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Literary Review
And the moral is
EVERYONE has a rough idea of what an Aesopian fable is, but who Aesop was and whether he was a real person remains a mystery. "By Zeus, I never heard that before!" exclaims the chorus-leader in Aristophanes' "Birds". "That's because you are ignorant and lacking in curiosity, and have failed to go over your Aesop", answers Pisthetaerus. The earliest collections of Aesopian fables which have come down to us, though, date from the first centuries of the Common Era. In the Middle Ages, collections proliferated, and Marie de France's 12th-century compilation was well known. La Fontaine is the last great exponent of the genre.
An Aesopian fable usually consists of a story about animals, either preceded or followed by a moral. Laura Gibbs has recently brought out a splendid translation with a very helpful introduction of the bulk of the fables in the Oxford World's Classics. Number 362 runs:
War broke out between all the beasts and the birds. When the ostrich was captured, she fooled both sides by being both a bird and a beast: she showed the birds her head and the beasts her feet. You cannot trust a two-faced associate.
As this demonstrates, the moral often seems to us to be tagged on and inappropriate, but it may be that we have simply lost the taste for proverbial literature, which was an important part of the cultural pool of nearly every civilisation from the Egyptian to the Hindu (animal fables in the Panchatantra are particularly close to those in the Aesopian collections), and is still very much present in so-called primitive cultures today. We go on reading Aesop, though, for the tale rather than the moral. The example quoted is not a very rich or developed one, but we read it with pleasure, I think, because it takes us into the world of animals with the kind of freshness and innocence which is characteristic of what the great German literary theorist André Jolles called simple forms. In the better-known fables, speech is given to the animals, and the narratives in which they figure are full of tension and humour.
The Bible, in keeping with other ancient Near Eastern cultures, includes a book of proverbs, and in the Book of Kings we read of the parable of the trees who gathered to elect a king — a natural rather than an animal fable. Towards the end of the 12th Century, a French Jew, Rabbi Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan, probably drawing on Marie de France, produced his own versions, a remarkable example of the way in which Hebrew literature has renewed itself down the centuries by adapting aspects of the host literatures to its own ends (later famous examples include Chaim Bialik's pioneering combination of Russian Modernism and biblical poetry, and Yaakov Shabtai's use of Proust and Faulkner to inject new life into the Israeli novel). Rabbi Berechiah's versions tend to be longer than the traditional ones, with more dialogue between the animals, couched in a language drawn from the Bible, and they are characterised by the addition of some moralising verses after the prose moral or lesson. Thus the well-known tale of the lazy cicada and the industrious ant concludes:
The parable is for a man too slothful to find provision for his house; will others then heed his cry? In the summer he slumbers and sleeps. Such a man is accounted guilty. And I plied my poesy and said:
Be diligent, my son; cross road and city in the heat of day;
Gather for the winter, garment and steed, ox and sheep,
But in all innocence. Pierce the fool's right eye,
Muzzle his mouth, break his teeth.
Moses Hadas's lively translation, which uses the Authorised Version to bring out the biblical echoes, was the last work this great Jewish classicist published before his death in 1967. One could wish that he had included notes and a commentary, but that was not to be. It is re-issued in a charming paperback by the small American publisher, David Godine, whose books are always a joy to handle.
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GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI
Fables of a Jewish Aesop: From the Fox Fables of Berechiah ha-Nakdan, translated by Moses Hadas, Boston, MA: Godine/Nonpareil, paperback, p.232, £16.95. 1 56792 131 0
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