Favorite Aesop's Fables

I've been blogging public domain versions of Aesop in English here at this blog, and it is still my intention to produce a big (VERY BIG) anthology of public domain Aesop. Over the past few months, however, thanks to many conversations about Aesop with Hector Tapia, I've decided that I also want to do another kind of Aesop anthology: Favorite Aesop's Fables, where I will be retelling the fables in my own way, hoping to recover what I consider to be the "real" Aesop, the oral Aesop, in which the fables are very short and end with a witty or wise comment from a character in the story, kind of like the punchline to a joke. 

When I wrote my dissertation on Aesop's fables (25 years ago! eeeek!), I coined the term "endomythium" (inside-the-story) to refer to this statement by a character in the fable which, in my opinion, marks the end of the fable, a formulaic conclusion that lets the audience know the story is done. In my opinion, this was the signature feature of Aesop's fables in their oral form. When they were written down and then became a literary genre in their own right, some fables retained this feature, but not all of them. Instead, the writers of fables more and more imposed their own formulaic structure, adding an authorial comment at the beginning of the fable, a "promythium" (before-the-story) and/or an authorial comment at the end of the fable, an "epimythium" (after-the-story). As you can see, I modeled my new term, endomythium, on those long-established terms.

In fact, the epimythium is now considered by many to be the defining formal feature of an Aesop's fable, usually called the "moral of the story." Yet, in my opinion, a fable doesn't need a moral; it needs a witty and/or wise endomythium. Sadly, though, the epimythium often supplanted the endomythium. The authors of the written fables wanted the last word, and they didn't even allow a fable character to have the last word in the recorded story itself. My goal, therefore, is to restore the endomythium to its original pride of place, and to do away with the epimythium. Maybe a promythium, maybe not... but there has to be an endomythium!

In some ways my project echoes the great Aesop translation project by Lloyd Daly which he entitled, provocatively, Aesop Without Morals (still available at the Internet Archive, although who knows for how long... but that's another story!).

In this book, Daly translated the Greek prose fable into English (following the Greek text in Ben Perry's Aesopica), along with the marvelous Life of Aesop (about which I will have things to say later). He also includes a few, but just a few, Latin fables translated into English. Most importantly, he dismisses the morals added to the fables by their anonymous authors as "little more than an insult to our intelligence," and confines them to an appendix in the back of the book. 

Daly considers the fables to be both proverbial and paradigmatic (a great characterization, in my opinion; I'll have lots more to say about proverbs in the future), and also to be highly rhetorical, a verbal tool used for attacking an opponent in an argument. Satirical. Insulting. Pointed, not pious. In other words: not didactic, and definitely not children's stories. Aesop for children came later. Much later.

As he describes the Greek prose fables, Daly notes, "Most fables end with the words of the principal character," which he also describes as an "epigrammatic climax, a punchline." That is what I am getting at with the term endomythium, but the endomythium need not be spoken by the principal character. There are some fables in which a random passerby pronounces the endomythium, for example, a formal feature that has much in common with the role of the Buddha-as-observer-but-not-participant in some of the Buddhist jataka tales (I'll have more to say about the jatakas later).

While Daly dispensed with the morals of the fables, he did adhere to the Greek texts, which means quite a few of the fables in his book do not have an endomythium. In my collection of favorite fables, I will proceed differently: like Daly, I will be removing the epimythium but, in addition, I will be restoring the endomythium. I am not claiming to restore the ancient Greek (or Latin) endomythium of the oral tradition; that would be impossible. Instead, I will be restoring an endomythium with an eye to my audience of contemporary English readers. Word-play is often a key feature of the endomythium, and word-play works differently in ancient Greek (or Latin) than in English. Daly, as a translator, was constrained to try to translate the Greek (or Latin) word-play into English, which is a nearly impossible task. My task will be much easier: I will freely invent the English endomythium to fit the story, using whatever English word-play I can conjure.

I will also be applying this technique to Aesopic fables in modern European languages, and to Aesop-like fables in other storytelling traditions around the world (and I'll have more to say later about what I consider to be the enormous debt of the Greek Aesop to both Africa and India). In addition, I will also try appropriating related genres, like jokes and emblem literature, to create some "new" Aesopic fables. They will not be new fables in the sense that I have invented them, but new fables in the sense that I have appropriated them from other genres and have retold them in what I consider to be true Aesopic style: a short, even very short, fable, and always with a witty and/or wise punchline.

So, this blog will now be the home not just to public domain texts of Aesop in English, but also to my own retold favorite fables. I'll borrow Perry's very congenial term "Aesopica" to use as the label for these posts going forward, and, especially as I get started, I'll add commentary to my fables to develop in more detail some of the ideas I have presented here.

I am excited to finally be doing this (after working on Aesop for well over 30 years now), and I am grateful to Hector Tapia for provoking me to dust off my Aesop files and try something new. Hopefully, it will turn out to be something both fun and useful! :-)