Now, this does not mean that I think the translator should try to follow his form with a slavish fidelity. For La Fontaine, as for generations of French versifiers before, during, and after, the standard poetic line is the twelve-syllable alexandrine. But he is also generous in adding to the mix a variety of decasyllables, octosyllables, and even shorter lines, not to mention a spate of so-called impair (uneven-numbered) lines. All for conscious (or perhaps even unconscious, instinctive) effect. And all in an effort to maintain the naturalness of prose in the formal but unobtrusive trappings of verse. In English poetry, as Pope tells us, the twelve-syllable line is overlong and heavy. Occasional use can be effective, as it is in Pope’s own picturesquely sarcastic example: “that like a wounded snake drags its slow length along…” But it makes more aesthetic sense to use its canonical English equivalent, the iambic pentameter, and to mold it flexibly into a convincing whole, with recourse to lines of other lengths as the rhetorical and dramatic situation demands.
In other words, the reader who troubles to compare my individual lines with La Fontaine’s will not usually find a one-for-one correspondence. Such an aping of his line lengths, although perhaps a virtuoso accomplishment, would be an artistically useless one, since, except for a few set pieces in quatrains, he follows no recognizable formal patterns himself. His prosodic freedom—like the freedom of the natural universe in which his characters live their slices of life for us—is, in fact, one of his hallmarks and one of his greatest charms. Some translators (and readers) will disagree. So be it. Here I stand. Others, with as much of a claim to credibility, stand elsewhere.
Let the reader decide…
My thanks to my many staunch friends and colleagues for assistance both practical and aesthetic. Evelyn Singer Simha has, as ever, been foremost among them, and exemplary in every regard, with her usual—unusual!—generously proffered advice; and Caldwell Titcomb has always been ready with valuable observations, linguistic and historical.
Most of these translations were written in the comfort of Adams House, Harvard University, where, thanks to the hospitality of its co-masters, Doctors Judy and Sean Palfrey, and their assistant Victoria Macy, I enjoy the position of writer-in-residence. Let it be said that my friends on its dining hall staff have also played a very sustaining and tasteful role.
My own university, Wesleyan, has likewise been most supportive with a number of grants, especially one founded by my late colleague Professor Joseph McMahon in memory of his parents. Such help has been invaluable, as has the much appreciated interest of Tom Radko and Suzanna Tamminen of the Wesleyan University Press. I am no less indebted to Sylvia and Allan Kliman for their encouragement; to Michael Weidman, French Wall, Todd Houle, and Glenn Carlson for their electronic know-how; to Rosalind Eastaway and Linda Cummings for frequent secretarial help; and to a bevy of research assistants—Sophie Hermann, Rachel Hoffman Bengtzen, and Daniela Cammack—for their efficiency and good cheer.
I should like also to acknowledge that the idea of this complete edition was the inspiration of Dr. Willis Regier, who, with his staff at the University of Illinois Press—especially Cope Cumpston and Dawn McIlvain—has been most cooperative and supportive. To each and all, my gratitude, with a special word of appreciation to enthusiastic fablephile Liz Dulany for getting the ball rolling in the first place. And, of course, my thanks to colleague and frequent past collaborator David Schorr, whose whimsical graphic talents provide such fitting company for La Fontaine’s verbal art, as well as to John Hollander for his appreciative and always appreciated insights.
Henri Regnier’s eleven-volume critical edition Oeuvres de J. de la Fontaine (rev. ed. [Paris: Hachette, 1883–92]), replete with copious annotations, has served as source of many of my notes. I have chosen to prepare my versions from the French text of the Fables as presented by Ferdinand Gohin in the Association Guillaume Budé’s two-volume edition, Oeuvres complètes de La Fontaine (Paris: Société des Belles Lettres, 1934), which purports to be a faithful representation of the last edition corrected by La Fontaine himself.
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Thomas and Catharine McMahon Fund of Wesleyan University, established through the generosity of the late Joseph McMahon.
Introduction
John Hollander
With the epic formula, “Je chante les héros” (I sing those heroes), Jean de La Fontaine begins the opening poem of his epical twelve books of not quite epical fables. The remainder of the passage makes clear the author’s quieter but perhaps no less modest claim, “Je chante les héros dont Esope est le père”—and I quote, as throughout these remarks, Professor Norman Shapiro’s splendid renderings—
I sing those heroes, Aesop’s progeny,
Whose tales, fictitious though indeed they be,
Contain much truth. Herein, endowed with speech—
Even the fish!—will all my creatures teach
With human voice; for animals I choose
To proffer lessons that we all might use.
Thus he addresses the Dauphin of France, to whom he observes as well—in a long prose preface—that although Plato condemned the poets for their untruths, he recommended Aesop. The allegorical nature of those stories was up front, as it were, and their immediate subjects were animals known in everyday life; La Fontaine points out that if we can’t find or understand philosophers to teach us moral truths, bees and ants are there to give us what we need. Truth, directness, down-to-earthness—these were always associated with Aesop’s prose vignettes of speaking animals.
The Aesopian tradition is a remarkably fruitful one. Anecdotal stories of animals, endowed with human speech and who therewith represent human qualities, go back as far as Hesiod and Archilochus in early Greek poetry. We commonly associate such tales with the name of Aesop, a slave probably living on Samos in the sixth century bce, but “Aesop” has come to designate the canonical author of fables written down only later by others; to this degree, his is an authorship much like “Homer” or “Moses” or “David.” The Greek word for fable (from latin fabula) is simply mythos, which means “story” (what we generally speak of as Greek mythology refers to the cycles of stories about gods and heroes). A late Greek rhetorician, Theon, defined a fable as “a false story picturing the truth,” but that “story” could be anything from a telling metaphor to a long and complex narration. The Aesopian stories, whether those strictly of animals or other sorts of parable, were in prose. But it was apparently an early practice to versify them. Plato tells us in the Phaedo of how Socrates in prison, awaiting the execution of his sentence, took some fables of Aesop that he knew and turned them into verse, following the intimations of a dream to compose something. We may surmise that his versification was in iambic lines; Socrates even wrote, albeit in prose, an Aesopian fable of his own (about how God, unable to reconcile the continual strife of pleasure and pain, fastened their heads together—thus when one of them comes, the other follows). We may imagine that one of the things that appealed to him most in Aesop was the same homeliness of the actors and their milieux in such fables that La Fontaine praised in his dedicatory prose cited above.
Some of the earliest Aesopian fables that we have are thus in verse. Horace, for example, has a speaker in one of his satires tell the familiar story of the country mouse and the city mouse; and versified collections in Latin by Phaedrus in the early first century ce, and slightly later, in Greek by Babrius, were themselves imitated and paraphrased in prose and verse and known in various collections through the Middle Ages. Chaucer tells and retells fables, and an elaborate version of one of them, in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” is one of the world’s great masterpieces of profound comic vision. Renaissance poetry contains many fables derived from Aesop, whether specifically of the animal sort or not. Fables in Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare lead to the spread of fable—often with a political agenda, as Annabel Patterson has shown1—in the seventeenth century and thence to the extended and well-known fables of John Ga
y. William Cowper, at the beginning of a fable of his own (“Pairing Time Anticipated”), reminds us of the common Latin root of fable and confabulate, and thereby of how much the matter of the animals talking is central to the form. He is also clear about how the Aesopian world is a particular kind of fictive domain, by taking a passing swipe at Rousseau, who had insisted that no children be allowed to hear beast-fables, because they were only vehicles of deception (animals don’t talk and reason!):
I shall not ask Jean Jacques Rousseau
If birds confabulate or no.
’Tis clear, that they were always able
To hold discourse, at least in fable;
And e’en the child who knows no better
Than to interpret, by the letter,
A story of a cock and bull,
Must have a most uncommon skull …
The Aesopian tradition gives frequent rise not only to new and later fables, but to a certain amount of meta-fabling, of fables manifestly or implicitly about the mythopoetic bases of beast-fable itself. In a fable in Sir Philip Sidney’s romance Arcadia, for example, all the beasts ask Jove for a king to rule over them. He agrees but gives the as yet incomplete human creature nothing but life itself, demanding that each of the animals contribute something of its own particular Nature: “The fox gave craft; the dog gave flattery; / Ass patience; the mole a working thought; / Eagle, high look; wolf, secret cruelty,” a strange list, mixing zoological plausibility, cliché, and off-the-wall ascription. English fabulists in the eighteenth century welcomed the beast-fable genre into their repertory of poetic genres, but they almost invariably condemned the fables to speak in only one mode of verse, rhymed tetrameter couplets, as in Cowper’s lines above, or in these from the anonymously rendered Aesopian tale of “The Cat and the Old Rat,” telling of how
[…the cat] gets upon a Shelf,
And to a String he hangs himself
By one foot, dangling with his Head
Downward, as if he had been dead.
The Rats all thought, he had been taken
At stealing Cheese, or gnawing Bacon;
Perhaps he might have foul’d the Bed,
Murdered a Bird, or that he had
Committed any other Evil
By instigation of the Devil
Or his own more malicious Nature;
For which they hang’d the wicked creature.2
Contemporary with these lines, too, is the cautionary tale into which the witty Matthew Prior revised the well-known fable of the cat changed into a woman from Aesop, itself turned by La Fontaine into La Chatte métamorphosée en Femme:
The am’rous youth, whose tender breast
Was by his darling cat possesst,
Obtain’d of Venus his desire,
Howe’er irregular his fire:
Nature the pow’r of love obey’d:
The cat became a blushing maid;
And, on the happy change, the boy
Employ’d his wonder, and his joy.
Take care, O beauteous child, take care,
Lest thou prefer so rash a pray’r:
Nor vainly hope, the queen of love
Will e’er thy fav’rite’s charms improve.
O quickly from her shrine retreat;
Or tremble for thy darling’s fate.
The queen of love, who soon will see
Her own Adonis live in thee,
Will lightly her first loss deplore,
Will easily forgive the boar:
Her eyes with tears no more will flow;
With jealous rage her breast will glow;
And on her tabby rival’s face
She deep will mark her new disgrace.3
In France, versified Aesopian fables have a rich and interesting history as well, seeming to outlast the life of the mode in English (although Emerson’s fable of the mountain and the squirrel is certainly squarely in the tradition). In Fables from Old French: Aesop’s Beasts and Bumpkins and The Fabulists French Professor Shapiro has himself previously translated such fables into English verse with the same kind of skill that he has brought to his translations of La Fontaine, commenting profusely and most enlighteningly on the French fable and its history.
The Greek myths in the Hellenistic handbooks were transformed, juxtaposed, intertwined, and brought to an amazing life of meaning and feeling by the poetry of Ovid. In the case of the Aesopian fables, the great transformation was wrought by Jean de La Fontaine in the seventeenth century, who made the language of his fabulous creatures the material for his own remarkable poetic skill: controlling tone, using a highly original rhythm and pacing of both line length and rhyme placement, and deploying a kind of wit that often seems to be implicitly acknowledging that these creatures couldn’t speak except in remarkable verse like this. His great collection of some 250 fables in twelve books was published in three parts: the first six books in 1668, five more ten years later, and a twelfth volume in 1694, the year before he died. This rounded out an epical enterprise (there were twelve books in Virgil’s Aeneid) that is half-signaled in the opening line, quoted earlier, of La Fontaine’s dedicatory poem to the Dauphin: “Je chante les héros dont Esope est le père” (literally, “I sing the heroes whose father is Aesop”). La Fontaine’s gifts as a neo-classical poet are apparent in his lovely poem Adonis, about which Paul Valéry wrote a fine and central essay; he also exploited the intriguing form of the rondeau redoublé, a mode which spins refrains out of its first quatrain.
La Fontaine’s collection contains fables of a variety of types drawn from a variety of sources (including those of the Indian fabulist Bidpai). The ones most familiar to English-speaking readers are perhaps those of the animal fables most often retold in other forms, or which became proverbial in themselves (the “sour grapes” of Le Renard et les Raisins, the fox and the grapes), or which, when most educated people learned French, used to be memorized at school (“Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché, / Tenait en son bec un fromage,” etc.). But there are many other sorts as well: aetiological fables like the one Socrates proposed about pleasure and pain (L’Amour et la Folie is a splendid one of these), or poems of wittily revisionary mythography, like the one on what happened to the Goddess Discord after the Homeric fable got through with her, which are rooted in traditions of Renaissance poetry. Stories of that sort contain their own moralizations, and most often need no “application,” as a concluding moral or interpretation was called in medieval story-telling.
But it is in the beast-fables that La Fontaine’s moral and poetic thought interfuse in another way. We cannot be sure, when we hear a story about an ant and a grasshopper, for example, what is going to be talked about: could it be a fable of the Imagination, the grasshopper taking great leaps as a sort of insect Pegasus, while the drudging life of the ant permits it to be conscious of nothing more in the world than its burden, its task, its duty? That would, at any rate, be the grasshopper’s story (or if cigale is more accurately translated as cicada, then it’s a matter of singing, or fiddling, rather than jumping). But that would be the grasshopper-view. It is the prudence of the ant with which the Aesopian tradition has always sided, and which has had the last word. It is only through the creatures’ discourse—by means of the relation between the arguments they offer and their habits, natures, and interests in the matter at hand—that the moral is deployed. La Fontaine carries this much further than prior fabulists had ever done, for discourse is the substance of his animal world. “Natural” characteristics (or, rather, Aesopian, as opposed to zoologically defined ones) play a good part in La Fontaine’s world—foxes are foxy, after all, cats never come off as much more than con-men, and so on.
But the fictional power of these fables derives from two paradoxically opposed elements, a kind of realism for which the poet is celebrated (his animals are variously peasants, bourgeois, or nobility, for example, rather than emblematic or heraldic creatures) and, on the other hand, the mythical matter of there being any discourse at all. In the epilogue to
Book II, the poet acknowledges the power of his own fiction by insisting, with a significant full rhyme on vers/univers that unites two senses of creation:
Car tout parle dans l’univers;
Il n’est rien qui n’ait son langage:
Plus éloquents chez eux qu’ils ne sont dans mes vers,
Si ceux que j’introduis me trouvent peu fidèle,
Si mon oeuvre n’est pas un assez bon modèle,
J’ai du moins ouvert le chemin …
…for none
Is there in all the Universe but that
Has language of its own. And far
More eloquent in their own habitat
Are they, perforce, than when they are
Characters in my work. If I have erred
By painting them less faithfully in word
And deed; if I present a model flawed,
At least have I opened a path untrod …
But by asserting that nothing in the universe is without its language, he does not mean what a naturalist would, but rather, as a poet, that he can make them say anything believably, and thus make moral discourse itself believable. As one commentator, Francis Duke, has so well put it, “La Fontaine is exquisitely aware of the relation of the speech of animals to the metaphor of the animals as man, whose proudest attribute is speech with words.”4 A modern schoolboy’s joke is apposite here, in that it pointedly deconstructs just this one crucial aspect of beast-fable: it is the one about a horse and a cow engaged in a contentious argument, until a little dog that had been listening in silence suddenly intrudes by pointing out where a resolution lay, at which point horse and cow, shocked, both say to each other at once, “Look! A talking dog!” That the animals talk so well, and so humanly, runs along in counterpoint to the general Circean moral of all fabling, that people have animal natures usually hidden by language, custom, society, and so on. These two notions entwined make for the basis of La Fontaine’s poetic world. His love of wit tempers his distaste for human folly so that it never becomes bitter or sour, whether in the language of dialogue among the creatures, in the wonderfully flexible modes of narration, or in the whole range of tones which he adopts in his prefaced or appended moral “applications.” Frequently these have as much archness, plainness, high diction, or casual wisdom as any of his animals, the “acteurs de mon ouvrage,” as he calls them.
The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine Page 2