Jean de La Fontaine

REPRINTED FROM THE 1982 SUMMER ISSUE



 



Translated from the French by Robert Fitzgerald



 



Une montagne en mal d’enfant



Jettait une clameur si haute



Que chacun, au bruit accourant



Crut qu’elle accoucherait, sans faute,



D’une cité plus grosse que Paris:



Elle accoucha d’une souris.



 



Quand je songe à cette fable



Dont le récit est menteur



Et le sense est véritable,



Je me figure un auteur



Qui dit: “Je chanterai la guerre



Que firent les Titans au maître du tonnerre.”



C’est promettre beaucoup; mais qu’en sort-il souvent?



Du vent.



 



A mountain mountainous in parturition



Broke all the windows of a valley neighbor



Who tumbled on the run to view her labor,



Thinking a mountain in such huge condition



Might bring forth Hell itself: a town: at least a house.



The mountain was delivered of a mouse.



 



This story, if I’m sober when I read it,



Strikes me as somewhat tall, if not gigantic:



Yet even for the most approved Romantic



Its literary sense is clear: concede it.



Think of the poet who begins his piece,



“I sing the lords of night and the day’s release,”



From which impressive pangs what issue do we find?



A little wind.











 



Found lately among papers of 1931, when I was a Sophomore and taking Professor Irving Babbitt’s course in the History of French Criticism. —R. F.