Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence Clark Powell, Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
John Butt, University of Edinburgh
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
Edna C. Davis, Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library
[Pg i]
Bernard Mandeville's first extant book in English, SomeFables after the Easie and Familiar Method of Monsieur de laFontaine, was published in 1703; it reappeared with additionalfables in 1704 as Aesop Dress'd.[1] Neither title reveals that,except for two original fables by Mandeville, the book consistsentirely of verse translations from the twelve books of La Fontaine'sFables (1668-1694). It is the first book-length translationfrom these poems into English.
The only previous translations from Fables into Englishverse appear to have been those made ten years earlier by JohnDennis. Miscellanies in Verse and Prose (1693) was a curiousvolume of Pindaric odes, imitations of Horace, Juvenal, andBoileau, and letters that the young Dennis had written during histravels in France and Italy, including the well-known account ofthe "delightful horrour" and "terrible Joy" that he had experiencedwhile crossing the Alps; there were, finally, ten fables inoctosyllabic couplets—all of them translations from La Fontaine.A word about Dennis's fables may help to put Mandeville's intoperspective.
Their resemblance to the French originals is slight. Not LaFontaine, but Samuel Butler, presides over Dennis's fables;indeed, when Dennis discusses them in the Preface to Miscellanies,he fails to mention La Fontaine, although he devotes alarge proportion of his remarks to a defense of Butler's burlesqueverse, which he acknowledges as his model.[2] Many people werewriting Hudibrastics in the 1680's and 1690's: the propensity ofButler's couplet for arousing laughter had made it a fad.[3] Withits jog-trot meter, insinuating swiftness, and jarring double andtriple rhymes, the Hudibrastic couplet was ideally suited to themockery performed by low burlesque. All burlesque works by anincongruity between subject and s