Aesop's Fables: A New Translation - Robin Waterfield - ★★★

AUTHOR: Robin Waterfield, Aesop

GENRE: Fables

PUBLICATION DATE: October 1, 2024

RATING: 3 stars.

In a Nutshell: A compilation of 400 of Aesop's fables, with a scholarly introduction to the same by the author. Interesting to classic fable readers but gets repetitive if you read it at a go.

One of the first books in my life was a tiny little paperback collection of Aesop's Fables purchased from the school book fair. I had read my copy so many times during my childhood that it soon lost its binding cover. Seeing this collection was a journey into nostalgia land, the time of simple stories with important-sounding morals.

The first edition of Aesop’s fables in English was printed in as early as 1484! Aesop was a non-Greek slave who lived somewhere in Greece in the mid-6th century. It is impossible to know if he indeed was the author of all the fables attributed to him. As the introductory note says, “Just as authorship of numerous medical treatises that he certainly never wrote was attributed to Hippocrates, so any and all fables became ascribed to Aesop; the Greeks had a habit of doing this kind of thing.” Either way, Aesop was the pioneer responsible for making the fable widely known.

I'm sure all of us have read/heard at least a few of Aesop's stories. We might not know that he was the person behind the tales, but we do know the content. The Hare and the Tortoise, The Thirsty Crow, The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse, Who Will Bell the Cat, The Ant and the Grasshopper, The Lion and the Mouse... All these common childhood tales come from Aesop’s collection. He is said to have narrated/collected about 700 fables. 400 of those stories are in this book.

The tagline - “A New Translation” – is used because the author is a translator as well, and he has opted for a fresh translation of the fables from the original language, aiming for close fidelity to the native texts with readable, modern English.

The book begins with a detailed note by the author, introducing to us a brief history of Aesop's times, his life (or more accurately, modern guesstimates about his life), and his stories. It also contains a rather extensive and complicated analysis of the origin, purpose, and structure of fables, including why animals are commonly protagonists of fables. The author is a literary scholar and his writing is clearly aimed at literary-minded adult readers. While I started reading this section with interest, the length and the textbook-style writing soon made it somewhat tedious. But the author himself says, readers are free to skip the notes and jump straight to the fables.

The stories themselves are good, if you know what to expect from Aesop: pithy writing, allegorical content, life lessons. A massive chunk of the stories (306 out of 400, about 70% of the book) contains animal fables. The rest have human and godly characters in the lead.

The 400 fables are divided into sections based not on theme but on the main character. While I initially thought this to be a good organising method, I soon realised that this created much saturation while reading, especially when the section was about one specific animal such as fox or lion rather than a more generic “Animals at Work” or “Larger Mammals.” Reading 20 stories in a row about a wolf, for instance, means that the stories soon blend into each other.

A majority of the fables have an appended moral written in italics. I'm slightly unsure if the moral was penned by Aesop himself or added by the author because the differing tone and the breaking of the fourth wall was a bit confusing. Some of the morals left me stumped; no way I would have guessed THAT as the moral of the story. Unfortunately, many of the morals sounded the same after a point. This made the reading experience somewhat boring. It’s not like I was expecting 400 morals from 400 stories, but getting the same message time and again felt highly redundant.

Some of the stories *might* work as bedtime reads for children, but do be careful about which one you pick for such readalouds. Not all the tales are meant for children’s ears. (I was stunned to learn that Aesop’s stories were not originally written for children, and some tales even covered themes such as rape or incest.)

All in all, this didn’t exactly go as I had planned. Maybe some books are best left in childhood memories. But I can’t deny the effort put into this modern translation that clearly stays true to the soul of the original fables.

Recommended to those interested in fables and their history or in allegorical stories. Better if read at random than cover to cover.

My thanks to Basic Books for providing the DRC of “Aesop's Fables: A New Translation” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.