Kien Va Chim Bo Cau Song Ngu

Abstract

This paperback is developed from a book in English already in the collection, "The Ant and the Pigeon," published in hardback by Raduga in Moscow in 1988. Here it is a paperback of the same footprint (5" x 7½") using the same illustrations by Mikhail Romadin but employing the unusual strategy of telling each fable, including its illustrations, twice, once in English and once in Vietnamese. At one point, two fables facing each other are told first in Vietnamese (20-21) and then in English (22-23). The English translations of Tolstoy are the same translations used in that book, by K.M. Cook-Horujy. I remember being taken with that wonderful little book with 105 excellent versions and lively color paintings. Eduard Babayev's introduction from there is here translated into Vietnamese. The illustrations here have lost a bit of their color and definition. Among the best are WC (108) and "The Lost Hatchet" (165). The texts have been reset, sometimes with errors like "mastes" for "master" in the very first fable (13). On 42 what was "go back to her hole" has become "go back her hole." I comment there that Tolstoy often successfully substitutes one animal for another traditional one and that at least two stories are re-worked episodes from Aesop's life: on drinking the sea and finding a real person. I notice that the "Monkey Mother of Two" story is quite differently told, somewhat confusedly (16). There is a Vietnamese T of C at the end. Communist brotherhood widened the distribution of this little gift!