REVIEW: Aesop's Fables; A New Translation by G.K. Chesterton [Kindle Edition]

Aesop's Fables; A New Translation. G.K. Chesterton. Public Domain Books (2004), Kindle Edition, Print length: 145 pages.

I wonder if modern man has always anthropomorphized animals. I suppose that ancient religious beliefs and practices could point to valid explanations, but how many animal stereotypes can we trace directly back to the influence of Aesop's fables? Aesop's works are important, because as Chesterton notes, they are simple truisms that require a certain degree of humility. People are reduced to "chessmen" and animals to their most basic qualities. In addition, the fact that these are likely collected works, and not simply the product of Aesop's mind, matters. Aesop, then, serves as a sort of orator, and yet he was supposedly thrown off of a cliff for...who knows...being "offensive?"

I wonder how often we bother to question our standard characterizations of the animals and the people found in Aesop's fables, and our often blind acceptance of the morals at the end of each one. Chesterton supposes in his introduction that ancient man thought themselves too mysterious to depict in the same manner as the cave paintings at, say, Lascaux. I think that some of the politics in the fables are obvious, and I wonder if this is where Aesop had a greater role in their creation. There are fables about the gods, the Oracle at Delphi, and slaves...fables that speak of class differences that easily could have gotten Aesop in trouble, if he were a Phrygian slave. There are lots of contradictory messages, too: tales of birds in cages who yearn to be free, and slaves who value protection over freedom. There are stories of cocks whose necks are wrung because they can only tell time, while a tame partridge is kept because it serves as a decoy to catch other birds...and then another tale in which a partridge is killed for its treachery when it offers to be a decoy in the interest of self-preservation. At face value, people take these morals to be self-evident truths, but the people in these stories are always the ones who contradict themselves. On the contrary, an Ass is always an ass.

Like Grimm's fairy tales, violence is a factor. The natural world has always had a bit of the gruesome to balance out the beauty. We accept this as normal, and it is, but it is also strange when we give voices to beasts and birds, and then use them to teach children right from wrong. Nothing is so cut and dry in a modern world, and yet these fables have survived despite the differences. I think that simplicity is the key. We tend to complicate matters, when all people really seem to crave are simple answers.

Rating: 4/5

To be quite honest, I'm being polite with this review. I gave this collection a 4/5 for historical importance, but I really wanted to give it a 3. The short form of the fables was easy to read, but it got to be rather dull, after a while. (In fact, it was enough to turn me off of ancient lit. for a while. I started reading an 1000-page, sprawling and modern novel this morning, just to shift to the other extreme. I NEED this, right now.)