— Madame Bovary (1856)
About this quote
हिन्दी में
मनुष्य की भाषा उस चटके हुए टीन के बर्तन जैसी है, जिसे पीट-पीटकर हम ऐसी धुनें निकालते हैं जिन पर भालू नाच सकें, जबकि चाह हमारी तारों को पिघला देने की होती है।
What it means
The force of the line is in the mismatch of scale, twice over. The instrument is cracked tin, not a broken violin — cheap, not ruined. And the two audiences are as far apart as they could be: bears, who will move for any noise, and stars, which will not move for anything. Between an instrument that crude and an ambition that large, the shortfall is not an accident of one bad speaker.
It gets quoted as a writer’s lament about the limits of language, usually with some self-flattery attached — my feeling exceeds my words. The line does not grant that exemption. The kettle is everyone’s kettle, including that of the man who is bored, and including the narrator saying so; no one in the sentence gets an instrument that works.
What it teaches you
When someone’s words for a strong feeling come out flat or borrowed — the same three phrases everyone uses — stop reading the phrasing as a reading of the feeling. There is no reliable correlation between the two. The harder half is the converse: your own better vocabulary is a fact about your vocabulary, and is not evidence that you feel more than the person fumbling.
अर्थ और सीख
यहाँ बात पैमाने के फ़ासले की है — औज़ार सस्ता चटका हुआ टीन, और चाहत तारों को पिघला देने की; धुन भालुओं के नाचने लायक़ निकलती है। इसे अक्सर लेखक की शिकायत की तरह उद्धृत किया जाता है कि मेरी भावना मेरे शब्दों से बड़ी है, पर पंक्ति यह छूट किसी को नहीं देती — वही टूटा बर्तन सबके पास है, कहने वाले के पास भी। सीख यह है कि किसी के घिसे-पिटे शब्दों से उसकी भावना को मत नापिए, और अपनी बेहतर भाषा को अपनी गहराई का सबूत मत मानिए।
Where it comes from
The narrator, on Rodolphe’s boredom with Emma’s declarations of love. In Eleanor Marx Aveling’s translation — the one in the public domain and used here — the phrasing is ‘a cracked tin kettle’, and ‘hammer out tunes’; other translations differ enough to matter if you are quoting.
The cruelty is in who it is said about. Emma means every word; the narrator explains that sincerity and cliché are not opposites.
