Versions in Regional Languages
The 18th to 19th centuries saw a vast amount of fables in verse being written in all European languages. Regional languages and dialects in the Romance area made use of versions adapted from La Fontaine or the equally popular Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian. One of the earliest publications was the anonymous Fables Causides en Bers Gascouns (Selected fables in the Gascon language, Bayonne, 1776), which contains 106. J. Foucaud's Quelques fables choisies de La Fontaine en patois limousin in the Occitan Limousin dialect followed in 1809.
Versions in Breton were written by Pierre Désiré de Goësbriand (1784–1853) in 1836 and Yves Louis Marie Combeau (1799–1870) between 1836 and 1838. Two translations into Basque followed mid-century: 50 in J-B. Archu's Choix de Fables de La Fontaine, traduites en vers basques (1848) and 150 in Fableac edo aleguiac Lafontenetaric berechiz hartuac (Bayonne, 1852) by Abbé Martin Goyhetche (1791–1859). The turn of Provençal came in 1859 with Li Boutoun de guèto, poésies patoises by Antoine Bigot (1825–97), followed by several other collections of fables in the Nîmes dialect between 1881 and 1891. Alsatian (German) versions of La Fontaine appeared in 1879 after the region was ceded following the Franco-Prussian War. At the end of the following century, Brother Denis-Joseph Sibler (1920–2002), published a collection of adaptations into this dialect that has gone through several impressions since 1995.
There were many adaptations of La Fontaine into the dialects of the west of France (Poitevin-Saintongeais). Foremost among these was Recueil de fables et contes en patois saintongeais (1849) by lawyer and linguist Jean-Henri Burgaud des Marets (1806–73). Other adaptors writing about the same time include Pierre-Jacques Luzeau (b.1808), Edouard Lacuve (1828–99) and Marc Marchadier (1830–1898). In the 20th century there have been Marcel Rault (whose pen name is Diocrate), Eugène Charrier, Fr Arsène Garnier, Marcel Douillard and Pierre Brisard. Further to the north, the journalist and historian Géry Herbert (1926–1985) adapted some fables to the Cambrai dialect of Picard, known locally as Ch'ti. More recent translators of fables into this dialect have included Jo Tanghe (2005) and Guillaume de Louvencourt (2009).
During the 19th century renaissance of literature in Walloon dialect, several authors adapted versions of the fables to the racy speech (and subject matter) of Liège. They included Charles Duvivier (in 1842); Joseph Lamaye (1845); and the team of Jean-Joseph Dehin (1847, 1851-2) and François Bailleux (1851–67), who between them covered books I-VI. Adaptations into other dialects were made by Charles Letellier (Mons, 1842) and Charles Wérotte (Namur, 1844); much later, Léon Bernus published some hundred imitations of La Fontaine in the dialect of Charleroi (1872); he was followed during the 1880s by Joseph Dufrane, writing in the Borinage dialect under the pen-name Bosquètia. In the 20th century there has been a selection of fifty fables in the Condroz dialect by Joseph Houziaux (1946), to mention only the most prolific in an ongoing surge of adaptation. The motive behind all this activity in both France and Belgium was to assert regional specificity against growing centralism and the encroachment of the language of the capital on what had until then been predominantly monoglot areas.
In the 20th century there have also been translations into regional dialects of English. These include the examples in Addison Hibbard's Aesop in Negro Dialect (USA, 1926) and the twenty six in Robert Stephen's Fables of Aesop in Scots Verse (Peterhead, Scotland, 1987). The latter were in Aberdeenshire dialect (also known as Doric). Glasgow University has also been responsible for R.W.Smith's modernised dialect translation of Robert Henryson's The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian (1999, see above). The University of Illinois likewise included dialect translations by Norman Shapiro in its Creole echoes: the francophone poetry of nineteenth-century Louisiana (2004, see below).
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