Prepare horse buggy in the Winter and sleigh in Summer.

I am not sure about buggy. Is it the right buggy. I mean the thing that the horse pulls with people in it.

Fine words scuttle no warships.

Not sure how to put 'life' in the past tense, but I'm pretty sure that proverb is used as the basis for one of the poems in the appendix to Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. I think there it might be 'To live one's life is not as easy as to cross a field'. Tippett aficionados will recognise it from the third of the Songs for Dov.

I don't have a copy of the Pasternak in London and my Tippett shelf is buried behind some piles of other stuff which I don't feel like moving at the moment, so I'll have to leave the discovery of the precise wording to someone else.

Did Pasternak use an existing proverb for his poem, or was his novel so popular that one of his own lines became proverbial?

Goodness, what a memory, t-i-n.

In the Tippett "Songs for Dov" it appears as:

I passed by their home
On my full circle west
I passed by their home
The forest hut;
Where they'd shacked up together
In the snow, amid the wolves,
In the long winter

But they'd gone
Back to the town,
Each, alone, into the swarming city.
"To live your life is not as easy as to cross a field"

In my volume of the Pasternak, the poem in the appendix is translated as:

Hamlet

The noise is stilled. I come out on the stage.
Leaning against the door-post
I try to guess from the distant echo
What is to happen in my lifetime.

The darkness of night is aimed at me
Along the sights of a thousand opera-glasses.
Abba, Father, if it be possible,
Let this cup pass from me.

I love your stubborn purpose,
I consent to play my part.
But now a different drama is being acted;
For this once let me be.

Yet the order of the acts is planned
And the end of the way inescapable.
I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees’ hypocrisy.
To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.


The text has a footnote which explains that 'the last line is a Russian proverb'.

Thank you kind sir! (And George for the Tippett, which immediately brings a wave of sounds flooding into my head - that "swah-ah-arming swomming swomming seetee"! )

You can always tell a Brummie... but you can't tell him much.

If at first you don't succeed, give up.

Tommo