De Fabels van Lokman: Naar het Latijn van Thomas Erpenius
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Authors
Erpenius, Thomas
Luqmān
Ross, Leo
Issue Date
1964
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Book, Whole
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Abstract
It has taken me years to get to this book. I do not know enough about Lokman, and I think I am not going to learn about him in Dutch. The surprise to me in this unpaginated paperback book is that Lokman is presented first in Latin, specifically in thirty-seven prose fables. Those I can read! Almost all seem standard Aesopic presentations. The moral of The Sick Stag (Fable #III) is surprising: His pains increase whose family increases. In Fable IX, it is not a goat but a deer that falls into the well, only to be admonished by the fox that he should have thought about a way out before he fell in. In Fable XII, Mulier et Gallina, the woman who overfeeds her productive hen wanting more has been getting silver eggs from this hen. I do not think that I had seen that approach to this fable before. I am not sure that I have before seen Fable #XXII on the planting of a bramble bush. Of course, it takes over the garden. There are two fables on blacks trying to become white (#XVII and #XXIIII). SW (#XXXIV) is told in the poorer form in the Latin. #XXXVII, Anser et Hirundo, seems new. When the pair of friends encounter a trap, the swallow can fly up and away, but the goose is caught. The Dutch translations seem to be in rhyming couplets. An appendix seems to present the same thirty-seven fables now in Dutch prose translations. Erpenius was apparently a professor of Arabic and other oriental languages. He seems to have flourished in the early 1600's. There is a pasted-in photograph facing the title-page. Might that be Leo Ross?
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Publisher
L.J.C. Boucher Paperbacks
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Identifier
5595 (Access ID)