Translator's Notes
by Craig Hill

Translating La Fontaine's Fables was something I began doing a long time ago, impulsively, in a sense accidentally. I started almost fifty years ago when the poet Marianne Moore published her complete translation of La Fontaine's great masterwork, Fables, in 1953. I was then working for a Boston publisher and attempting to write poetry of my own, when I happened to read some of Moore's translations that appeared in various magazines. I was appalled at how badly they read. I had never heard of La Fontaine and his fables, but I could not believe that these clumsy, eccentric poems in English could be good translations of what were said to be great poems in their original language. It seemed to me that Moore's translations simply didn't have the air of masterpieces about them. Her versions of the poems seemed labored, as her own poems never were.

As I read Moore's translations of the French originals I recognized that many of La Fontaine's fables were in turn versions of those of Aesop, familiar to almost everyone from childhood. Admittedly with a degree of hubris— my knowledge of French was meager— and primarily for my own amusement; I began trying my own hand at translating a few fables. I thought it would be easy— they were only Aesop, after all. However I soon discovered that simplicity is not easy to achieve. Humor tends to fall flat in translation, as does wit. It is easy to write in meter and rhyme, but to convey the famous music of the original French is hardly an easy task, in fact largely impossible. The effort proved both extremely difficult and permanently fascinating.

Over the years as I went on with my life— I left publishing, essentially stopped writing poetry and went into architecture and, later, still other fields of endeavor— I kept on translating fables on the side and sometimes reading them for the amusement of appreciative friends. By the time I met Gus Kayafas, the owner of Palm Press, in 1997, I had by then accumulated over 100 translations. We discovered that we both knew and greatly admired the work of the artist Andrew Stevovich. When I told Gus about my translations of La Fontaine I said that if they were ever to be published, I thought Stevovich would be the ideal illustrator. He agreed. Although Palm Press was and is primarily a publisher of great photography, Gus proposed that Palm Press would bring out a fine, limited edition of a selection of my translations if Stevovich would agree to illustrate it. When he did so, a collaborative effort began that was to go on for three years, until July, 2001, when Beasts and Citizens was at last published.

I hope that my translations in Beasts and Citizens will eventually help to dispel the all too common impression that La Fontaine's fables are merely inspired children's literature. Though sometimes assuming the rather deadpan guise— or disguise— of nursery rhyme simplicity, the poet's great work casts a wide net around matters of perennial human concern that are political, social and moral. Besides that, they are often funny.

I see La Fontaine as a gadfly, an irritatingly irreverent poet whose fables stung at establishment mores in an age of absolute monarchy, and I strongly believe that his work continues to have much the same pertinence in an age of consumerism and terrorism. For the follies, the dangerous pretensions and cruelties of former ages are with us yet. In my translations, I have attempted both to stay true to the poetic forms of the originals and to convey in modern-day English some measure of the ironic wit and verbal playfulness that make La Fontaine's fables one of the enduring treasures of world literature.

I am considering publishing all of my translations of the fables on the Internet by subscription. While I can't promise to answer all comments and queries personally, I would like hearing from people to see if there may be enough interest to proceed with my idea.