Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95)
Fables (1668–94)
(selected and) translated by James Michie (1979)

This was what I’m calling “roll 34” in my Western Canon sweepstakes: 482, which is the line for Jean de La Fontaine. Only one item under his name: Fables.

La Fontaine’s verse is prized for its elegance and piquancy in the original language; his fables have been classroom French examples for centuries. Well that sounds splendid but I don’t speak French. After doing a bit of comparison shopping for translations I settled on the Penguin selection seen above.

Many of the fables are just retellings from Aesop; others come from Indian sources. Later in his output La Fontaine ventured more of his own invented fables, which tend to be wordier and more involved. (That is, if I was correct in my sense of which were which.)

For the old chestnuts, the charm of the style would seem to be the main attraction here; his audience already knew the fables themselves as well as we do. La Fontaine retells these little animal stories in a style that is both precious and sardonic, chatting cheerfully and smirking cynically in equal measure. The ideal, it seems, is to be simultaneously free and controlled, breezy refinement. How very seventeenth-century-French, non? The verse follows a similar muse: the schemes of rhyme and meter are generally irregular, whimsical, improvisational, but the element of rhythm is always kept in play. It has sort of a jazzy formal spirit.

That sounds like it might be pretty good, and sure, in many ways it was pretty good, but I’ll be frank with you: my desire to write anything about this runs very shallow. I think that’s because the moral content, which is after all the point, felt neither enriching nor amusing. After each one I had a sense of having been a bit scolded, rapped with a ruler, and felt myself forced to contend with the lesson. E.g. “It’s best for people only to associate with their equals.” Gee, I don’t know, is that really good advice? Was it good advice then? How mean-spirited is this? Do I agree with it even a little? Am I worried about it? How much politico-historical thinking do I need to do to neutralize the discomfort I feel? Why does this 300-year-old smirk feel so personal?

That sort of agonizing is inevitable for me when faced with self-assured criticism and advice. Criticism and advice always unnerves me because it is the knife-edge across which kindness ceases to be kindness. And this book is chock full of it.

Eventually, after finally reaching the end of my wrangle with whatever “oh snap!” La Fontaine had just laid down, I would feel drained. I had to go through that just to read this damn cute animal story? I had a pretty strong hunch that La Fontaine didn’t actually care about these morals as much as he was letting on, nor did his readers; that they all lived in a time when worldly cynicism and metaphors to match were in and that all this finger-wagging was just a posture. Well, I really dislike that posture. Moralizing gives me the willies and moralizing just as a way to be marvelous is even worse.

Like, I don’t even feel very comfortable with that grasshopper (cicada, here) and that ant. When the ant refuses to take pity on the grasshopper because it’s your own damn fault, don’t let the door hit you on the way out to FREEZE TO DEATH, the lesson, it would seem, is not just that one should pull one’s own weight, nor even that one can reap only what one has had the foresight to sow (like in the much more palatable “who will help me bake the bread” story), but, more disturbingly, that your neighbor (as well as every consenting teller and hearer of this fable) is self-righteous to the point of bloodthirst. Forget what Jesus said, everybody really knows that charity is only for the blameless, ha ha ha. And blame after all is very easy to mete out. That stuff’s hard enough for me to take hearing it in public debate these days; somehow it feels even more insidious coming out of a witty old Frenchman talking about some très charmant bugs.

I went through a lot of “who says??” while reading this, which ate up much of the charm. You might tell me, “The point should have been the charming poetry, not the morals! Don’t worry so much about them.” But that’s like telling me to enjoy hard-right-wing political cartoons because “Forget the politics, they’re such delightful cartoons!” I don’t know that they are that. I don’t know that the two are separable.

Admittedly, a great many of the fables had a softer touch and were directed at the softer targets of vanity and pretension. That I found easier to take. I was, in fact, occasionally amused. I did appreciate the breeze of the style. This has all been just to say that I was never fully delighted, because my hackles were always a bit up.

The translations seemed to me good; better than the others I’d sampled. I guess you’ll want to try one. Here’s the one I mentioned earlier. Book V, Fable II: THE CLAY POT AND THE IRON POT.

Said the iron to the clay pot:
‘Let’s see the world together.’
‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather not,’
Said the other. ‘I’m not sure whether
I would be wise to forsake
My corner of the ingle —
After all, it would only take
The slightest shock, one single
Accident to shatter
My body irrevocably.
But for you who are made of matter
Tougher than mine, I can see
No reason to stay inside.’
‘But I’ll be your bodyguard,’
The iron pot replied.
‘If we happen to meet some hard
Impediment on our way
I’ll stand between you and harm
As a buffer.’ The pot of clay
Was persuaded. Arm in arm,
Brother escorting brother,
As best they could they set off
Six-leggedly, knocking each other
At the least stumble or cough.
The clay pot was bound to suffer.
Within a hundred yards
His bodyguard and buffer
Had smashed him into shards.
He had only himself to blame.

In life we observe the same.
One should only associate
With equals. He who does not
Is sure to suffer the fate
Of the vulnerable pot.

Who says who says who says??

I had also checked out of the library a bilingual edition of the complete fables, with slightly less attractive but perfectly passable translations, and intended to supplement the short Penguin volume with a trip through this giant hardcover volume. But as I neared the end of my first round, a rare sense of agency came over me and, in a bid to reduce the amount of masochism in my life, I granted myself leave to declare this assignment finished once I got to the end of the Penguin selections. I had, after all, read an entire book of La Fontaine’s fables. The gods, I thought, would not be angry.

Well, I guess they were, because when I went to find out my next selection the randomizer gave me an unambiguous reprimand. With a nasty twinkle in its eye, La Fontaine style. A little too ironic.

In that same spirit of non-masochism I am going to end this entry here. There is, after all, more to come.