The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine
By Robert Paquin, Ph.D.,
literary and film translator, Canada
www.jarp.ca
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Translated by Norman Shapiro
 The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine,
translated by Norman Shapiro, Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2007.
Reading Jean de La Fontaine's fables is
a double pleasure. These short moralistic narrative poems
are not only witty, but they also evince a wonderful (I
was going to say "fabulous") poetic skill. And
reading Norman Shapiro's translation doubles the pleasure
one more time.
Unlike Shapiro's translation of French Renaissance
poets previously reviewed here (see <http://accurapid.com/journal/39poetry.htm>),
these fables are not published in a bilingual edition. They
are not meant to be read line by line as a language lesson.
The translator adapts and distances himself from the French,
and his translation doesn't always correspond word for word
or even line for line to the French. What it does follow
is the intent of the author as it tries to reproduce for
the English reader the reading experience of the native
French reader savoring La Fontaine's fables.
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These
short moralistic narrative poems are not only witty,
but they also evince a wonderful poetic skill.
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La Fontaine did not invent the fable as a genre.
He had models—the legendary Greek Aesop and his imitators,
of course, but also the Romans Phaedrus and Horace, and a
host of other Latin writers as well as oriental fabulists
such as Brahmin Bidpai, in translation of course. La Fontaine
also had contemporaries who wrote fables, but what distinguishes
him is that he wrote his in verse. Thanks to him, the fable
became a poetic genre, with rhyme and rhythm, even if La Fontaine's
fables retain some of the freedom of prose in their use of
metrics. The lines of varying lengths create a rhythm that
has less of a monotonous chanting quality and more of the
irregularities of natural speech.
What is remarkable here is that Shapiro manages to recreate
this in English. In his translation the lines vary in length
mimicking oral speech while retaining rhythm and rhyme and
thus creating surprise and enjoyment in reading. In his
introduction to the book, John Hollander speaks very highly
of the translator's talent, illustrating his praise with
many examples. Let's just look at the first fable, the well
known La cigale et la fourmi/The Cricket and the Ant
(p. 5):
The cricket, having sung her song
All summer long,
Found—when the winter winds blew free—
Her cupboard bare as bare could be;
Nothing to greet her hungering eye:
No merest crumb of worm or fly...
Now the French:
La cigale, ayant chanté
Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue.
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau...
The translation is not literal, it doesn't
translate the words, it translates the meaning. And the
rhyme is part of the meaning. It's also part of the pleasure.
Shapiro's fables work as poems on their own. The poems read
as if they were original creations and not translations,
so that the reader who doesn't understand French and has
never read La Fontaine may experience the same pleasure
as the French reader. But what about somebody like myself
who can read both French and English? Well the pleasure
is doubled, since I get to appreciate not only the wit and
poetic talent of the author, but also the intelligence and
craft of the translator who manages to recreate this in
English. Here's another example taken this time from The
Miller, His Son, and the Ass (p. 55). You will see how
the overall meaning is the same though the information given
in one line may occur in a different line.
... But listen to a story first, I pray.
... J'ai lu dans quelque endroit qu'un meunier et son fils,
A miller and his son, one market day,
L'un vieillard, l'autre enfant, non pas des plus petits,
Went off to sell their ass; one of them, old—
Mais garçon de quinze ans, si j'ai bonne mémoire,
The father, that is, if you need be told—
Allaient vendre leur âne un certain jour de foire.
The other, if my memory serves, a young
Afin qu'il fût plus frais et de meilleur débit,
Lad of some fifteen years. Betwixt them hung
On lui lia les pieds, on vous le suspendit;
The ass, suspended, hooves together bound.
Puis cet homme et son fils le portent comme un lustre :
For thus, they thought, he was sure to be found
Pauvres gens, idiots, couple ignorant et rustre.
Fresh and in finest fettle. As the pair
Carry him, chandelier-like, to the fair...
This example illustrates how the translation
is an adaptation from the French, different yet serving
the same purpose. The aim being to entertain while educating,
to provide pleasure while encouraging the reader to reflect.
Shapiro's avowed mission is to allow readers
who can't read French to enjoy these fables and learn from
them. They teach simple wisdom and common sense. Beware
of flatterers, don't be a spendthrift, the type of advice
my mother used to give me as a child. But one also finds
social judgments based on the observation of "the way
of the world" at court and elsewhere. And even if in
his preface Shapiro himself declares, "though I myself
have translated many hundreds of fables over the years,
despite all their edifying content I am still as flawed
a human being as I was when I began" (p. xvii), the
reader's (and the translator's) awareness of his own shortcomings
must surely contribute to the improvement of his character.
Can one ask for more?
No wonder many aphorisms contained in La
Fontaine have become common sayings or proverbs in French
and they are often quoted as pearls of wisdom without reference
to the fables. As Shapiro points out in the notes to his
translation, "Many La Fontaine morals with a proverbial
ring to them were, in fact, [...] introduced by him into
the language" (p. 422). Here is a list of such formulas
excerpted from La Fontaine's fables, along with Shapiro's
English translation:
- Tout flatteur vit aux dépens
de celui qui l'écoute—Flatterers thrive
on fools' credulity.
- Rien ne sert de courir, il faut partir
à point—To win the race you needn't run;
just start on time.
- Je plie et ne rompt pas—I never
break; I merely bend,
- Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera—Heaven
helps those who help themselves.
- Tel est pris qui croyait prendre—Lest
we be hoist upon our own petard.
- La raison du plus fort est toujours
la meilleure—The strongest argue best, and always
win.
Friends to whom I showed this English translation
of La Fontaine's fables were all properly impressed by the
talent of the translator, but often concluded by saying,
"but I prefer La Fontaine's formulations." Of
course, and Shapiro does not claim to be Jean de La Fontaine,
but his translator. The challenge here is to reproduce the
concision of the formula while respecting rhythm and rhyme.
The aim is to translate the fable, while keeping as much
as possible of its poetry.
On first reading, I wondered about Shapiro's
occasional use of a French word or expression which he italicises.
Why use French words? As a professional translator and a
native French-speaker living in Canada where we feel constantly
"threatened" by the gratuitous introduction of
English in our vocabulary, I'm always wary of lexical borrowings.
Why did Shapiro use words from a different language when
there are English words with the same meaning. The only
reason I could think of at first was that the translator
was stuck for a rhyme and found this way out. Witness Death
and the Wretched Man (p. 19), where you find the two
following lines:
...I want no part of you! Be off!
It was Maecenas—something of a philosophe...
Or again in The Fox and the Stork (p.
22), where
...Quick to accept, replies: "Merci
beaucoup!"
rhymes with
...No need for tra-la-la with friends like
you.
Shapiro doesn't do this only with French
though. On the next page, in The Child and the Schoolmaster
(p. 23), we find
..."Help!" yelps the child. "I'm
dead!" The magister,
Deciding that a proper remonstration
Is what the urchin needs, stops then and there...
Ah, but here the Latin word magister
is the exact word which La Fontaine uses in his fable, except
that Shapiro uses it for a rhyme, whereas La Fontaine puts
it at the beginning of the line. So, my objection to the
translator's use of French or foreign words didn't hold
in this case. Okay, what about The Eagle and the Dung
Beetle (p.36), where you read the line "My neighbor,
my compère, my guest"? This corresponds
in La Fontaine to the following line:
C'est mon voisin. C'est mon compère.
A line which rhymes three lines down with:
L'étourdit, l'oblige à se
taire.
Finally I had to admit that Shapiro knew
what he was doing. And mostly he was having fun. He plays
with the words, and wants us to join in the game. His use
of non-English words is a wink at the reader, a smile, a
reminder that the fables may work very well in English thanks
to his command of the art of translation and prosody, but
they are in essence French and they were originally created
by Jean de La Fontaine in the 17th century.
The fable Death and the Wretched Man
quoted above was written in imitation of another fable called
Death and the Woodsman, which La Fontaine claims
to have adapted from Aesop. In his first book of fables
published in 1668, the two are printed together as numbers
15 and 16, with a short explanation by the author in which
he explains: "Never are we able to surpass the Ancients:
they leave us only the glory of following them closely."
(p. 20) I wonder if Norman Shapiro, as he was translating
that passage, thought of applying it to himself. As far
as I'm concerned, the glory and the talent of Jean de La
Fontaine were certainly well served in this translation
of the fables.
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