Translator's Note to the Fables of Félix María Samaniego

Bequeathed from classical antiquity and of probable non-Western origin, the fable genre flourished during both the Spanish Enlightenment and Romanticism. Tomás de Iriarte (1750-1791), Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch (1806-1880), Miguel Augustín Príncipe (1811-1866), and Ramón de Campoamor (1817-1901) all tried their hand at the form. Félix María Samaniego (1745-1801), Iriarte's arch-rival, imbued his work with the values of his day, borrowing extensively from Jean de La Fontaine, the Roman Phaedrus, and the Englishman John Gay. Contemporary readers, therefore, may find Samaniego's fables most enjoyable for the ways in which they strive but fail to address humankind's putatively universal experience. Read as cultural artifacts, they speak most directly to neo-classical ideals of art, government, justice, freedom, and individual perfectionism.

Amid atheistic currents, a conventionally god-centered cosmos can rule the day, invoking the fatalism on view in "The Hapless Ass." The translations' use of analogical meter and their preservation of rhyme quaintly recall the 18th-century dictum that art should "delight while instructing." "The Stag at the Spring" (not included here) similarly reflects the age 's prevailing aesthetic: "The greatest beauty lies in usefulness." For a cold-eye view of monarchy, "The Frogs Who Asked for a King" serves nicely, though human progressivism through upright personal comportment takes up, well, the lion's share of the genre's morals. "Que nous apprennent toutes ses fables?" the (somewhat) freethinking Voltaire asks. "Qu'il faut être juste." Maybe. Works like "The Eagle and the Beetle" do provide broadly helpful suggestions for behavior, though self-improvement on occasion yields to greater lessons involving self-knowledge, as both "The Lioness and the Bear" and "The Saddlebag" attest. Often, though, a tone of sheer old-fashioned superiority prevails, undercutting didactic intent. And how many slaughtered animals will it take to convince us these poems are not children's fare? Consider Samaniego's fables as emblematic in many ways of the poetry and thought of the Spanish Ilustración.