Selected Fables: A Dual-Language Book (Dover Dual Language French)

by Jean de La Fontaine (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2003

  $16.91

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $22.12

  La Fontaine (1621-95) is best known for his comic and delightful fables. This lively new translation of the most famous among these captures the wit and nuances of the original La Fontaine deals with the universal themes: greed and flattery, envy and avarice, love and friendship, old age and death. Spare, allusive, often severe, his writing is characterized by its humanity and wisdom, as well as by an irrepressible and ironic humour. The selection - of 110 of the 240 Fables - spans La Fontaine's long writing life and shows his progression from short, charming Children's tales to longer, more philosophical fables. The parallel French text, scholarly introduction, and detailed notes and appendices make it ideal both for students and for all lovers of poetry. This book is intended for students of seventeenth-century French literature courses.

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $14.95

  Jean de la Fontaine (1621-95) freely plundered the works of Aesop, Phaedrus, Bidpai and others to transform the world's great fables into charming poems of astonishing originality, wit and verve. Here he depicts lions, frogs, donkeys, rats, insects, birds and wily foxes in situations that reveal the quirks, follies and frailties he observed in humankind. Sins of pride, greed and vanity come under humorous attack - a cunning fox tricks a crow out of his dinner, an arrogant hare loses a race to a steady tortoise, a merry cicada who sings all summer finds herself hungry in winter, and the goddess Juno scolds a peacock, who covets a nightingale's song. But faith in human nature can also be found in poems such as those in which a wolf is saved from choking by a helpful stork, demonstrating an engaging belief in the possibilities of redemption.