Aesop's Fables

Abstract

This book came to me because it first came to Prof. Tom Lawler as a gift from his student Yin P. Rex Hung, and Tom asked if he could pass it on for the collection. It is a beautiful paperback that matches 136 of Handford's versions, including his titles, with--so I presume--Chinese translations. The latter come first as a group; then there is a second title-page, followed by a second section, paginated just as the first was. The result is that a given fable has the same page number in both sections. Simple cartoon-like black-and-white tail-piece designs pop up frequently along the way in either section, like the thief crawling in through the window on 11 in the Chinese section. These cartoons are perhaps more concentrated in the first, Chinese section. The second, English section often gives a number of notes on vocabulary right with the text of a fable. This book is one of those lovely paperbound Chinese works that has a dust jacket. Here it presents a near-pointillist colored FG on the front and a golden profile of the same on the back. At the back of the book is a page of extensive bibliographical information. I wonder what selection criteria were used to get down from Handford's 207 fables to the 136 used here. The book is inscribed by Rex to me on 6-30-01.