Fables de Lokman
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Authors
Cherbonneau, A.
Luqmān
Issue Date
1925
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Type
Book, Whole
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Abstract
Here are forty-one fables on 79 pages. The rest of the title proceeds Expliquées d'après une Méthode Nouvelle par deux Traductions Françaises. One translation right underneath the Arabic is a standard prose paragraph in French. On the page facing, there is a two-column presentation of the fable, phrase by phrase, in Arabic and French, respectively. The book has three further elements. First comes a long analytic dictionary of words with difficult forms. Then there is a helpful T of C that lists other fabulists who treat the same fable or theme. Finally there is an Arabic AI of fables. Lokman is mentioned in the thirty-first sourate of the Koran. Cherbonneau starts his preface by writing that Lokman's fables are much more modern than had been thought; Lokman is commonly dated to 1100 BC. The numbering and understanding of these fables seems consistent with what I have described from the Dutch edition of Lokman by Leo Ross in 1964, though that edition presents only thirty-seven fables. Thus the moral of Fable 3 about a sick gazelle is again that when a family grows, so do concerns grow. In this fable and generally, this edition substitutes gazelle for deer or stag. In Fable 9, a fox tells a gazelle who has fallen into a well that she made a mistake by not thinking ahead to the way to get out. In Fable 11, it is a rabbit that claims to the lion to produce a number of offspring. Fable 12 is also consistent with Ross' edition and with his numbering: the woman who overfeeds her productive hen wanting more has been getting silver eggs from this hen. I have for Fable 19 the same question that I had about this fable in Volume III of The Classic and the Beautiful from the Literature of Three Thousand Years from 1895. This story tells of the lamenting pig who is travelling with the lamb and goat. There is again a strange moral, namely that criminals should know the dire fate that awaits them in the next life. But what crime did this pig commit? As in Ross' edition, Fable 22 tells of the bramble bush that takes over the garden. In Fable 29, it is a cat and not a snake that licks a file. As against Ross, Fable 34, SW, is told in the better version. I noted in Ross that Fable 37 on the goose and the swallow seems new. When this pair encounter a trap, the swallow can fly up and away, but the goose is caught. Fable 40 is new to me. Two snakes are fighting, and a third comes up to reconcile them. A human observer addresses the third snake: If you were not worse than both of them, you would not try to mediate. In Fable 41, DS, the piece of meat dropped into the river is picked up by a bird.
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Publisher
Paul Geuthner
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DOI
Identifier
5829 (Access ID)