Aesop's Fables with a Life of Aesop (review)

THE COMPAKATIST with the playful articulation of the relations between the secular and the sacred. James S. Hans Wake Forest University JOHN E. KELLER and L. CLARK KEATING, trans, and introd. Aesop's Fables with a Life of Aesop. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1993. 239 pp. This is the first translation into EngUsh ofthe Spanish coUection of Aesopic Fables, La vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas hystoriadas, printed in Saragossa, Spain in 1489. Although this is not the earUest Spanish version ofAesop's Fables (an incomplete edition was printed in 1482 in Saragossa and another version in Spanish appeared in Toulouse in 1488), the 1489 edition is the first complete version to be printed in Spain with all the woodcuts previously employed in German editions of Aesop. In fact, the printer of the 1489 Spanish edition was a German, Jan Hurus. However, as KeUer and Keating observe in the introduction to their translation, the Spanish Ysopet is not a translation from the German Aesop but was adapted directly from the Latin version of d'Arezzo, the best known and most comprehensive edition of the fables known in Western Europe in the fifteenth century. Another Spanish connection with d'Arezzo's Latin translation is the fact that the work was dedicated to Cardinal Antonio Cerda of MaUorca. D'Arezzo's edition was first translated into Spanish in the 1460s at the request of the Viceroy of Cataluña, Enrique, cousin to Ferdinand of Aragon, but the Spanish translation was not printed until the 1480s when printing reached Spain. Printed German translations of D'Arrezzo had appeared in Ulm and Augsburg between 1474 and 1483 and were the immediate sources for the woodcuts which Alústrate the 1489 Ysopet. Keller and Keating point out that the corpus of stories known as Aesop's Fables had been known in Spain for centuries before the printing of the Ysopet. Aesopic tales appear in thirteenth-century Spanish translations ofArabic tales (Calila e Digna, for example), in Juan Ruiz's Book of Good Love, and in Juan Manuel's Book of Count Lucanor, the last two examples both from the fourteenth century. Furthermore, even though there are no extant manuscripts of the supposed sixth-century B.C. Greek known as Aesop, there was a long history of references to Aesop's tales in writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers who were weU known, first in the thriving Greek colonies in the Iberian Peninsula, and later in the important Roman colony of Hispania. KeUer and Keating faithfuUy foUow the organization of the Spanish Ysopet, which opens with the long (approximately 50 printed pages), prenoveUstic "Life of Aesop." The fables foUow and are arranged in eight sections caUed "books" or "parts." Books I through IV each contain 24 Vol. 19 (1995): 157 BOOK NOTES fables. Book V, entitled "Fabulas extravagantes" (rendered by the translators as "Fanciful Fables of Aesop"), is composed of fables largely derived from the French fabliaux and folkloric sources. Book VI, "The Fables of Remitius" is a translation of 17 fables of Rinuccio d'Arezzo. Book VII, "The Fables of Avianus," contains 27 fables attributed to Avianus who Uved between the second and fifth centuries. Book VIII, "The CoUected Fables ofAlfonso, of Poggio, and of Others," contains 22 fables. The Alfonso of this section is well known to students of Spanish literature as Petrus Alfonsus, the converted Jew from Aragon who, in the twelfth century, penned the Disciplina Clericalis or Scholar's Guide. The Poggio mentioned in this section is Poggio Bracciolini, author of a popular fifteenth-century fable anthology. Thus the Spanish compüer of the Ysopet strove to pubüsh a complete compendium offables considered, directly or indirectly, to be part of the Aesopic tradition as this corpus was known in fifteenth-century Europe. Keller and Keating provide a very lively and readable translation from the Old Spanish. This version in EngUsh will prove useful to scholars of the fable and medieval brief narrative as well as those interested in early book art and woodcuts. The woodcuts from the 1489 edition are very clearly reproduced in this volume and add a delightful dimension to the narratives. This book wül likewise...