Fables of Aesop and other Eminent Mythologists: With Morals and Reflexions (1692) – translated by Roger L’Estrange – $2,600

Roger L’Estrange’s translation of the Fables of Aesop was not the first English translation of Aesop, or even (necessarily) the most interesting bibliographically. (The first major translator of Ovid was John Ogilby, which I think forms a close second in terms of which translation I would choose. Francis Barlow’s polyglot Aesop of 1666 has beautiful illustrations, but I find the verse it’s written in rather leaden. Aphra Behn’s revised translations of 1687 are a notable early translation by a woman, though not as notable as Lucy Hutchinson’s Lucretius of earlier date, which unfortunately exists at this period only in manuscript form.) Nor was L’Estrange a particularly nice or admirable person: a life-long Tory who used his role as chief censor to silence the political opposition while acting as tireless propagandist through publication of journal The Observator for his Stuart benefactors.

The main reason to select Roger L’Estrange’s prose version of Aesop is because of how L’Estrange’s unique personage expresses itself through this translation. His biographer George Kitchin gets to the heart of L’Estrange’s appeal right at the top of his introduction:

As a writer he is a Goth of the Goths, almost uncultured in the classic sense, and for this, as a corrective to the learned fluency of the age which preceded him, he is to be chiefly valued. The native element must have been intensely strong in the man who dressed Seneca and Cicero in homespun. Even his titles have an extraordinary force. No Blinde Guides for Milton, The Relaps’d Apostate and Holy Cheat for the Presbyterians, have a terseness which we are too apt to think of as a late acquisition of journalism.

But few even of those who are capable of relishing the distinction between fine classical work and the rude incult native will have the patience to read his political works. Gnarled, bitter, black and wasted, are these products of seventeenth-century strife. (v-vi)

It will be noted that, to a certain audience of modern readers, any writer whose prose style can be described as “gnarled, bitter, black and wasted” sounds amazing. Anyone of whom it could be written, “his vindictive and unappeasable thirst for a petty vengeance is the most observable feature of his character. He could be, and habitually was, meanly cruel,” cannot fail to be fascinating to readers with a thirst whetted by the Marquis de Sade, the Comte de Lautréamont, the writings of Curzio Malaparte, and other well-known purveyors of heavily stylized moral perversity. (For L’Estrange at his most gnarled and wasted, Kitchin recommends his early translation of Quevedo in 1668, wherein L’Estrange described his goal as “pure spite, for the author has had hard measure among the physicians, the lawyers, the women, etc. and Dom Francisco de Quevedo in English revenges him upon all his enemies.”) He also in this period produced translations of the essays of Seneca and of Cervantes’ Exemplary Novels which Kitchin highly praises.

But in 1692, we find L’Estrange in an altogether changed position. An old man with fading faculties, cast out of power by the revolution of 1688, he would be thrown in jail in 1491 and again 1496 by the very same enemies he had persecuted, under suspicion of conspiring against the government, though both imprisonments lasted no more than a handful of weeks. L’Estrange in this period of his life turned all his energy to literary work—he was “definitely in the pay of the booksellers,” Kitchin notes, but at the same time L’Estrange had begun to acquire a great reputation for his style:

He began now, on the score of his non-political work, to be talked of as the ‘celebrated Sir Roger,’ ‘the prince of translators,’ and Dryden was no more the patriarch of poets than L’Estrange the patriarch of English translation and a referee in all points of taste in prose (391).

L’Estrange’s Aesop is written in prose rather than verse, and Kitchin states that he aimed to compete not with the version of the fables by La Fontaine, but rather the 1630 version by Baudoin, to which “Reflexions or Discourses” were affixed; these are really the best part of L’Estrange’s Aesop, in my opinion, because while his versions of the fables are very short and pithy,

There fell out a Bloody Quarrel once betwixt the Frogs and the Mice, about the Sovereignty of the Fenns; and whilst Two of their Champions were Disputing it at Swords Point, Down comes a Kite Powdering upon them in the Interim, and Gobbles up both together, to Part the Fray.

at the same time, his explanatory essays are full of quotable and combative bits of thinly veiled political commentary which (as Kitchin puts it) “makes up for the Frenchman’s grace by a rude wit, and the shrewd vernacular both of language and manners, which make his Aesop eternally fresh.”

However L’Estrange’s Aesop was forcefully criticized in the next century by critics who argued it was an unfaithful translation and one which made free use of slang and other low language. Kitchin goes on to quote Thomas Gordon, an 18^th century-translator of Tacitus, who excoriates the “flippant jargon” of L’Estrange as “full of technical terms” and “phrases picked up in the street from apprentices and porters,” and says there is “nothing more low and nauseous,” though we moderns may be more inclined to side with Kitchin when he says these criticisms reflect “an inability to dinstinguish between vernacular force and vulgarity.”

Why This Copy:

If this is not a first edition, it is certainly a very early one. The half-leather marbled binding is not contemporary, but is still very attractive to look at. The condition inside is not perfect; there are “minor smudges and stains” and a small hole and track due to “biopredation, not affecting text” (heh!) Overall this seems like a reasonably priced copy of an early edition of L’Estrange’s translation.