DLyons (asker) Jun 9, 2015:

@all Thanks for the excellent input.

I'm currently proofreading and have decided the closest meaning is probably "plus ça change ...". Any thoughts about using that in French - it seems to me that's more familiar than its English equivalent of "the more things change, the more they stay the same"?

Nikki Scott-Despaigne Jun 9, 2015:

DLyons I dare say that rooting around sites with English sayings including farming and so on, you will come up with something.

It would help if you could post the sentence before and after this one. It could give an idea of alternative solutions to the unsatisfactory one of a literal rendering.

Nikki Scott-Despaigne Jun 9, 2015:

I agree with Charlotte. That's happening quite a bit at the moment!
BTW, it's the other way round though. The agricultural domain which feeds the mind of the intellectuals. Working outside, in the open air, on the land or on the ocean, spirituality is traditionally of comfort and solace. Mariners and farmers alike have endless sayings of this type.

After the 1GM, the school holidays were organised and extended in the summer so that children could actually help out in th fields. So education and agriculture have many links... but I digress!

Charlotte Allen Jun 9, 2015:

Won't the meaning of this be lost anyway? Quoting half of a proverb with which anglophones will not be familiar will probably mean nothing much anyway, surely? A bit like somebody saying "red sky at night..." to a non-English speaker - they don't have that little voice inside their heads saying "shepherds' delight" to help them grasp the meaning. So short of trying to flesh out what the labourer may or may not have meant by quoting the first half of this proverb (and who can know for sure what he really intended?), and in the process distorting what he actually DID say, probably the best you can do is translate literally but with a poetic feel (so that the reader gets the sense that this speaker is hinting at/quoting something).
BTW, what a poetic lot these agricultural labourers are! It's always struck me that whenever you see French speakers from ALL walks of life interviewed on TV (from footballers to farmers and factory workers), they express themselves so well. Must be something in the French educational system...

DLyons (asker) Jun 8, 2015:

@Phil Yes, something like that. Stuff that we're just slaves to. I think it's significant that he only uses the first half of the proverb - maybe that implies that there's not much we can control at all. There's usually something Biblical that fits but I'm drawing a blank other than being literal.

philgoddard Jun 8, 2015:

All we can do is eat and sleep?

philgoddard Jun 8, 2015:

Could the bit before the comma mean that we can't control the weather or the soil? I'm not sure about the second half of the sentence though. It gets lots of hits, but I can't find any that explain what it means.