edition, under 幸運. Fortune favors the brave as an example under the noun, with no Japanese sentence of its own [23].
1987 and 2012. David Galef, Even Monkeys Fall from Trees, Tuttle, number 66, page 146, and Japanese Proverbs, Tuttle, number 66. 運は勇者を助く, Un wa yūsha o tasuku, Fortune favors the brave, and in his list of equivalents Fate aids the courageous: Saitō's rendering given as a Japanese proverb, with no source, and kept in 2012 as Fate aids the courageous, with Fortune favors the brave bracketed after it [24] [4]. Not in Galef's Even a Stone Buddha Can Talk (2000), Zona (1996) or Trimnell (2004).
The equivalent. Fortune favours the brave in English. The English proverb is older than any printed Latin collection: Chaucer's Troilus about 1385, Thenk ek Fortune, as wel thiselves woost, Helpeth hardy man to his enprise, and Gower about 1390, Fortune unto the bolde Is favorable forto helpe [2]; Wilson dates the Chaucer about 1374 [25]; Caxton's Reynard of 1481, Who that is hardy the auenture helpeth hym, and Taverner's 1539 rendering of Erasmus, Fortune helpeth men of good courage [26]. Erasmus's Adagia files it as number 145, Fortes fortuna adjuvat, with Cicero's sentence, Ennius, Virgil, Ovid's Audentes forsque deusque juvat and Livy, and reads the adage as against those who veluti cochleae perpetuo latent intra testas, who like snails stay forever inside their shells [27]. Stevenson 1948 gives the same chain from Terence through Erasmus and Taverner [28]; Apperson 1929 adds Ovid's Audentes deus ipse juvat from the Metamorphoses [29]; Brewer's Phrase and Fable of 1894 credits Terence alone [30]; the Oxford quotations dictionary dates the English late 14th century [31].
Today. JMdict has no entry for the sentence. The house title, Fortune Favors The Brave, is the English proverb itself, which English has carried since Chaucer; word for word the Japanese says the brave are blessed with good fortune, a modern dictionary's gloss of that English. What a rendering must keep is Fortune as the actor, which the English title does and the Japanese wording does not.
A reading
The Latin proverb is older than every author credited with it; Cicero already called it an old proverb a century before Pliny gave it to his dying uncle. What moved into Japanese is not the proverb but Fortune herself, translated a dozen different ways — Heaven, a god of luck, plain chance — by translators who each reached for a different face of her, and none of the twelve renderings ever settled into a fixed form or entered a dictionary of Japanese proverbs.
References
- 斎藤秀三郎, Saito's Idiomological English-Japanese Dictionary, S.E.G. Publishing Department, 1915, s.v. fortune, p. 463.
- Speake, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, Oxford University Press, 2015, s.v. Fortune favours the brave.
- Daniel Crump Buchanan, Japanese Proverbs and Sayings, University of Oklahoma Press, 1965, p. 51.
- David Galef, Japanese Proverbs: Wit and Wisdom, Tuttle, 2012, no. 66.
- Ennius, Annales VII, quoted in Macrobius, Saturnalia 6.1.62, at Latin Wikisource. https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Saturnalia/VI
- Terence, Phormio, line 203, at The Latin Library. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ter.phormio.html
- Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 2.11, at The Latin Library. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/tusc2.shtml
- Virgil, Aeneid 10.284, at The Latin Library. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/vergil/aen10.shtml
- Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 6.16.11, at The Latin Library. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/pliny.ep6.html
- Alan of Lille, Parabolae; Albertanus of Brescia, De amore et dilectione Dei III (1238); John Owen, Epigrammata (1606), at Latin Wikisource. https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Parabolae
- An English-Japanese Lexicon, appendix, p. 1069. National Diet Library pid 1677027, scan 551. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1677027/1/551
- 佐々政一『修辞法』, 1901, pp. 230–231. National Diet Library pid 864859, scan 116. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/864859/1/116
- 神田乃武・南日恒太郎『英和双解熟語大辞典』, 1909, appendix pp. 12–13 and 38–39. National Diet Library pid 990169, scan 845. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/990169/1/845
- 新渡戸稲造監輯『英和俗語熟語故事大辞典』, 1911, pp. 1716–1717. National Diet Library pid 902975, scan 864. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/902975/1/864
- 斎藤秀三郎, Idiomological English-Japanese Dictionary, 1918. National Diet Library pid 1681530.
- 鈴木周作『実用音引作文辞典』, 1925, pp. 36–37. National Diet Library pid 914586, scan 356. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/914586/1/356
- 大瀬甚太郎『中学新修身教授資料』, 1928. National Diet Library pid 1457231. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1457231
- 『世界格言全集』, 1932. National Diet Library pid 1108066.
- 竹原常太『スタンダード和英辞典』, 1946. National Diet Library pid 1126792.
- 「運は天にあり」, 精選版 日本国語大辞典・ことわざを知る辞典, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/運は天にあり
- 「fortune favors the brave」, Weblio英和対訳辞書, at Weblio. https://ejje.weblio.jp/content/fortune+favors+the+brave
- Okada, Japanese Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, Japan Travel Bureau, 1958, s.v. 笑う門には福来る.
- Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, 4th ed., Kenkyusha, 1974, s.v. 幸運.
- David Galef, Even Monkeys Fall from Trees: The Wit and Wisdom of Japanese Proverbs, Charles E. Tuttle, Rutland and Tokyo, 1987, no. 66, p. 146.
- Wilson, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 1970, s.v. Fortune favours the bold (brave).
- Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, University of Michigan Press, 1950, F601.
- Erasmus, Adagia I.ii.45, no. 145, Fortes fortuna adjuvat, in Les Adages, volume I, Les Belles Lettres, 2013.
- Stevenson, The Home Book of Proverbs, Maxims and Familiar Phrases, Macmillan, 1948, s.v. Fortune.
- Apperson, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, Dent, 1929, p. 245.
- Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Cassell, 1894, s.v. Fortune.
- Knowles, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 8th ed., Oxford University Press, 2014, Proverbs, Fortune favours the brave.