The Fables of La Fontaine

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Title: The Fables of La Fontaine
A New Edition, With Notes
Author: Jean de La Fontaine
Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7241]
[Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on March 30,
2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FABLES
OF LA FONTAINE ***
Produced by Thomas Berger, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE FABLES OF LA FONTAINE
Translated From The French
By Elizur Wright.
A New Edition, With Notes
By J. W. M. Gibbs.
1882

PREFACE
To The Present Edition,
With Some Account Of The Translator.
The first edition of this translation of La Fontaine's Fables appeared in
Boston, U.S., in 1841. It achieved a considerable success, and six
editions were printed in three years. Since then it has been allowed to
pass out of print, except in the shape of a small-type edition produced
in London immediately after the first publication in Boston, and the
present publishers have thought that a reprint in a readable yet popular
form would be generally acceptable.
The translator has remarked, in the "Advertisement" to his original
edition (which follows these pages), on the singular neglect of La
Fontaine by English translators up to the time of his own work. Forty
years have elapsed since those remarks were penned, yet translations

into English of the complete Fables of the chief among modern
fabulists are almost as few in number as they were then. Mr. George
Ticknor (the author of the "History of Spanish Literature," &c.), in
praising Mr. Wright's translation when it first appeared, said La
Fontaine's was "a book till now untranslated;" and since Mr. Wright so
happily accomplished his self-imposed task, there has been but one
other complete translation, viz., that of the late Mr. Walter Thornbury.
This latter, however, seems to have been undertaken chiefly with a
view to supplying the necessary accompaniment to the English issue of
M. Doré's well-known designs for the Fables (first published as
illustrations to a Paris edition), and existing as it does only in the large
quarto form given to those illustrations, it cannot make any claim to be
a handy-volume edition. Mr. Wright's translation, however, still holds
its place as the best English version, and the present reprint, besides
having undergone careful revision, embodies the corrections (but not
the expurgations) of the sixth edition, which differed from those
preceding it. The notes too, have, for the most part, been added by the
reviser.
Some account of the translator, who is still one of the living notables of
his nation, may not be out of place here. Elizur Wright, junior, is the
son of Elizur Wright, who published some papers in mathematics, but
was principally engaged in agricultural pursuits at Canaan, Litchfield
Co., Connecticut, U.S. The younger Elizur Wright was born at Canaan
in 1804. He graduated at Yale College in 1826, and afterwards taught
in a school at Groton. In 1829, he became Professor of Mathematics in
Hudson College, from which post he went to New York in 1833, on
being appointed secretary to the American Anti-Slavery Society. In
1838 he removed to the literary centre of the United States, Boston,
where he edited several papers successively, and where he published
his "La Fontaine;" which thus, whilst, it still remains his most
considerable work, was also one of his earliest. How he was led to
undertake it, he has himself narrated in the advertisement to his first
edition. But previously to 1841, the date of the first publication of the
complete "Fables," he tried the effect of a partial publication. In 1839
he published, anonymously, a little 12mo volume, "La Fontaine; A
Present for the Young." This, as appears from the title, was a book for

children, and though the substance