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Translator’s Preface Iam a self-confessed La Fontaine addict. Unlike other addictions, this one is quite harmless. It even has an upside. My translations can help introduce those with limited or no French to the genius of the genial fabulist; and even, perhaps—though doubtful—improve the behavior of a reader or two. (“Doubtful,” because, 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. And anyway, it is unlikely that La Fontaine’s intent for his little moral tales was truly as didactic as his first six books would have us believe. Their artistry far transcends their morality.) But it has a definite downside too, by definition. La Fontaine’s oeuvre, after all, like any author’s, is finite. When, in 1988, I brought out my collection Fifty Fables of La Fontaine, even though I had no conscious intention at the time of doing another, the possibility of continuing to feed my happy addiction was always there. It surfaced with Fifty More Fables in 1998; and again, with Once Again, La Fontaine, a couple of years later. After each backsliding, though, I dutifully resolved that I would reform. So much for resolutions. I went on, in my all-too-human frailty, to complete the remaining fourscore a couple of years ago, blithely ignoring the fact that the supply would thereby dry up. (And, to the best of my knowledge, there are no treatment centers to deal with La Fontaine addiction.) There are, to be sure, other competent, attractive, even thoroughly engaging French fable writers—scores and scores of them, in fact, over the centuries. And I have dealt with many. But there is only one La Fontaine. I can, of course, hope that researchers may eventually discover a trove of as yet unknown La Fontaine fables. But even that xvii unlikely serendipity would be only a temporary solution at best. And so my “collaboration” with him, while an ongoing joy, is tempered by the knowledge that it now exists in retrospect and not in anticipation. I am both enriched by the past and saddened by its finality. That confessed, what I present here is the integral fruit of that benignly compelling collaboration with this dean of French fabulists: translations —versions? re-creations?—of his complete Fables, in the sweep of their twelve books extending over his entire literary life, from 1668 to 1694; developing from the child-friendly and uncomplicated minidramas of the earliest, through narratives of greater philosophical and literary complexity—hardly children’s fare; and even unto the lengthy but never ponderous works in the late books. Some of these latter are not, in fact, “fables” at all, but rather contes—tales in the style of his often licentious Contes et nouvelles en vers. But who am I to argue? Included with the fables since their first publication (by either La Fontaine or his publisher), they are traditionally part of the corpus; and for the sake of truth in advertising I include them in the announced completeness of the present collection. I hope readers will be as undaunted by “Philemon and Baucis,” “The Daughters of Mineas,” and the several others, as by “Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché . . .” and his quite different ilk, which are much more readily committed to the memory of generations of French school children. They will be rewarded with a view of La Fontaine’s narrative talent that literary histories often fail to mention but that shows many of the same qualities that make him unique. A few words are in order concerning my own philosophy as a translator , especially of verse, and, more especially, of La Fontaine’s. Without embarking on a screed-like discussion of the “rhyme-and-meter versus free-verse” controversy between “formalists” and “literalists,” which will never lose steam among Translation Studies adepts, I would say only that for me—and individual taste is crucial here—to render formal (i.e., rhymed and metered) verse into anything but similar English is tantamount to artistic sacrilege. If the “message” is all the reader wants, a prose (or prosy) rendition is fine. The Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare, I might point out hyperbolically, does serve a valuable purpose, after all. But the message is only part of a poet’s artifact. If he or she clothes it in rhymed and metered verse, to do less is to betray...

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