Hello, and welcome to Western sev and today's bonus author interview. We are sitting down with translator and also historian Robin Waterfield. Fans of the show will recall we have had Robin on the show before some of his other translations essential to the Western Canon. Today, he has a new book out, Asop's Fables, a new translation. It's available right now. Link is in the show notes if you would like to check.
It out now.
If you're like me, you remember Asop's Fables from elementary school or lower school or primary school, whatever it was called, wherever you were. They were read to you in second or third grade with some sort of heavy moral that was sometimes expressly stated, sometimes not, and the teacher would use it as a way to sort of explain what you should or should not do, the most famous of which, of course, being the Tortoise and the hair Slow steady wins the race. I can almost hear you all saying
it right now, wherever it is that you're sitting. Well, it turns out there's over seven hundred of these fables and they've been compiled over a long period of time, and I love this new translation. It's it would actually be an interesting book to kind of keep handy for those of you who have young children, but don't let them just pick it up, because some of these are
actually a little racy, honestly. So I thought what we would do today is before we hop into the interview, because this is a totally different kind of book than we normally do on this show. You know, usually we're looking at some sort of a narrative history in some way, shape or form.
This isn't.
This is a pure translation, and it's a translation of what is usually a bunch of shorter texts because the fables are relatively brief. So I thought before we head to the interview, I would read a couple of them that I enjoy and that I thought you might like to hear as well, just so you can kind of get a taste of what's in the book. It's a great book. It clocks in and right now at just over three hundred pages, over seven hundred different fables. So
it's really great. We make a great gift, I think for someone who's maybe a little bit nostalgic for bygone eras. So let me read a couple of these to you before we hop into the interview. Now, some of these, as I mentioned, they have direct sort of morals. So this one does I enjoy it. It's called the Goose and the Stork. A stork came down to her usual hand and found a goose there, diving over and over again under the surface of the water. When she asked why,
the goose said, that's what we geese do. We find food in the mud. Oh, it's also how we escape when a hawk attacks us. And the stork said, well, I'm stronger than a hawk. Be my friend, and then you'll laugh with scorn at hawks. The goose agreed, and it wasn't long before he asked the stork for protection. He left the pond with her and went into the open countryside. But a hawk swooped down, seized the goose with its talons and started to eat him up, and
the goose cried out against the stork. Anyone who makes a pact with such a pathetic defender deserves to die a wretched death, the moral being for those who expect to be defended by people who were unable to guarantee their safety.
Watch out.
Here's another one that has a great moral. This is called the Viper and the Snake. A viper used to go to a certain spring to drink, but the spring was home to a water snake who kept him away from the water. He was angry with the viper for coming to his domain rather than being satisfied with his own feeding ground. Their quarrel grew ever more bitter until they agreed that they'd fight each other and that the winner would have the use of the land and the water.
Once they had fisked a day for the battle, the frogs, who hated the water snake, came to the viper and boosted his morale by promising to fight alongside him. But when the battle was joined and the viper was fighting the water snake, the frogs proved incapable of doing anything except croaking loudly. Still, the viper won, and afterward he told the frogs off. They had promised to fight alongside him, but all they did was sing, which was no use
to him at all. Now, the frogs replied, learn from this, my friends, that as allies, we have only songs to offer, not strength. The point of this tale is that words are useless when physical strength is needed. Now, those of you who remember Aesop's fables probably remember that a lot of them involved either a wolf or a fox. This one has both the treacherous fox and the wolf. A wolf had gathered a huge quantity of loot in his den in good time, so that he could enjoy all
kinds of delicacies in the coming months. A fox found out about his trove and paid the wolf a visit in his den. Are you okay, she whined, I haven't seen you for ages. I've missed you so much while you've been staying indoors, And the wolf replied caustically, they're not here because you're worried about me. You're not come out of the kindness of your heart, but to see if i'll give you anything. I know you're trying to
trick me. This enraged the fox, and she went to a shepherd and said to him, what will you give me if today, right now, I turn the enemy of your flock over to you so that you don't have to worry about him anymore. I'll be in your debt, said the shepherd, and I'll give you whatever you want. So the fox showed the shepherd where the wolf's lair was, and the shepherd immediately killed the wolf with his javelin. Then he let the fox satisfy her envious desire for
food that was not her own. Later, when the fox encountered some hunters and was caught by their hounds. As she was being torn to pieces, she said, not long ago, I committed a major crime. I'm dying for having caused someone else's death. Those who harm others should be aware of being harmed by others themselves. Now, not all of the fables actually involve animals, Believe it or not. I didn't know that, and so I want to read one to you. One last one that does not. This is
Demetrius of Phalarium and Meander the Poet. By an underhanded use of power, Demetrius the Phalarian, as he's called, has gained control of Athens as its sole ruler. The general populace, as is typical of mobs, rushes up to him, pushing and shoving at one another in a desire to be first to explain their congratulations. Even the leading men of the city kissed the hand by which they're oppressed, while inwardly resenting the sad twist of fate that impels them
to do so. In fact, even a political people and men of leisure come creeping in at the tail end of the crowd, worried in case they fail to do so, they'll suffer for it. Among them is Meander, famous for his comedies. Now, Demetrius had never met the man himself, although he was familiar with his work and admired his genius.
So when the tyrant saw Meander walking in right at the end of the line, with his mincing, foppish gait, anointed with perfume and dressed in flowing robes, he said, who is this nancy who dares to come into my presence? Swiveling his hips like that? That's Meander, the writer, said the people standing around him. Demetrius immediately changed his tune. What a fine looking man, he said. It is impossible to imagine that anyone could be more handsome. Ladies and
gentlemen beware compliments sometimes. But now, without further ado, the interview with Robin Waterfield.
And welcome back.
As I mentioned previously in the introduction, today I am sitting down with Robin Waterfield is an eminent translator and historian, and so we're going to talk today about something that you know, if you've gone to school, you know the word ASoP and Asop's Fables, because it's something that even in grammar school, or at lower school, or in elementary school, depending upon where you are, I would wager that we've all read or maybe been read at least one of
them at some point in our lives. I know that I've been read several and until I read this book, I never really thought much about the fables themselves. And I'm gonna be honest with everyone listening today, I didn't actually even know where they originated from.
But I think one of.
The places that I want to start with today is just the role of the translator, because you've translated some of the most important texts in the Western world, and so I thought maybe you could explain a little bit about your role and your methods as a translator, and that how you do that when it's a text that it's not just word for word translation, it's also things like author's intent, author's purpose, things like that that you
have to take into consideration. So if you could talk a little bit about your role, I think that that might be illuminating.
Okay, well, thanks for having me on the show again, Adam, But you should be careful what you ask for, because I once gave a fourteen minute talk on my translation policy, so I'll keep it short. The way I say it is this, there are two extreme in translating. There are translators who believe that the way to do justice to their author is to follow even his word order and sentence structure as closely as possible. That to me is not translation. Translation is literally the transference of the words
and idiosyncrasies of one language into another. You don't retain the idiosyncrasies of the original language when they don't fit.
Then.
The other extreme is the opposite. That is, many translators embellish their texts a bit in order to bring out the nuances they detect, such as you just suggested, the intentions of the author, and so on and so forth. I try to find a middle road between those two extremes. I try to write modern readable English while remaining faithful to the original text. Let me put it this way. Of the two extremes, overly literal translation underestimates the intelligence
of the reader. This is particularly common in translations of philosophical texts. And it's true that since action philosophers use a lot of precise technical vocabulary, in these cases one has to be just as literal. But Plato, for instance, I've translated a lot of Plato. Plato was a far more fluent writer than most philosophers, and yet still commonly gets translated pedantically and over literally. Now you can see why I say that this kind of literal translation underestimates
the intelligence of the reader. In his early and middle works, Plato rarely felt the need to express his philosophical profundities in pedantic and ugly phrases. He assumed that he could write good Greek and still communicate his point and over translation. The opposite underestimates the intelligence of the original author, because if the ancient author had wanted the flourishes and so on that so many translators attribute to them, they'd have
written them. In art doesn't have to be obvious. It doesn't have to spell everything out and express every implication and nuance. It leaves such things hovering just below the surface of the text or the painting or whatever. The painting or text then gains depth and resonance. So in fact, in my view, a truer translation is one which leaves in place as much of the resonance as possible without spelling it out. You can see why this might be
difficult for philosophers. But please note that I'm talking about translating prose, which is what I chiefly do. Poets who translatation group poets have to allow themselves much more license than I allow myself.
So that's it.
In short, Adam, I trying to achieve a balance between those two extremes, and I do believe that the middle way that I'm trying to walk is the way to be truly faithful to the author i'm translating.
It's interesting because, of course there's a distinction between translation and interpretation. I think sometimes we see them packaged together in a book, and I find that that students can confuse the two, but they they're not the same in any way, shape or form. And I think it's important to bear that in mind as we start to look
at any sort of text. And as yesterday we were speaking with on the show an author of biblical history and the problems of translation, because of course, throughout history there have been good translations, and then there have been less good translations over time. This is a good translation, So that's that's a positive standpoint for us. But well, let's let's talk a little bit about the fables. For themselves, like, let's just begin, as Lewis Carroll once wrote, at the beginning,
and start with where did the fables originate? And how did they first start to become incorporated into what I suppose we might all the Western canon.
Okay, they didn't reach us by a single route. Originally, the fables were told one by one, so to speak around the fireside at home, or as a cautionary tale for children, or to entertain others at a symposium. Sometimes politicians would bring up a persinent fable to help them make a point in a speech. Sometimes playwrights or poets
might tell or paraphrase one. So some of the fables we know are found one by one, embedded in some such literary context, in a politician speech or something which happens to have survived, or a poet or a poem. But later people began to make collections of the fables, and the first such collection we know of was compiled by a man called Demetrius of Phalerum, A very interesting man in his own right.
He studied in the Aristotilian.
School, and for ten years he was the sole ruural dictator of Athens.
At the end of the fourth.
Century BC, Now Demetrius's collection hasn't survived, but its point was almost certainly to aid in the training of orators teachers of rhetoric like students to study the fables, because they said that it helped them acquire a simple, non elevated style which would suit some.
Contexts or audiences.
Then, in the early centuries of this era CE further collections were made that have survived in whole or in part.
Three.
Such collections go to make up a set of three hundred and fifty what are called anonymous fables, anonymous meaning that the compilers found them one by one in the sources I described a moment ago or from collections such as Demetrius's. But we also have several collections of fables turned into verse, of which the two most extensive are the Latin verse fables written by Fedrius and the Greek
verse fables written by someone called Babrius. More collections were made over the following centuries and into the Middle Ages, but it was only in the middle of the twentieth century that they were all pulled together into a single
collection by an American scholar called ben Edwin Perry. His weighty tone contains far more than the fables contains two ancient biographers, two ancient lives of Esop, for instance, But he collected over seven hundred fables, and that's not counting all the variants.
Now there I should explain variance. It's because.
Quite a lot of the fables aren't, as it were, just stories, their story types, and so they might exist in different versions, with a fox perhaps being the main protagonist rather than a wolf, or a goose rather than the duck, or the variation might be more extensive than that, while still retaining the same core story and moral And if we would account those as separate fables, there would
be way over seven hundred. But Perry collected seven hundred, and that is, as it were, the standard collection.
Now that's interesting. I find it a little bit surprising. I suppose that it took so long, relatively speaking, for all the fables to come together in one particular text. I guess I would have expected, maybe at the latest the eighteenth seventeenth century, at some point in there there would have been some sort of a collection.
So it's interesting that it didn't happen till later than that.
Well, it might have done, but I'm saying not to the fullest extent, and people were writing their own verse fables well into the seventeenth eighteenth century. La Fontaine's fables are particularly famous, and the Sours fables, yeah, were certainly known and read and enjoyed, so they must have been books. But we're also touching on the fact that in recent centuries, I mean even going back to the eighteenth century for sure,
possibly seventeenth, I don't know, you started getting fables. The idea, as you in a sense you suggested in your introduction. The idea was that the fables were to be told or read by children, told to or read by children. And you see, in order to do that, first of all, you're not doing a translation, because, as we'll soon see, the fables aren't really suitable for children, so they get extremely watered down and simplified in order to be told
for children, so they're not translations. And secondly, if this was the main way the fables were being published, a book of fables for children would contain no more than perhaps twenty thirty to fifty fables at the most.
Something like that.
So yeah, that's why I'm giving Perry the credit for she being the first to pull it all together.
Then of course, that's the fun part about history, especially when you get back to the distant past.
We don't know exactly.
There's there's certainly a possibility that someone else put it together earlier and we just don't know. It's kind of like a tip of the Iceberg scenario. So now this question I feel like I have to ask, even though it may again getting to the sort of the distant past idea that we might not know everything, we might know nothing, But I should suppose I want to ask.
It anyway, which is who was Esop? To the best of our knowledge, Well.
There almost certainly did exist a person called Esop who was famed for his fables. He would have lived in the sixth century BCE. But immediately I have to add that there are fables still in existence that predate his alleged lifetime, so he wasn't the only tender fables, just a particularly famous one. But after that, having said that much the details get a bit murky. As I've just mentioned that there are a couple of acient written in ancient times lives of Esop, but.
They are more excuses to.
Retell a few fables and Esopian jokes in an obviously fictional biographical context. Like most ancient biographers, they are not at all reliable sources of information. But pulling the few more reliable threads together we get something like this. Esop was a slave. He was an enslaved person, born either in Phrygia in Asia Minor that is Turkey today, or in Thrace, which today would be northern Greece and Bulgaria.
He worked as a slave on the Greek island of Samos before he was given his freedom, and he was incredibly out.
And that that really is as much as is as it.
Were, common law throughout the biographies and other things that we hear about Esop. That's really all therefore that we can safely say. But in my opinion, even that isn't really safe. I think that certainty is impossible because his low status as an enslaved person, his non Greek ethnicity, and his ugliness made him the perfect vehicle for commenting on aspects of Greek society, which is what the fables do. He was an outsider, casting an amused, cynical and critical
eye on the behavior of people around him. So even his enslavement is in a sense too good to be true. So as I say, the only really safe thing every one can say is that he probably did exist. It's the same as the problem with Homer. You know, we don't actually know for sure that there was an ancient poet called Homeros that almost certainly was. We can't be sure that he's the author of both the poems that have come down to us under his name, the Iliad
and the Odyssey. These problems come up time and again when studying ancient texts.
I was going to bring up Homer, and I guess the kind of a follow up question to that is, you know, does it matter? You know, is it relevant that we don't know particularly who this person is. You know, if we were to discover I don't know how we would unearth this, but let's just say we did unearth some sort of biography of Esop or biography of Homer. Would it in any way sort of change our perspectives on the fables?
I'm not sure.
I'm sure it wouldn't. I'm sure it wouldn't time it. But that goes for any work of art or creative.
Work, doesn't it.
I mean, it's a well, I've been touching on difficult issues here. I suppose you know, so much about an author that you find he's a despicable person.
Does that make his work?
Does that make you want to not read his work or listen to his music or something anyway?
Sorry, that's probably a disgrestion, Adam.
But yeah, no, it wouldn't certainly any socks case, It wouldn't wouldn't make the slightest difference. And it doesn't make the slightest different because I've just been saying, we don't know about up Set.
What we've got is the Paples.
That is an interesting question.
I mean, I think that's probably and I think it's it's it's it's dangerous sometimes for us to put our modern ideals and perspectives onto people from the very distant past and then cast normative statements about them. But you make a good point that, you know, if we were to discover you know, some oh some terrible, terrible information about Esop or Homer for that matter, would that make either one of the texts less interesting to me?
No?
I suppose other people may have different responses to that, But at least as far as I'm concerned, you know, I think we could separate those two things.
So, looking kind of at the fables themselves.
Now, one of the things that certainly I remember as a child hearing the fables is that the protagonists, the characters are by and large all animals. That was what I remember is setting these out when I remember hearing about them. It's it is very different from you know, the fairy tales that I might otherwise hear or be told. We're generally the protagonists was a human, and you might have animals who play some sort of a supporting role.
But this is a little bit different, and.
So I wanted to ask ours our Aceop's fables unique in that the protagonists are animals, in this case non humans.
No far from unique.
There are fas from around the world, from particularly common in India, which have animals as their protagonist protagonists. So the Esopian fables aren't unique in that sense. But I have to slightly correct you. You said buy and large, which was a good hedge, but far from all the
Esopian fables have talking animals as their protagonists. It's certainly true that the most famous ones and the ones that people are most likely to have come across in childhood have animals as the protagonists, because you.
Know, that's their charm.
And so on, And even in our benighted times, hardly anyone is unfamiliar, at least in outline with the dog in the manger, for instance, or sour grapes, or the tortoise and the hair. These are the sorts of these fables are so famous that they're given us proverbs, you know. But far from all the fables animal tables. There are many that have talking inanimate objects, talking, trees and bushes, talking parts of the body, parts of the body talking to one another.
And there are.
Many in which humans and deities are the protagonists. So what I did in my book, it was arranging the book. Was Deciding how to arrange the book was not easy. So I just you know, because as I said earlier, I think the fables were originally told one by one. Should I just scatter the fables you in no order whatsoever?
But in the end what I did was was I divided the.
Book into inter sections depending on what kind of protagonists are involved. So you get inanimate objects and humans and deities and trees and plants. And then for the majority of the fables, which as you say, are animal fables. And then I divide the animal fables into according to the different type of animal, different types of animal, And.
And then I guess that gets us into the when we're kind of think about how this is divided. I think one of the important things we need to think about here is, Okay, what is the purpose of a fable?
Right?
Is this intended to be moral in some way?
Or do fables in general? And then maybe I'll ask the same question about ESOPs fables in particular.
Do they serve a particular purpose?
Okay, Well, I can't talk about fables other than Esop.
I've read some, I know that they exist.
I've read a couple of studies, but are by no means an expert in anything other than Esop's fables. And so I'll slide away from that bit. So talking just about ESOPs fables, there is no single purpose. The most famous fables are certainly those that are designed to advice or criticism, with the pill sugared by the lightheartedness of the story that acts as the vehicle. But quite a lot of fables and no more than jokes with a punchline,
you would say, rather than with a lesson. Quite a few are merely entertaining or paradoxical stories designed to raise an amused or ironic smile, and perhaps with little or no generalized truth to tell. Many fables are ideological. They explain the origin of something, and many are agonal. There are other categoriesm sliding over because they're rare, but many are agonal, pitting rivals against each other, like famously the
tortoise and the hair, and some simply retail animal law. Now, Adam, if we've got time, should I give a few examples of a couple of those times?
I think apple would be very helpful.
Thank you. Okay, right, there's one that's just an amusing story. For instance, I'm starting to quote now, a square cut statue of Hermes had been placed by the side of a road, supported by a pile of stones. At his base, a dog came up and said, and to begin with Hermes, I salute you, But then I'd like to anoint you. I can't walk past a deity without doing so, and
especially you, the god of wrestling. And the statue said, I'll thank you not to come and lick off the oil with which I'm already coated, and not to piss on me either. That's all the honor I need from you, say, Just an amusing story, or here's an ideological one. The creature that we now call ant was originally human. He worked as a farmer, but the fruits of his own labor weren't enough for him, and he used to cast envious eyes on his neighbor's farms and steal their crops.
His greed made Zeus angry, and he changed the man into the creature we call ant. But although his form changed, his character didn't. Even now he goes around the fields gathering grains of wheat and barley that belonged to others and storing them up for himself. So there re quite a view that do that kind of thing explain in this case the origin of ants, but the origin of something or other. It could, but not necessarily an animal or a creature, but it could be the origin of why life is hard.
For instance. There's another one.
Now he has an agonal one pitching rivals against each other. The north wind and the sun were arguing about which of this is a famous one. The north winds and the sun were arguing about which of them was stronger, and they decided that the victor would be whichever of them could get a certain wayfarer to undress the north wind went first and blew a mighty blast, but the man clung onto his clothes, so he blew even more forcefully.
Increasingly troubled by the cold, the wayfarer kept adding more layers of clothing, and eventually the north wind gave up and let the sun have a go. First, sun shone quite gently, but once the man had taken off his extra layers, he turned up the heat. Finally the man could no longer stand it, and he stripped and went off to bathe in a nearby river, and finally has a piece of animal law. The beaver is a four
footed pond dwelling creature. It's said that his testicles supply effective remedies for a number of ailments, and so whenever one is spotted, he's hunted down. But the beaver knows perfectly well why he's being pursued. For a while, he tries to escape simply by running as fast as he can, After all, he wants to keep himself whole. But when he sees that his capture is inevitable, he bites off his own testicles and abandons them, thus saving his life.
So right, not only the.
Ones that have a moral at the end that are supposed to supply advice or Something's all sorts of different fables.
And I think as a child growing up, I recall basically only hearing those that did supply morals. I think by marchward those were the only ones that we got. And maybe that was simply because that was what wound up in the textbook, but it certainly it is.
It is it's like I said before, it's because they were being it's because it was usually assumed that the fables were a good thing for children, and so they you know, have this, have this, uh a little moral at the end, as a way of educating children.
Well, there, certainly we certainly weren't told the uh, the one about the beaver and testicles that was that was not one that was reiterated to the third grade. I
can tell you that much. Well, that's that's interesting. So that that, like a lot of them, was just things that we Again, it's it's what gets it's what gets included in the various anthologies and in the different compilations of texts throughout time, because it's it's rare, other than in your translation, to see so many of them together. That's just not something that I think that most people normally get, which is unfortunate, but that's also just kind
of the way that it is. I was wondering a little bit about could you eplain a little bit about the structure of the fables? They seem obviously very short, to the point I didn't know if there was some variation between the structures, if they lined up to the purpose behind the fable in some way, shape or form, or if they were all more of a uniform structure.
Well, actually, quite a lot of the fables in Perry's collection, for instance, are quite long and rambling. But I believe that these were all written later. They were, you know, embellishments of an original short core. And so I believe that the original fables were short, as you just said. And I also think they had a very clear triparthite structure, clearer in the sh sort of fables than in the
slightly longer ones. Sometimes the shorter fables consist of just three sentences, each sentence giving.
A part of that structure.
So what they do is they start by giving the bare minimum of background information needed to enable the reader or listener to creatively imagine the scene. Let's say, and after this introduction, of the scene and the protagonist of the fable, comes the action of the story, and then finally a closing comment, which usually carries the moral or lesson of the story.
So here's one.
A dog who had proved his speed and strength against all kinds of wild animals, and who had always pleased his master, began to lose his energy under the burden of old age. Okay, Sentence one gives us the background information. Then we get the action of the story. One day he found himself up against a bristle backed boar, and he sees the bee by the ear, But with his rotten teeth, he couldn't maintain his grip, and the ball got away. Okay, second sentence, and now what about the moral.
The hunter lost his temper and scolded the dog, but the old warrior replied, it wasn't my spirit that let you down, but my strength. If you see fit to condemn me for the way I am, you should praise
me for what I was. Okay. So I believe that, as I say, to be the original structure, which, as I say, got somewhat lost when people were just sort of telling the fables as stories in their own right, not necessarily because I mean, in order to deliver a moral or a lesson, they've got to be short and punching. And I also believe that the original fables are like the one I just read out, that is that the moral is embedded in the story. Was in the last
sentence of that bit, it wasn't my spirit delaid? If you praise, if you see fit to condemn me for the way I am sure praise me for what I was spoken by the dog, who is himself the protagonist of the story.
But quite often what you get is.
As again as I say, I think in later ages, people started adding morals onto the story, sometimes the moral, which in my translation I've translated in italics to show that it's separate from the story itself, from the fable itself. Sometimes this italicized moral just repeats the moral that's contained
in the story already. Sometimes it adds something on. Sometimes its interpretation of the story is really quite weird, so that you get morals appended to stories, which to fables which you know you have to struggle to see their relevance, and things like that. But the one I just quoted, I believe preserves the original structure with the tripath i'd structure with the moral contained within the story itself.
Well, I think I would be remiss then if I didn't ask if you had a personal favorite fable or something that you really would like to share with everyone, Because I mean, I read them and I enjoy them all, but I obviously didn't spend nearly as much time translating them, so I didn't know if there was one that you just particularly enjoyed, maybe enjoyed the translation work of that one. But I think it'd be worth us knowing about.
An elderly woman had a problem with her eyes, so she asked a doctor to call on her and agreed to pay him his fee. The doctor made repeated visits to her house, and each time, after he'd put ointment on her eyes and gummed up her eyelids, he made
off with something of hers. Once she was cured, by which time he'd cleared the house out, he asked to be paid the stipulated fee, and when she refused, he took her before the authorities, but she argued that she'd promised to pay him he cured her eyes, whereas his treatment had made things worse than before. I used to be able to see all the things I had in my house, she said, But now I can't see a single one of them.
That's amusing. I didn't see it going that way until the very end.
And that one has one of these appended morals as well, It says, likewise, dishonest people fail to realize that their greed causes them to convict themselves.