George Herbert's Outlandish Wisdom

Abstract

George Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs has never been regarded as part of his literary corpus. The work is not a composition but a collection, an assemblage of proverbs translated mainly from French, Italian, and Spanish originals. These proverbs come with no front matter, commentary, or other signs of an authorial persona, and the small body of scholarship that has addressed Herbert's book of wisdom has treated it as raw material, a source or analogue for passages in his other works. But the Outlandish Proverbs can also be read otherwise. This essay claims that Herbert's translations, in the Proverbs, are pointedly enigmatic and ironic, distinctive compositions in their own right; that Herbert's practices as a translator reflect his collection's persistent concern with obscurity and apocalyptic disclosure; that the distinctive forms and concerns of Herbert's proverbs align not with the main bodies of early modern proverbial wisdom but with other discourses, older and stranger; and that these older discourses are vital not only to Herbert's proverbs but also to his poetry. The proverbs therefore raise fresh questions about Herbert's relationship with a literary past, and about the emerging literary modernity in light of which both his proverbs and his poetry must be understood.