E, vidiš te kakva si!
This phrase appears in a conversation between a poor couple, one of whom works as a janitor, the other as a washerwoman at a hospital. The man is telling his wife not to look at the bed linen she washes because it makes her sad. She can tell when someone is alive or dead depending on what’s on the sheets when they bring them to her.
He says, “Why do you look at them so much, dear? A person can go mad from looking too much at bed linen the same as from looking too much at books. Wash, sweetie, but don’t look at anything!”
“I would if that were possible,” she answers, and then he delivers the line above.
Literally, this means something like, “Well look at what kind you are!” And I suppose I could make this more idiomatic by putting, “Just look at yourself!” but that feels too polemical and not soft enough to me. He’s a shy man who makes jokes to cheer her up when he sees her down from washing the sheets of dead people. He’s trying to console her but also convince her that she can do this. Perhaps just look at yourself feels too judgmental or mixes up the looking at the sheets with the looking at oneself, which is not strong in the source.
In any case, I cannot quite hear the right tone of delivery with the “just look at yourself” line as with, “Listen to yourself,” and so
Listen to yourself
it is.
Russell Scott Valentino 