Photo by Hamed Saber |
When
my Iranian in-laws first came to stay with us, I decided I needed to learn a
few words of Farsi so we could communicate without requiring constant
translation. So I asked my husband to supply a few useful phrases—hello,
goodbye, please, and thank you, for starters.
What
I didn’t anticipate was the slew of options he offered for “thanks”—mersi, mamnoon, motshakkeram, to
name but a few. Who knew that there were so many ways to express gratitude?
“Just
say mersi,” he advised.
I
could get my mind around that one. It was easy to pronounce. Better yet, it was
already familiar, having been borrowed from French. But soon I realized that the
word sometimes came up a bit short. In a culture that has had millennia to
perfect the art of gratitude, often what is said is less important than what is
left unspoken. Mersi just doesn’t say
enough.
Then
I learned this useful phrase: dast-e
shoma dard nakoneh. It covers many situations but is usually offered at the
end of a meal to thank a hostess for preparing the delicious feast. Literally,
it means “don’t hurt your hand.” And the phrase even has a standard response: sar-e shoma dard nakoneh, or “don’t hurt
your face.” At first, I thought this was a joke. “Don’t hurt your face?” It
sounds like something Groucho Marx might say.
But
it’s meant quite seriously. In fact, the exchange is far more than “thank you”
and “you’re welcome.” The guest is acknowledging how much hard work went into
preparing the meal, which, in Iran, probably took all day and multiple sets of
helping hands to prepare. The hostess, in turn, is graciously accepting the
praise and expressing her joy at the opportunity to provide such a satisfying meal.
A
similar expression took me longer to figure out, partly because it means
something different in every situation: khasteh
naboshi (literally “don’t tire yourself out”). If followed by a request for
a favor, it means “I hate to trouble you, but…” On another occasion, it might be
offered in acknowledgement of a favor rendered, in which case it’s more like, “you
shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.” And you might say this even if you
were the one asking the favor in the first place.
Things
get even more complicated in a situation like this: Last year, when my
mother-in-law was recovering from knee surgery and hobbling around with a cane,
she couldn’t do her household chores for several months. I pitched in with the
cooking and cleaning. At the end of the day, I’d sit down with a glass of tea
after the washing up was done, and she’d give me a sad look and say, “khasteh naboshi.” Translation: “thank
you and I’m sorry I couldn’t help out.” Gratitude and apology rolled up into
one convenient phrase.
Try
to pack all that meaning into a simple, easy-to-pronounce mersi.
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