The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine

by Jean La Fontaine

  La Fontaine’s morals are not easily classifiable. His stories can take Stoic or Epicurean positions in turn and speak variously as it were for ants and grasshoppers. He is of the age of Molière rather than of Voltaire, and his pragmatic naturalism and strongly anti-Cartesian views are accompanied by a clearly manifested love both of narrative and of his own characters, who create themselves, for the most part, through spoken language rather than by aetiological myth. His anti-Cartesian position is laid out most directly in the verse essay serving as an epilogue to Book IX of the fables, the “Discourse [for Madame de la Sablière.]” Here he seems to find a mechanistic determinism even more offensive when applied to animals than to humans:

  Only that some there are who will protest

  That every animal is a machine,

  No more; that everything within its breast,

  Its head, is moved by springs—or so to say!

  No soul, no choice, no sentiment;

  Naught but a clock, ticking away

  In even pace, blindly, with no intent.

  Open it, and you find wheels, gears, the lot!

  No mind; a simple mechanism, what!

  From one wheel to the next the thought is sent

  In a mechanical, unfeeling fashion!

  So think these folk. An animal might feel?

  Sense? Suffer? Love? No, no! “It is a wheel

  Moving a wheel that moves a wheel… No passion,

  No will!” “Then what are we?” you ask. Much more!

  This is how good Descartes explains it …

  He then goes on to give counterexamples of animal thought (in the behavior of stags, partridges, and beavers), and the whole “Discourse” concludes with what starts out sounding like one of his fables—

  Two rats seeking a living found, one day,

  An egg; discovery most bountiful

  For hungry rats …

  —but which turns out to be an ethological anecdote about the behavior of two rats protecting their dinner from a fox by ingenious means.

  Conversely, another general discourse on “The Power of Fables” is far from being a philosophical disquisition. It contains a fable almost en abîme—itself encapsulated in another story. In this case, the anecdote is of an Athenian orator who was failing to hold the attention of his hearers. Exhausting every conventional rhetorical device only breeds more inattention. But then

  …Our orator

  Decides to turn to metaphor.

  “Ceres,” he says, “with Eel and Swallow, went

  Abroad one day; came to a river, wide

  And deep. The three were most intent

  On getting over to the other side.

  Eel swam across and Swallow flew.

  And so did they succeed.” “And Ceres?” cried

  The people. “Why,” the orator replied,

  “She flew…” “Flew?” “Yes, Ceres went flying too…

  Into a rage, that is! Because of you!”5

  —the “you” here being the orator’s audience, who have been brought to attentive life, albeit by a device of breaking the epistemological frame of a story.

  The third-century-ce Philostratus, in one of his eikones or descriptions of imaginary pictures, shows the Fables gathering “around Aesop, being fond of him because he devotes himself to them … And Aesop, methinks, is weaving some fable; at any rate his smile and his eyes fixed on the ground indicate this.” This looks like La Fontaine, with his eyes fixed on his page, and his ear attuned to the two harmonies of human speech in all its variety, and the immense resources of formal verse. This seems more appropriate as a visualization of the spirit of the fabulist than the fantastic labyrinth built at Versailles, in the smaller park, in 1677, which contained thirty-nine remarkable hydraulic statuary groups of Aesopian fables, in which jets of water spurted or spewed from the mouth of each animal in a representation of speech (the machinery for pumping enough water from the Seine to operate these cost the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars). At the entrance to the labyrinth stood statues of Aesop and, of course, Cupid (as Ariadne, holding in his hand the ball of thread as a guide to the way out of the maze—most poets would want to create some other figure holding the guide through Cupid’s maze). But just as Renaissance poetry, viewing the ruins of antiquity, could claim of itself that (as in the particular putting of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, of the commonplace going back to Horace) “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, can outlive this powerful rhyme,” so the world of fable could arise anew in a dense, complex, self-referential, and magnificently high-spirited poetry, rather than frozen into unenduring stone (the labyrinth was destroyed in 1775), and sounding only of the splashing of falling water, which is always nonsense until poetry makes it mean something.

  Wandering through La Fontaine’s world of fable is not in the least like going through one of the Sun King’s labyrinths, but more like a walk through an English, or natural, sort of garden. The poet’s muse, “aux bords d’une onde pure,” propounds its profusion of sorts of story, shades of ironic coloring, nuances of diction, turns of allegorizing strategy, and types of moral stance. But in all of these sorts of story it is what happens to them when they are mises en vers by this great poet that unifies them. The very verse itself—the so-called vers libres of rapidly shifting line lengths and rhyming schemes (not to be confused with le vers libre, the unrhymed “free-verse” of Rimbaud and modernity)—creates a tone which could be unsatisfactorily characterized as wry, witty, distanced—all of which are true of it—but which does more than that. Both the zigzagging of the line lengths, and the unpredictabilities even of its mode of unpredictability (the very famous poem of the country rat and city rat is so regular in its quatrains of unvaryingly alternating masculine and feminine lines of seven syllables cross-rhymed abab that it is still sung as a children’s song to a repeated melody), have both general and local effect. So, too, the wonderfully flexible diction, with its pointed and elegantly self-conscious use of archaic words here and there, and its constant reminders that this world of fable is like nobody else’s. Even the American school child who used to have to recite the line about the fox addressing the crow (and, of course, his cheese) in “à peu près ce langage” (in language [sort of? rather like? more or less? approximately?] like this) would get the kind of joke—in its self-reference to animal discourse, which is “à peu près langage, langue, parole” in any case, and to poetry, for which reality is always represented in “à peu près ce langage,” the language of the particular poem.

  Professor Norman Shapiro has previously translated three large selections from La Fontaine’s fables into exquisite and appropriately nuanced English verse. In these versions, there is always an assurance of metrical control, and a sharp aptness to his decisions about diction, so that when, for example, he makes an egregious emendation or substitution, it rings true. I shall quote only one of these in its entirety, preferring the somewhat startling adjustments he makes to the old familiar fable of the fox and the crow (even with the almost outrageous allusion at the very end) to something chaster but less neatly done. The sense of play in, and with, the translation is somehow an appropriate version of the poet’s own:

  Perched on a treetop, Master Crow

  Was clutching in his bill a cheese,

  When Master Fox, sniffing the fragrant breeze,

  Came by and, more or less, addressed him so:

  “Good day to you, Your Ravenhood!

  How beautiful you are! How fine! How fair!

  Ah, truly, if your song could but compare

  To all the rest, I’m sure you would

  Be dubbed the rara avis of the wood!”

  The crow, beside himself with joy and pride,

  Begins to caw. He opens wide

  His gawking beak; lets go the cheese; it

  Falls to the ground. The fox is there to seize it,

  Saying: “You see? Be edified:

  Flatterers thrive on fools’ credulity.

&n
bsp; The lesson’s worth a cheese, don’t you agree?”

  The crow, shamefaced and flustered, swore—

  Too late, however: “Nevermore!”

  This may be perhaps the single fable most familiar to American readers, and to play with it requires some bravura. “Your Ravenhood” for good old “Monsieur du Corbeau” and “rara avis” for “le phénix des hôtes de ces bois” are a little surprising, but by the time second thoughts have let them pass, they have already worked. More interesting to me is the sequence “His gawking beak; lets go the cheese; it / Falls to the ground. The fox is there to seize it,” where the series of enjambed lines culminating in the half-stumbling “cheese; it” is followed across the line break by the falling of the cheese into another clause ending at the middle of a line. But the whole is elegantly saved, in a completed pentameter line, when the fox is there to seize not only the cheese but, we feel momentarily, the fragment of verse—the fox catching the cheese itself catches the falling half-line, in a move that is pleased with itself even as it gives pleasure. Professor Shapiro, as in his version of these lines, seems almost to feel viscerally the way in which the English pentameter always stands in for the alexandrine—it’s the same “official,” canonical line—and he uses it in this passage, as elsewhere, appropriately. But in general, it is his ear for English iambic verse which is so well-tuned that his lines have the sort of authority of their own that gives credence to his strategies of adaptation and adumbration. His diction, also, seems remarkably flexible in exactly the right way. And adding the extraneous allusion to Poe’s raven in the very last word is, if a self-indulgence, one for which we should be grateful.

  In the wonderful short fable of the mountain laboring to give birth to the ridiculous (in the proverb: “et nascitur ridiculus mus”) mouse, La Fontaine cannot resist moralizing it as a defense of his own retreat from epic inflation into the wisdom of shrewd minority. Here again, Professor Shapiro as translator seems to be taking the same kind of pleasure in his verse as La Fontaine does in his. And here again, we can see his poetic translation at work and at play. The pregnant mountain, shouting and screaming so that spectators are convinced she’s about to give birth to a city huger than Paris, produces a mouse—in La Fontaine, everyone

  Crut qu’elle accoucheroit sans faute

  D’une cité plus grosse que Paris:

  Elle accoucha d’une Souris.

  Here the sublime rhyme of Paris/Souris, almost does it all. There’s no way to get that in English, even house/mouse missing the epic grandeur of the drop in scale. Shapiro doesn’t try, and simply gives us “That all who run to watch surmise/She’ll bear a city more than Paris’ size./ A mouse is what she bore.” He doesn’t bemoan the loss of the Paris/mouse, and gets his (or, really, English’s) own back at the end, when, after rendering beautifully the parody of epic opening in La Fontaine, he catches better than any other translator the magnificent deflation at the end. La Fontaine avers that

  Quand je songe à cette fable

  Dont le récit est menteur

  Et le sens est véritable,

  Je me figure un auteur

  Qui dit: “Je chanterai la guerre

  Que firent les Titans au maître du tonnerre.”

  C’est promettre beaucoup: mais qu’en sort-il souvent?

  Du vent.

  This final tiniest line, with its full rhyme, reminds us once again how “hot air” (in its rhetorical sense) has density of matter inverse to its expansiveness, like bad pseudo-poetic rhetoric. Here Shapiro is immensely satisfying:

  When I conceive this fiction

  Empty of fact but full of sense,

  It seems to me a true depiction

  Of authors’ vain grandiloquence.

  They promise: “Ah, my lyre will sing

  Of Titans’ combat with the Thunder’s king.”

  Fine words! And yet what often comes to pass?

  Just gas.

  His additions all come from so deep a grasp of the matter that they spell out and gloss the issues (e.g., the “vain grandiloquence” and the “my lyre will sing” as an English neo-classic cliché to parallel “Je chanterai”).

  Among La Fontaine’s fables of the kind that would not be thought of by most readers as Aesopian is the story of Discord mentioned earlier. It continues her story from Olympian surroundings to subsequent human life, by giving her a father named “Thine-and-Mine,” and a brother, “True-False,” and having her end up in residence in the inn of marriage.

  Ah, what an honor that the goddess chose to dwell

  Here in our hemisphere, and not the other—

  In every way our opposite—

  Peopled with savages and such,

  Who, marrying without the benefit

  Of notary and priest, would surely not have much

  For her to do. Well, be that as it may…

  With Rumor as her guide, the exiled castaway

  Roamed here and there, spreading her fame,

  Fanning the slightest angry spark to flame,

  And keeping Peace and Harmony at bay.

  But Rumor soon complained, calling attention

  To Discord’s lack of fixed address;

  Because, when one had need of her dissension,

  The search was long, and could be limitless.

  And so, at length, it was decided she should be

  Lodged in a permanent location, whence

  She could, at proper times, dispense

  Her services. But, seeing that we

  Hadn’t invented convents yet, where she

  Would be well housed, she took up residence

  In Holy Matrimony’s hostelry.

  The other is an aetiological fable of the blinding of Cupid (a favorite Renaissance motif, investigated over fifty years ago by Erwin Panofsky, pointed up by the fine ambiguity of the phrase “Love is blind”: it could mean that Cupid, blindfolded, shoots his arrows randomly, as well as that all lovers are blind to truths about their desires’ objects and themselves as well), “L’Amour et la Folie.” The translator’s skill and wit come through beautifully in it, and I can make no better recommendation of his work than by quoting the entire narrative part, starting with its fine handling of the internal rhyme in the original’s “La Folie et l’Amour jouoient un jour ensemble”:

  Folly and Love, one day at play together,

  Had a dispute. The latter wondered whether

  The Council of the Gods ought not be called.

  Folly, incensed, punched, flailed away

  And robbed the other of the light of day;

  Whose mother, Venus, properly appalled—

  Shrieking for vengeance, woman that she was—

  Deafened the gods and won them to her cause:

  Nemesis, Jove, Hell’s judges too—

  In short, the whole Olympian crew.

  “No punishment is hard enough,” she pleaded;

  My son is now an invalid.

  Do what you have to do!” The court acceded,

  And so, indeed, do it they did:

  In view of public weal and private woe,

  They sentenced Folly evermore to go

  Abroad with Love, whithersoever,

  And be his constant guide, forever.

  I have suggested above that Circe was the first satirist, turning men into the animals they “really” were; she made Odysseus’s sailors into pigs, and Odysseus himself, but for the intervention of Hermes, a fox, or so Hawthorne suggested. In La Fontaine’s own fable, the wonderful Les Compagnons d’Ulysse, the poet, following Plutarch and other writers, works a splendid turn on Circe’s magic. Ulysses’ men, each transformed into a different sort of beast, all elect, with powerful pragmatic and satiric arguments, to remain animals rather than being returned to human form: “Ils croyoient s’affranchir suivants leurs passions,/Ils étoient esclaves d’eux-mêmes.” In Shapiro’s version,

  From great and small: each, by and by,

  Would sing the praises of their passions; free
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  To roam the woods, follow their appetite,

  Forsake all human virtues… What they might

  Have realized, had they thought sensibly,

  Was that they were the slaves of their new state.

  Circe could thus be said to have invented one mode in which moral indignation has operated ever since, distorting the physical representation of people and their commodities in order to render correctly their usually hidden moral nature. She also thereby first allowed for the art of the animal fabulist, and so was, in a sense, the Muse of Aesop. The sixteenth-century Florentine writer G. B. Gelli, following a lead left unfinished by Plutarch, wrote a series of ten dialogues between Ulysses and a number of the animals who had been transformed from humans. After Circe’s power was nullified, they had the option of returning to human form again, but in these conversations, each of the animals discourses eloquently, reasonably, and sometimes learnedly about why he or she prefers not to. Given that they retain the language in which they can present their arguments, we might imagine that their preference is not for the animal state over the human, but in fact for their desire to remain fabulous. La Fontaine clearly loved them for that, as we indeed love him for showing us how much he did.