Literal translation
to have cheeks like a poor man's backside
Meaning
to have plump, rosy cheeks
Explanation
This expression compares full, round cheeks to the crude, popular image of a poor man's backside, but it carries two contradictory meanings depending on how that reference is pictured. Agué de gauto (to have cheeks, gauta also meaning to aim, as with a gun to the cheek) coumo lou cuou d'un paure (like a poor man's backside, cuou meaning buttocks) most often yields nicely round, fresh cheeks : here the poor man is imagined as well-fed despite his condition, his buttocks staying full and plump. A second, rarer but attested meaning reverses the image into hollow cheeks, if the poor man is instead pictured as gaunt from hunger, the thinness of his backside then serving as a measure for the thinness of his face. This ambivalence rests entirely on how one pictures the poor man's body, an image the expression itself leaves unspecified, well-fed regardless or wasted away by poverty. The register is very familiar and crude, typical of a popular idiom that does not shy away from drawing its images from the most trivial parts of the body.