A Selection of World's Great Fables

Abstract

Ninety-three fables with English on left-hand and Chinese on right-hand pages. The same illustration occurs on all the upper left pages: it looks to me like a Byzantine church mosaic featuring an angel flanked by two saints, with horses and riders below. On all the upper right pages is an apparently Egyptian painting of a human, a staff, and a crane. That same picture occurs in larger format after the opening T of C and before the text section of the book. On the book's cover is a colored medieval medallion of a woman and maid with attending animals, including a unicorn. As the eBay advertisement for the book proclaims, This book not only collects the great fables in Panchatantra and Aesop's Fables, but also the works of Lafontaine, Lessing and Krylov etc. That seems an accurate description. Some of the fables are new to me, e.g., Sparrow and Elephant (24). In The Bear and the Fox (36), is it not more likely that the fox would say to the bear Oh! that you would refrain from eating the living and not the dead than that he would say, as he does here, Oh! that you would eat the living and not the dead? There are ninety-three fables on 145 pages.