Una mela al giorno toglie il medico di torno

Buondì.

After the end of the Easter Sale (thanks to everyone who participated), it’s back to normal here at OnlineItalianClub.com.

Expect articles on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with new materials or inspirational thoughts.

But as today I’m all out of the latter, having worked hard all weekend, try this:

La mela

It’s the sixth in our series of mini-lessons based on common nouns.

You can find the others here.

One of the expressions from La mela is:

‘Una mela al giorno toglie il medico di torno’

which even the newest student of Italian should be able to recognise as

‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’.

A lot of what makes up a foreign language will be similar to what you find in your own native tongue.

Nouns, for example, such as ‘apple’ and ‘doctor’.

But not all such words are straightforward.

Another example from today’s lesson is:

‘Cucino una torta di mele.’

Would that be an apple cake you’re making? Or perhaps an apple pie? Or an apple tart, maybe?

The distinction between cake and pie is obvious where I come from, but much less so where I live now.

If direct translations exist, they may not be commonly used or generally understood.

For an Italian, a torta is a torta, and basta. Why mess about with subtleties?

Note also the use of the present tense in the above example.

‘Cucino’ is ‘I cook’.

But hey, maybe it could mean ‘I’m cooking’?

Some languages, such as English, place great importance on ‘the progressive aspect’.

Others, like Swedish, don’t.

In Swedish you just have to work out from the context whether what’s meant is ‘I cook’ or ‘I’m cooking’ (though that does make the speaking part much easier!)

Italian is somewhere in the middle.

Italians use tenses when someone is twisting their arms behind their backs, or threatening to scratch the paintwork of their new car with a nail.

Otherwise they’ll cheerfully do without them.

So did Marika (the writer of La mela ) mean ‘I cook’ or ‘I’m cooking’?

No way of knowing.

But I changed her translation to ‘I’m cooking’ on the basis that there was nothing to suggest it was more general, less specific. Also it was ‘una torta’, so singular, so likely to be now, this cake, here.

I often change her translations, but given that the two languages differ so fundamentally in this respect, it’s not always easy to do that consistently.

Leaving aside tenses, verb constructions themselves can be a pain.

Even when an idiomatic expression has a direct and obvious translation, the way the meaning is conveyed may not be so obvious.

Stefi and I had trouble explaining the construction of

‘Una mela al giorno toglie il medico di torno’

although we both knew what it meant.

‘Toglie’ is ‘takes’, ‘takes away’, ‘removes’, so that’s not a problem.

But the prepositional phrase (I think that’s what it is, or maybe it’s adverbial…) ‘di torno’ presented more of a problem.

Stefi pointed out that it’s the same as in the expression

‘levati di torno’

which means ‘get yourself out of the way’.

So ‘an apple a day gets the doctor out of your way’ would be close enough, I suppose.

Other idiomatic expressions in the La mela are identical in English and Italian, which is nice.

Go find them and practice them.

No need to look a gift horse in the mouth (a caval donato non si guarda in bocca), after all.

But I bet you’d have trouble with

‘La mela non cade mai troppo lontano dall’albero.’

There’s a translation, but what does it MEAN?

Email suggestions, please.

I’ll publish the one I like best on Wednesday.

La mela | others like it

A mercoledì.