Literal translation
to smoke the mallows
Meaning
to be dead and buried
Explanation
Fuma means to smoke, in the sense of giving off smoke, smoking a pipe, or, in a farming sense, spreading manure, and mauvo means mallow, a flowering plant that readily grows on neglected ground and around graves; fuma lei mauvo thus literally means smoking the mallows, a funereal image describing a buried body feeding, through its decomposition, the plants growing above the grave. In use, the expression means being dead and buried, the exact Provençal equivalent of the French pushing up daisies, both expressions resting on the same image of a dead body turned into fertilizer for the cemetery's vegetation. The transcribed pronunciation fuma leï maouvo shows the local articulation of the vowels. The register is familiar and macabre with a touch of dark humor, used to bring up someone's death with ironic distance, in the manner typical of popular sayings about the end of life.