Customer Reviews

Fifty More Fables of La Fontaine

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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Shapiro's verse translations are incredible. The same person who has just done the most faithful and most poetic rendering of Baudelaire has no less flawlessly met the very different demands of La Fontaine, with all the latter's elegance (and, when called for, inelegance) of tone, stylistic devices, phlosophical depth, and playful humor. His translations lose nothing of the originals. One even feels that the spirit and voice of La Fontaine are speaking here. A truly remarkable achievement. Bravo!

It is not clear to me whether Shapiro is more poet, translator or scholar, but he is certainly all three. The range of his colorful lexicon, the beat of his hexameters and pentameters strike me as nothing short of phenomenal, making of him the most worthy of translators of La Fontaine.

La Fontaine has never fared better in English than in Shapiro's translations. To say more is to gild the lily.

Shapiro is most successful with the fables that deviate least from Greco-Roman objectivity, linear organization, and insistence on eternally recurring traits. But when his source texts are most lafontainian - skeptical or epicurean in viewpoint, dense, resonant, and conflictual in method, as well as radically creative with genre norms, Shapiro corrects the French poet's eclecticism by skillful massaging, tweaking, and pruning. The result is an undeniably delicious read - fluent, lively, and transparent - but like Fifty Fables of La Fontaine, Fifty More is less a translation than a thorough-going and backward-looking adaptation, as remote in profile from the original as La Fontaine's fables are from their classical models.

Shapiro is most successful with the fables that deviate least from Greco-Roman objectivity, linear organization, and insistence on eternally recurring traits. But when his source texts are most lafontainian - skeptical or epicurean in viewpoint, dense, resonant, and conflictual in method, as well as radically creative with genre norms, Shapiro corrects the French poet's eclecticism by skillful massaging, tweaking, and pruning. The result is an undeniably delicious read - fluent, lively, and transparent - but like Fifty Fables of La Fontaine, Fifty More is less a translation than a thorough-going and backward-looking adaptation, as remote in profile from the original as La Fontaine's fables are from their classical models.

La Fontaine's fables look good. Where do I get more of La Fontaine's fables in French? (en francais?) greggtho@yahoo.com