The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine
Page 40
The Hare and the Partridge (V, 17)
1. Two of the three dogs’ names used here are discussed by Regnier, (1:278, 417–18), who indicates that they imply the nicknames I have given the animals (even if the poet doesn’t). Although the third, Rustaut, goes unexplained—there would seem to be at least a suggestion of “rusticity” in it—I take the liberty of characterizing him as “the Wise,” given La Fontaine’s (sarcastic?) assurance of his infallibility as one “qui n’a jamais menti” (who has never told a lie).
The Eagle and the Owl (V, 18)
1. In Antiquity the owl was an emblem of the Roman goddess of wisdom Minerva, counterpart of the Greek Athena, eventually becoming synbolic of philosophy itself and the quest for knowledge. (Needless to say, its strictly coincidental inquisitive-sounding “Hooo” has nothing to do with the latter phenomenon.)
2. Given the scenario, I take the logical liberty of making La Fontaine’s owl a female, despite the masculine gender of the noun hibou.
3. The name Megaera has long been used in French to allude to a shrewish female, as in La Mégère apprivoisée, the usual French translation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Hence my translation of “voix de Mégère” (Megaera-voice).
4. I hardly need call to the reader’s attention that my pun is gratuitous and does not exist in the original.
The Lion Going off to War (V, 19)
1. Readers given to zoological precision will, I hope, excuse my liberty here in transforming the hare into a rabbit, all the more appropriate in the context, I think, since the latter is even less ferocious than the former. Besides, La Fontaine too, on occasion, sacrifices on the altar of easy rhyme.
The Bear and the Two Companions (V, 20)
1. The reference is to Rabelais’s celebrated sheep-merchant, in Pantagruel (Book V, chapter 17), likewise done in, though in a different manner.
2. Though it no doubt owes its popularity to La Fontaine, like many others, the proverb “Il ne faut pas vendre la peau de l’ours avant de l’avoir tué” (You mustn’t sell the bear’s skin before you kill him), equivalent to “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,” dates from at least as far back as the fifteenth century. (See Adrien-Jean-Victor Le Roux de Lincy, Le Livre des proverbes français, 2 vols. [Paris: Delahay, 1859], 2:191.)
The Ass Dressed in the Lion’s Skin (V, 21)
1. La Fontaine’s irony here is obvious. He gives his peasant miller a name—Martin—traditionally applied in French to the ass, as, for example, in the proverb “Il y a (à la foire) plus d’un âne qui s’appelle Martin,” usually translated as the less-than-common “There are more jacks than one at the fair.” His irony is not original, however. It should be remembered that the same name is given to the peasant in the proverb “Faute d’un point Martin perdit son âne” (For lack of a stitch Martin lost his ass; i.e., For want of a nail the shoe was lost).
2. Readers familiar with the more common antique meaning of the noun équipage (horse and carriage) may take issue with my translation here. In La Fontaine’s lexicon, however, and that of many of his contemporaries, it is frequently used to mean “attire,” as the present context suggests.
BOOK VI
The Shepherd and the Lion & The Lion and the Hunter (VI, 1 & 2)
1. Some might be tempted to see here a bit of tongue-in-cheek self-ridicule. Although no one would accuse his characteristic digressions of being mere “empty ornament,” it is hard to take seriously La Fontaine’s seeming defense of concision.
2. In a note of his own La Fontaine explains that the “certain Greek” in question was “Gabrias.” It was by that deformed name that those of early centuries, La Fontaine included, knew some of the quatrains of the third-century Greek (or Hellenized Roman) poet Babrius (also Babrios or Babrias), whose work was not more definitively brought to light until the 1840s. For illuminating details, see Regnier’s note to the present fable (6:3).
Phoebus and Boreas (VI, 3)
1. Unlike others who had treated—and would treat—this celebrated subject of worldwide folkloric diffusion, La Fontaine chooses to use the mythological names of his characters. (See, for example, the version by sixteenth-century fabulist Philibert Guide, a.k.a. “Hegemon,” in The Fabulists French: Verse Fables of Nine Centuries, 27.)
The Ass and His Masters (VI, 11)
1. Purists may well prefer “currier” to “tanner,” the two not being synonyms and the former being a more exact translation of the original’s corroyeur. I prefer “tanner,” with no detriment to the meaning, since, when read aloud, in many English dialects, the somewhat archaic “currier” might not only be misunderstood but might be misconstrued as “courier.”
2. As for any equally punctilious readers who may object to my rhyming liberty here (“indict ’em / ad infinitum”), I urge them—invite ’em—to recall Jonathan Swift’s celebrated lines from On Poetry (1733):
So Nat’ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite ’em,
And so proceed, ad infinitum.
The Peasant and the Snake (VI, 13)
1. I choose to avoid the obvious problem of how to translate La Fontaine’s designation of the snake here as an insecte, a literal rendition of which would sound curious in English. The poet was neither zoologically naive nor misinformed. He was, on the contrary, respecting the etymology of the word (from the Latin insectum [cut into sections]), commonly applied in the seventeenth century, according to Le Grand Robert, to animals like worms, snakes, and the like, that, according to popular belief, continued to live for a time after being cut in two.
The Wagoner Stuck in the Mud (VI, 18)
1. The town of Quimpercorentin (or Quimper-Corentin) was the county seat of a district in Brittany. La Fontaine’s opprobrium, more than the result of mere antiprovincial prejudice, would seem to have been shared by many. See Regnier, 2:58–59.
2. As Regnier points out (2:60), the reference to Hercules is slightly askew, since the god was asked by Atlas to replace him briefly in holding up the heavens, not the earth. But La Fontaine’s mythological intent is clear.
3. Again, the poet’s punctuational imprecision lets the reader of the French guess whether his moral—one of many to become proverbial—is pronounced by Hercules or by La Fontaine himself. For another example in the present collection, see “The Hare and the Frogs” (II, 14).
The Charlatan (VI, 19)
1. The Acheron (River of Sorrows), in the original, was one of the five rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology. I invoke translator’s license here to allude instead to the better-known Styx. La Fontaine’s reference suggests the death-defying tricks common to the outdoor magicians and quack healers of the time, no less than to the illusionists of our own.
2. Less elegant a coinage than La Fontaine’s passe-Cicéron (Cicero-surpasser), mine attempts to echo at least his meaning and his effect.
3. As Regnier observes (2:64–66), the soutane (cassock) of the original was not exclusively a priestly garment in the seventeenth century, as it is today, but was also used, as implied here, by lay clerics and academics.
4. Arcadian mounts, both horses and asses, were, according to Regnier (see 1:65), famous through antiquity.
5. Though la Mort (Death) is personified in the French as feminine, because of the grammatical gender of the noun, I opt here for the masculine pronoun, usual in English when referring to the Grim Reaper.
Discord (VI, 20)
1. The reference is, of course, to the famous apple that Discord offered to “the most beautiful” of the goddesses assembled at the wedding feast of Thetis and Peleus. According to Greek legend, it was Paris who awarded it to Venus, thereby incurring the wrath of Juno and Minerva and precipitating their spiteful vengeance, resulting, eventually, in the fall of Troy.
Epilogue
1. La Fontaine had begun his verse-novel Psyché, on the mythical heroine’s amours with Cupid (i.e., Love), bef
ore writing his first collection of Fables, completing it in 1669.
2. The identity of “Damon”—a common seventeenth-century pseudonym—is unknown.
BOOK VII
For Madame de Montespan
1. Tradition had it that Mercury gave Aesop, the “Sage” referred to, the gift of the fable.
2. La Fontaine’s traditional pseudonym for the marquise properly (or improperly) hyperbolizes her divine qualities.
3. This dedication of Book VII, conventionally fulsome but no less disillusioning—one would like to think that La Fontaine was above such toadying—was addressed to Françoise de Rochechouart de Mortemart, marquise de Montespan (1640–1707), beautiful and influential mistress of Louis XIV, with whom she had six children.
The Animals Ill with the Plague (VII, 1)
1. The Acheron (see note 1 for VI, 19) is mentioned by Milton in Paradise Lost: “Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep” (IX, 578).
The Man Who Married a Shrew (VII, 2)
1. La Fontaine was not nearly as misogynistic as this introduction, and preceding fables, would imply, having enjoyed a number of female relationships, both platonic and romantic. His one marriage, however—to sixteen-year-old Marie Héricart—appears to have been arranged with an eye to her considerable dowry, and was marred almost from its beginning by constant misunderstandings. It resulted in a legal separation in 1658, twenty or so years before the present fable was published, lasting throughout the rest of his life. (La Fontaine’s amours, especially from the time of his marriage on, have been sympathetically chronicled by twentieth-century fabulist Franc-Nohain [pseudonym of Maurice Legrand], in La Vie amoureuse de Jean de La Fontaine [Paris: Flammarion, 1928].)
The Rat Who Withdrew from the World (VII, 3)
1. The alleged Eastern inspiration is probably a fiction invented by La Fontaine to render the denouement more palatable. See Regnier, 2:106–7.
2. One is easily tempted to see here a pointed allusion to the Solitaires of Port-Royal, the Jansenist religious community among whose most celebrated adepts had been the philosopher Pascal. Their ascetic discipline was clearly at odds with La Fontaine’s easygoing and almost libertine lifestyle. He expressed this antagonism in works such as “Ballade sur Escobar” (1664), in which he explicitly criticizes the Jansenists for being spoilsports: “nous défendent en somme / Tous les plaisirs que l’on goûte ici-bas” (forbid us, in short,/ All the pleasures that one enjoys here below). His flirtation with various projects of religious verse—among them the “Poème de la captivité de Saint-Malc” (1673), done at the urging of certain Port-Royalists some five years before publication of the present fable—without blunting the temptation to read anti-Jansenist sentiments into the allusion, points, rather, to La Fontaine’s typical vacillation between the values of flesh and spirit, as well as to a good-natured willingness to lend his talents to a variety of endeavors.
The Heron & The Damsel (VII, 4)
1. The reference is to Horace’s Satire about the city mouse and the country mouse (II, 6, 79–117) which inspired La Fontaine as well. See “The City Rat and the Country Rat” (I, 9).
The Wishes (VII, 5)
1. Readers interested in the probable source of this tale, from the Hebrew (and eventually, Indian) Parables of Sendebar, will find it extensively discussed in the Regnier edition (2:119–22).
2. This fable is designated as number 6 of Book VII in those collections where the pair of preceding fables, “Le Héron” and “La Fille,” are presented each with a separate number rather than in tandem. (The disparity is, of course, continued throughout the succeeding fables of the same book.)
King Lion’s Court (VII, 6)
1. Regnier (2:130–31) devotes a lengthy and informative note to the trained monkey known as Fagotin, who performed outside the theater of a popular marionettist, Brioche, during the mid-seventeenth century. There is some question as to whether the name may have, in fact, been used by more than one performer.
2. One of La Fontaine’s lines in the original is most unusual in that it has no rhyme at all, clearly a rare and inexplicable oversight on his part, but one that gives heart to translators, who are, themselves, human also. (I have been careful not to let my humanity show through here, and have avoided reproducing La Fontaine’s error.) The present lapsus calami is discussed in detail by Regnier (2:131–32).
3. La Fontaine attributes to the Normans, known for their shrewdness, the special art of evasive reply.
The Vultures and the Pigeons (VII, 7)
1. The reference, as in “The Dove and the Ant,” is to the dove (see note 2 for II, 11 & 12). The dove is not only the sacred bird of Venus, according to Ovid, but also, as he tells us in the Metamorphoses (XIV, 597)—though without specifying the intermediary of a chariot—a means of her divine locomotion.
2. The allusion to Prometheus’s optimism, in the face of his persistent liver-plucking enemy’s seeming imminent demise, is too obvious to require explanation. Readers who do not understand it will find it amply elucidated in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound.
The Coach and the Fly (VII, 8)
1. Obviously, I take the liberty of offering here an interpretation of La Fontaine’s line that not everyone will agree with. It was the late Professor Ted Morris who, years ago, first suggested to me (and other then students) that, flies being flies and horses being horses, the only appropriate payment for the hero(ine) of this fable would, indeed, be the latters’ droppings. I’ve always thought he was right.
The Milkmaid and the Milk Jug (VII, 9)
1. In Rabelais’s (Gargantua, Book I, chapter 33), Picrochole harbors grandiose plans, like La Fontaine’s milkmaid, only to come to grief at the hands of Gargantua. No lesser folly is displayed by Pyrrhus in Boileau’s Epître I.
2. The Soufi (or Sophi) was formerly the title of the shah of Persia.
The Curé and the Corpse (VII, 10)
1. La Fontaine takes the name Jean Chouart from Rabelais (Pantagruel, Book II, chapter XXI).
2. If one can believe Mme de Sévigné in the letter to her daughter dated February 26, 1672, La Fontaine’s subject here was a true event. “Monsieur de Boufflers,” she relates, “killed a man after his death. He was in his coffin, in the hearse, being transported to a league’s distance from Boufflers for burial. His curé was by his side. The hearse tips, and the coffin slits the poor curé’s throat.” Less than two weeks later, on March 9, she sent her daughter the present fable dramatizing the bizarre event, commenting that “the fable is pleasant, but it’s nothing compared to the ones that will follow.” Apparently, she was keeping abreast of La Fontaine’s creativity.
The Man Who Runs after Fortune and the Man Who Waits for Her in His Bed (VII, 11)
1. La Fontaine’s allusion to a cabbage planter turned pope is rather obscure, according to Regnier (2:162), whose characteristically thorough research would certainly have explained it if anyone’s could.
2. My high school English teacher, Julius Finn—a gentleman and a gentle man—would be pleased to see that, years after he had tried to convince me of the utility of the shall/will distinction, exigencies of rhyme have convinced me that he was right.
3. The reference is to the pompous ceremonial levers (arisings) and couchers (retirings) of Louis XIV attended by favored members of the royal household and assorted dignitaries. The protocol of these events is explained in detail in La Grande Encyclopédie (31 vols. [Paris: La Société Anonyme de la Grande Encyclopédie, et al., 1886–1902], 13:29–30; 22:135).
4. Surat, north of Bombay, had been the first English foothold in India, since 1612, and eventually became one of the richest and most trafficked commercial centers in the Orient, visited especially by pilgrims to Mecca.
The Two Cocks (VII, 12)
1. The Trojan river, the Xanthos, also known as the Scamander, would figure in one of La Fontaine’s more cynical tales, “Le Fleuve Scamandre,” in his Contes et nouvelles en vers. (See La Fontaine’s Bawdy: Of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers,
252–59.) It was dubbed the Xanthos (golden red) by Homer, for reasons variously hypothesized by Pliny and others. As we are told in The Iliad, the gods referred to by La Fontaine were Venus and Mars, wounded by Diomedes (V, 330ff., 855ff.), and Mars, later struck down by Minerva (XXI, 385ff.).
The Ingratitude and Injustice of Men toward Fortune (VII, 13)
1. One of the three Fates, she cut the thread of life. See note 1 for V, 6.
The Fortune-tellers (VII, 14)
1. Though the basic subject of this fable is the ease with which one can be duped by appearances, one must see it too as an evidence of the tremendous vogue of occultism in the France of Louis XIV, part of a wide-ranging superstitious belief in the other-worldly, and in man’s ability to control it, by fair means or foul, reaching all the way to the Salem witch trials. Charlatanism, fortune-telling, potions, aphrodisiacs—all were the order of the day, as can be seen in a number of celebrated affairs found even among the ranks of the aristocracy. The most famous was perhaps the “Affaire des poisons,” which resulted in one Catherine Deshayes Montvoisin (“La Voisin”) being burned at the stake in 1680 as a poisoner and a sorceress.
The Cat, the Weasel, and the Little Rabbit (VII, 15)
1. La Fontaine borrows the name for his venal cat cum judge from Rabelais (Pantagruel, Book III, chapter 21), and the name Grippeminaud—which I render as “His Grimalkinship”—from the same author’s work (V, 11–15), in which the chat fourré (fur-bedecked cat) is taken as emblematic of the hypocritical and pompous legal profession of the day. For a wealth of detail see Regnier, 2:187–91.
An Animal in the Moon (VII, 17)
1. The two philosophers in question are, respectively, Democritus, fifth century BCE, distrustful of the senses, and either Heraclitus (576–480, bce) or possibly Democritus’s disciple Epicurus (241–70, bce), for both of whom the senses were of paramount importance.
2. La Fontaine is referring here and in the following lines to a poem by Samuel Butler (1612–80), “The Elephant in the Moon,” a satire directed against the Royal Society of London. The manuscript was probably known to him before its publication in 1676, thanks to various of his English friends.