I was wondering why you were coming up with so many abstruse and convoluted English sentences—people don’t talk or write English like that anymore—so I was tempted to check where you were getting all of them. I wasn’t surprised when I found out that the two latest puzzling sentence constructions you posted in the Forum are from a Victorian English translation of a book written originally in Spanish. They are from Oraculo manual y arte de prudencia (The Art of Worldly Wisdom), written in 1637 by the Spanish-born Jesuit priest Balthasar Gracian (1601-1658) and translated into English by the Australia-born British folklorist and literary critic Joseph Jacobs in 1892.
I am raising these points not to question the grammatical and structural integrity of the two hard-to-understand sentences that I’m now about to deconstruct here. It’s simply that those two aphorisms—which, of course, are concise, pithy formulations of someone’s sentiment or perception of the truth—used the peculiar English syntax of a bygone era in an attempt to faithfully capture the flavor and cadence of ideas expressed in the linguistically more difficult Spanish tongue. So, if those sentences sound inscrutable to you, it’s not necessarily because your English isn’t good enough. It’s just that the English of those sentences is too arcane and too convoluted to the modern mind and ear—even to native English speakers, I dare say.
Now let’s deconstruct the first sentence that baffles you:
“It is preposterous to take to heart that which you should just throw over your shoulders.”
First, we must recognize that the sentence above is a complex sentence consisting of two clauses, as follows:
1. Main clause: “It is preposterous to take to heart (something)”
2. Subordinate clause: “(It is) something you should just throw over your shoulders”
These two clauses are then linked and combined into a complex sentence by the subordinating conjunction “that,” as follows:
“It is preposterous to take to heart something that you should just throw over your shoulders.”
The peculiar syntax of Victorian English—and also perhaps the lilt of the original Spanish sentence—evidently demanded the removal of the word “something” because it detracted from the aphoristic quality of the statement. In its place, the English translator (Joseph Jacobs) decided to use the less obtrusive, indeterminate pronoun “which” instead of the word “something.” Structurally, however, the pronoun “which” would work properly only if positioned after the subordinating conjunction “that.” Indeed, in that position, “which” becomes not only the subject of the subordinate clause but the object of the main clause as well, as follows:
“It is preposterous to take to heart that which you should just throw over your shoulders.”
This appears to be how Joseph Jacobs’ Victorian English mind handled the translation of Balthasar Gracian’s aphorism in the original Spanish. In modern-day English, however, I think a simpler, more easily understood rendering of that aphorism would be the following:
“If you find something preposterous to take to heart, just throw it over your shoulders.”
A nonchalant, less prepossessing expression of that idea—meaning not aphoristic at all—would be this:
“Just throw over your shoulders what you find preposterous to take seriously.”
Now as to the second aphorism by Gracian as translated into English by Jacobs:
“Much that would be something has become nothing by being left alone, and what was nothing has become of consequence by being made much of.”
This is a tougher, even more convoluted form of Victorian English—a jigsaw-puzzle-type language that we don’t hear or see the likes anymore in modern discourse. I’ll offer a simpler rendering of that aphorism in modern English in a little while, but in the meantime, let me answer your question about its use of the word “being” twice in the same sentence.
Yes, I suppose you can say that “being” was added to each of the phrases “left alone” and “made much of” to make them acquire the attribute of nouns, but a simpler grammatical interpretation of the process is that the addition of “being” was meant to turn those adjective phrases into gerund phrases, which as you know function as nouns in sentences—whether as subject, object, or object of the preposition. The presence of the preposition “by” before the gerund phrases “being left alone” and “being made much of,” in turn, clearly indicates that those gerund phrases are functioning as objects of the preposition in their respective clauses.
Since it appears that you perfectly understood what that aphorism says despite its extremely convoluted form, I won’t attempt to explain its structure anymore beyond saying that the construction is that of a compound sentence consisting of two coordinate clauses joined by the coordinating conjunction “and.” I’ll just present what I think would be its modern English equivalent:
“Many consequential things turn to nothing when left alone, and some inconsequential things become consequential when we give too much importance to them.”
