The Fox and The Grapes - Concise Translations

Concise Translations

Many translations, whether of Aesop's fable or of La Fontaine's, are wordy and often add details not sanctioned by the original. Two English authors have produced short poetical versions which still retain both the general lines of the story and its lesson. The first of these is a quatrain by Aphra Behn appearing in Francis Barlow's illustrated edition of the fables (1687):

The fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain

The tempting clusters were too high to gain;

Grieved in his heart he forced a careless smile,

And cried ,‘They’re sharp and hardly worth my while.’

The second also accompanies an illustrated edition, in this case the work of Walter Crane in Baby's Own Aesop (1887). Each fable has been reduced to a limerick by W.J.Linton and is enclosed within the design. "The Fox and the Grapes" has been given the moral 'The grapes of disappointment are always sour' and runs as follows:

This Fox has a longing for grapes:

He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.

So he goes away sour;

And, 'tis said, to this hour

Declares that he's no taste for grapes.

By comparison, the Phaedrus version has six pentameter lines, of which two draw the moral and Gabriele Faerno's Latin reworking has five lines and two more drawing the moral. Both Babrius and La Fontaine have eight, the latter using his final line to comment on the situation. Though the emblematist Geoffrey Whitney confines the story to four lines, he adds two more of personal application: 'So thou, that hunt'st for that thou longe hast mist,/ Still makes thy boast, thou maist if that thou list.'

The fable was also one that the French poet Isaac de Benserade summed up in a single quatrain, not needing to go into much detail since his verses accompanied the hydraulic statue of it in the labyrinth of Versailles. He can therefore afford a thoughful, moralising tone:

Pleasures are dear and difficult to get.

Feasting the eye, fat grapes hung in the arbour,

That the fox could not reach, for all his labour,

And leaving them declared, they're not ripe yet.

But Benserade then adds another quatrain, speculating on the fox's mental processes; finally it admits that the grapes really were ripe but 'what cannot be had, you speak of badly'.