The Complete Fables of La Fontaine: A New Translation in Verse
In this wonderful, vigorously contemporary translation, Craig Hill has captured the liveliness, satiric wit, and poetic beauty that made Jean de la Fontaine famous during his lifetime and his Fables\ celebrated as a masterwork of world literature ever since. Despite la Fontaine’s deceptively modest claim that all he intended was to put the moral tales of Aesop and other ancient fabulists into poetry for the pleasure of Louis XIV’s young son, his real accomplishment, as later generations have...
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A new, rhymed translation of one of the great works of world literature. In this wonderful, vigorously contemporary translation, Craig Hill has captured the liveliness, satiric wit, and poetic beauty that made Jean de La Fontaine famous during his lifetime and his Fables celebrated as a masterwork of world literature ever since. Despite La Fontaine's deceptively modest claim that all he intended was to put the moral tales of Aesop and other ancient fabulists into poetry for the pleasure of Louis XIV s young son, his real accomplishment, as later generations have understood, was holding a mirror up to the society of his day and in the process fashioning a work that has become a classic. Borrowing from a variety of sources, La Fontaine gave the hitherto mute animals in ancient fables the power of speech. Putting his characters on stage and endowing them with irresistibly witty dialogue, he portrayed with great humor the flaws and pretensions that still dog us. Backstabbing politicians, brainless nincompoops, charlatans, clueless heads of state, egomaniacs, empty-headed celebrities, foolish investors, gluttons, liars, penny pinchers, self-important blowhards, and wastrels the targets of the poet s pen were legion and remain so today. Craig Hill has given us a rare treat: both the irreverent spirit and the vivid poetry that have made La Fontaine s fables beloved through the ages, continuing to amuse and inspire centuries after they first appeared in print. Making this volume even more of a delight are a dozen scintillating illustrations by Edward Sorel.The Barnes & Noble ReviewThanks to Craig Hill, French-less readers of La Fontaine's classic fables now have a version worthy of the original. Hill matches wits with the Frenchman's clever rhymes and recreates his varied meters in verses that sound crisp and contemporary, yet lose none of their historical context. La Fontaine's moral tales of gods, men, and beasts go beyond their origins in Aesop and Phaedrus. For one thing, he gives his animals voices, and the result is certainly no peaceable kingdom but a world of sneaky foxes, clever ants, lying frogs, and proud lions. His humans fare no better: the drunks and charlatans, the scoundrels and flatterers all get their comeuppance. La Fontaine (1621-95) spares no one in his satiric view. Affairs of state figure prominently in fables on the delusions of empire; the limits of party loyalties; the need to know your enemies; and the obligations of royalty -- after all, "a crown fits very few," as an antic monkey learns. Readers will recognize some of Aesop's chestnuts: the tortoise and the hare, the hen that laid golden eggs, and the sun and the north wind. But even here La Fontaine adds his sneaky comments on contemporary France in the age of Louis XIV. A fable, the poet tells us, contains "hidden truths," not "naked morals," and while La Fontaine's cynical verses affirm the timeless virtues -- thrift, honesty, hard work -- his tales thrive on the foibles of the lazy, the lying, and the spendthrift. Hill's slangy verses add some contemporary notes of their own -- a "Social Register" here, a "Bronx cheer" there. But he follows with La Fontaine the Horatian poetic ideal -- to instruct and delight. And along the way, Hill gives us in this translation of all 12 books, a Fables for our time. --Thomas DePietro
