No, and it is worth knowing before it goes on anyone's skin. "This too shall pass"
comes from a fable told across Persia and the Jewish world, in which a king asks for
words that will make him sad when he is happy and happy when he is sad, and receives
a ring engraved with this line. It turns up in the twelfth-century Persian poets
Sanai and Attar, and English readers know it mostly from Edward FitzGerald's 1852
version and from Abraham Lincoln, who told the story at the Wisconsin State Fair in
1859. Chinese has no traditional saying in those words.
What Chinese does have is a family of sayings about fortune turning, and one of them
fits remarkably well. 否极泰来, pǐ jí tài lái, is
built from the names of two I Ching hexagrams: Standstill and Peace. When Standstill
reaches its end, Peace arrives. The top line of the Standstill hexagram says it
outright: the standstill overturns, first blocked, then joy. Chinese speakers say it
when the worst seems to be over, which is exactly when an English speaker reaches
for Solomon's ring. Close behind it come the frontier old man and his runaway horse,
and the poet Lu You's line about the road that seems to vanish among hills and
streams until another village appears, both in the luck section below.
If you want the idea as a tattoo, choose one of those set phrases rather than a word
for word translation of the English. A translated sentence reads to a Chinese eye the
way a menu in tourist English reads to yours, which is the sixth failure mode on our
page of Chinese tattoo symbols. Four characters
from a known source cannot be mistranslated, because they are not a translation. You
can see any of them brushed in five classic scripts with our
calligraphy generator, and then have a fluent
reader check the final design before it is permanent.
