fabulous
Extract from fol. 13r of the Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, CC-BY-NC 4.0.
…it is true that I long syth haue redde and herde that the beste clerkes ben not the wysest men.
I’ve had to give up on one of the translations of the Pancatantra that I’ve been attempting to read. What with one thing and another, neither has been particularly enjoyable, so I’m abandoning the longer, chattier translation, although it is based on an actual manuscript text instead of a twentieth-century scholar’s ‘reconstruction’. Ordinarily, I would choose the more ‘authentic’ version, but, well, it is longer, and ‘the lyf so short’ as the man said.
Reading the Pancatantra is part of a longer ‘project’ – I use the scare quotes advisedly, as these reading projects I take on are loosely structured, haphazard, and rarely completed – looking at animal fables, which is probably the only reason I am continuing even with the shorter version. The History of Reynard the Fox first drew my attention to the genre as being suitable for further examination, and I then meandered through the Loeb edition of Babrius and Phaedrus, which was a bit of a slog, but at least the stories were short. Perhaps I should have continued with Caxton’s Aesop or Kalīlah wa-Dimnah, but as the latter was based on the Pancatantra, I thought I had best start with first principles. That might have been the wisest approach for the systematic or orderly reader; I much prefer, however, to graze freely as I wander from shelf to shelf. There is probably a moral in all that, for those with ears to hear and eyes to read.