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I have always been interested in the illustrations of Aesop's Fables, and to the best of my ability, I have successively collected more than 100 more representative illustrated editions of Aesop's Fables in Both Chinese and English. Therefore, a few days ago, I accidentally learned that in January this year, Houlang Company compiled a book "500 Years of Illustrations and Stories of Aesop's Fables" for Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House, and immediately went to buy a volume back.
Very early on, I learned from a translation published by Huang Gaoju in Hubei Education Society twenty years ago that John J. McKendry, assistant director of the printmaking department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, had carefully compiled an Aesop: Five Centuries of Illustrated Fables in 1964 based on some of the old editions of the museum's collection. A few years ago, I finally bought this book on Kong Net, I liked it very much, I appreciated it from time to time, and I recommended it to friends in the publishing industry many times, hoping to translate and publish it in China. When I saw the title of the book compiled by Hou Lang that day, my first reaction was: The Metropolitan Edition has finally come out in Chinese translation!
After receiving the book, after flipping through and comparing, I found that the situation was not so simple. The Metropolitan Edition contains only 40 fables, each accompanied by a black-and-white illustration; Later Lang's book contains 100 fables, each accompanied by three or four illustrations, both black and white and color, so the capacity is larger. The editor of the book wrote in the Afterword: "John F. Kennedy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States Mr. J. Mackenzie has edited 500 Years of Illustrations of Aesop's Fables, which traces the evolution of Aesop's fable illustrations from the mid-fifteenth century to the twentieth century, and is the culmination of the historical study of Aesop's fable illustrations to date. Unfortunately, the book contains only 50 illustrations and related fables, and many of the fine works are not included, which makes people feel that they are not fully appreciated.
To this end, we have compiled this Chinese edition of "Aesop's Fables: 500 Years of Illustrations and Stories", which has selected 318 illustrations from the "Aesop's Fables" from different historical periods and different countries, with 100 fables, aiming to enable readers to appreciate more illustrators' masterpieces of different expression techniques, and also to better understand Aesop's fables. "Such a creative and original intention should be said to be quite good, but unfortunately, for the following reasons, I can only judge this 16-open hardcover book priced at 128 yuan as a piece of disillusionment and shoddy work."
In fact, from the short text of the editor's afterword, the editor's shoddy fabrication can already be seen. First, the editor of the Metropolitan edition was McKendry, not MacKenzie, and second, the book contained only 40 fables instead of 50. It is not difficult to compile more fables (and their illustrations), but the editors are entirely drawn from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and feel that this is a good way to present the context of Aesop's fables of 500 years of illustration, as detailed in the appendix at the end of this article. Moreover, the book clearly brings together more than 300 illustrations created by 53 painters, so why does the biography of the painter on the mouth list only one Randolph Cadick? In fact, there are not many illustrations of Caddick in the book, and his illustrations of Aesop's fables are not very brilliant. In my opinion, the editor took some effort to summarize the brief situation and illustrations of the painters, and put them together at the end of the book, which in itself can be regarded as a good deed to benefit readers and researchers.
The biggest point of my opinion on the book compiled by Houlang is: Obviously, the content of the Metropolitan Edition has been included in almost the entire book, why not explain it in the epilogue (the only place mentioned in the book about the Metropolitan Edition is the paragraph I quoted above), why not directly obtain the other party's Chinese Simplified translation copyright authorization? After I got the book yesterday, I compared it carefully with the Metropolitan Edition and found that 37 of the 100 fables were taken directly from the Metropolitan Edition. Because there are so many English versions of Aesop's Fables, the textual differences between the different versions are often not small, and the 37 fables are exactly the same version, even the same year, and it is really unbelievable to say that the editors of the houlang are not directly "taking", not to mention that the corresponding illustrations (including some of the illustrations on some fairly rare ancient texts) are basically selected. In order to save some money, is it a little unauthentic and a bit inferior?
Other things that I am not very happy with are mainly the commonplace problems with the quality of illustration printing and the quality of translations. I haven't had time to look through the whole book yet, but here are just a few of the places I've found. The famous portrait of Aesop, which depicts Aesop as a hunchback dwarf who understands the language of birds and beasts and is good at using birds and beasts, was created in 1476 and first appeared in the earliest German version of Aesop's Fables, the Heinrich Steinhowel edition. The Houlang edition says it is a woodcut print created by Basel in 1501, and I don't know what to do. Moreover, the original black-and-white illustration (on the right is on the Metropolitan edition) was scrawled with color, so that Aesop's Latin name ESPOPVS in the middle of the upper part of the figure could not be seen clearly, and indeed it was not clever. The second picture below is a color illustration by Walter Crane for the fable "The Peacock's Complaint", with cui Ying's illustration from the British Illustrator on the left and the houlang version on the lower right. The third figure below shows the illustration of the metropolitan version on the left and the houlang version on the right. I hope that after taking pictures, the difference in the quality of the illustrations can be better displayed.
As for the translation, it has already been mentioned above that the afterword exists, and here is only one more Article of the Astronomer, because I happen to have the Thomas James edition of 1848. It can be seen that the translator of the Houlang version, "Qingyun", translated the "holloa" in the text as "shouting bad luck", but in fact it only means shouting loudly; "My good man" is also translated as "kind friend", but in fact it is a very broad phrase, usually in order to let the other party agree to their own common use of this sentence, a bit of a request. From the article, you can feel the ironic tone, Huang Gaoju's translation translates it as "old guy", I think it is good to use the "old gentleman" with a ridiculous tone.
I admit that I have always hoped that such a book can stand on the shoulders of the Metropolitan Ben, supplement the progress of the illustrations of Aesop's Fables in recent years, and be able to write in depth the three parts of famous illustrators according to "Biography", "Selected Works" and "Notes", like Wu Wei's "Selected Illustrations of the Rubai Collection", rather than just piecing together the content. When I talked to Cui Ying, I said that the Houlang edition of the book fell far short of my expectations in terms of quality, capacity and height. She encouraged me to make a book myself. I know I haven't accumulated enough so far, but I'm still looking forward to a satisfactory selection of illustrations of Aesop's Fables. If anyone thinks that I am too harsh on the houlang version, I hope that some book lovers will agree with my defense: without a strict reader, it is difficult to produce high-level reading.
Aesop's Fables: Famous paintings by famous artists
by Aesop [Ancient Greece]; Translated by Jiang Pu
¥16.0 Jiupin
Appendix: Aesop: An Illustrated Fable of Five Centuries
Aesop's Fables is the only text that has been illustrated so frequently, so stylistically diverse, and so constantly that the history of printed editions can be revealed through these fables alone. The illustrated Bible surpasses Aesop's Fables in terms of circulation, but the sanctity of the text requires illustrators to adopt a more clerical and less varied approach. Ovid's Metamorphosis also produced a large number of illustrated editions, but the classical writer was neglected for a long period of history. Aesop's Fables combine the freedom of expression with its enduring appeal, making it an object of constant interest among book illustrators from the 15th century to the present.
Aesop's fables are not strictly limited to one time and one place, which is an important reason why they continue to be favored by illustrators. Every painter who depicts them can set them at will in the era when he is best at all, or he will not care about the place where the specific story takes place when he is creating (which is often the case). It's also important to be unsure which texts were written by Aesop. None of the surviving texts can claim to have been written by Aesop himself, or even copied from lost ancestral texts. The earliest version, the one written in Latin rhyme by Phaedrus in the first century AD, followed by some of the later books, was not a translation of these stories, but a restatement.
Aesop's name, in the fifth century BC, is associated with Aesop's fables. Traditionally, he is considered a Frigian slave who lived in the sixth century BC. He was a hunchback, born mute, but was given the ability to speak because of his devout worship of the goddess Isis. His fable-telling talent gave him the ability to fool his master and earned him freedom, which in turn made him an adviser to the king. But he was not lucky for long: he was falsely accused, convicted of theft by the citizens of Delphi, and executed by throwing him from the top of a hill. His life was undoubtedly based on unsubstantiated rumors; The point is that Aesop is known for his storytelling.
Diogenes Laertius notes that the Athenian philosopher Demetrius of Phalereus (Themetrius) wrote a prose collection of Aesop's Fables in Greek in the fourth century B.C., and that surviving Greek manuscripts may have been traced back to the earliest known source. Some fables already existed in pre-Aesop's time: as early as the time of Hesiod (the Greek poet of the eighth century BC), fables appeared in ancient Greek literature, two centuries before the time of Aesop's birth, which is now recognized. Animals that behave like humans have appeared in works of art that predate ancient Greek civilizations, and some of Aesop's fables contain remnants of ancient India and Asia Minor, but these sources are not strongly evidenced, and are too uncertain to trace. Although Aesop, like others who recount these fables, is not generally the original author, it is likely that he also created some of them.
In this edition of Aesop's Fables, each illustration matches a more or less contemporary translation. For some stories, text and illustrations come from the same source. The first english copy of Aesop's Fables was the 1484 Copy of Caxton; Caxton himself translated it according to an earlier French edition, which appears to have become a standard translation and, in fact, the only English version for a century or so. In 1585, the educator and spelling reformist Bullokar re-translated Aesop's Fables, which was unique in his particular spelling (which, like all earlier translations, became standard).
In the 17th century, Ogilby and L'Estrange produced creative versions. Croxall's version, translated in 1722, became the standard English version for most of the century in which he lived; The Bewick version that later replaced it placed more emphasis on the moral allegory of the fable. In the 19th and 20th centuries, a large number of high-quality (if not particularly excellent) English translations emerged. But no English translator can match La Fontaine, whose newly created restatement has given Aesop's fables a unique place in France, becoming a monument of great literary significance and the only possible restatement of Aesop's fables in French.
In any century, not a single illustrated copy of Aesop's Fables could have been a benchmark, leaving all other editions to be compared. There is no illustrated Copy of Aesop's Fables that rivals Dürer's illustrated Apocalypse because it makes it almost impossible for all later generations to illustrate the subject. Nor did the illustrations of Aesop's Fables receive similar treatment to those of Monet for Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, Delacroix's lithographs for Goethe's Faust, Moreau le Jeune's copperplate engravings for Rousseau's novel The New Eloise, and Tinnier's woodcuts for Alice in Wonderland— in which the writer and the painter developed a close and harmonious relationship that could only occur once. Aesop, like homer, Shakespeare, and Dante, was so powerful that it was impossible to present it as a visual work of equal power, making the illustration a pale shadow of the text.
Although illustrations for Aesop's Fables appeared very early, it was the invention of the printing press that made illustrations popular and made them a major part of our pictorial history. Before the end of the 15th century, more than twenty different illustrated editions of Aesop's Fables appeared. The earliest editions, by Mondovi, Ulm and Verona, were all published between 1476 and 1479, all among the best-printed books of the 15th century.
In these versions, the animals are sketched with very few backgrounds, perhaps a tree, and a group of buildings may be added if the scene is a city. The creative interest of the illustrators is mostly focused on the central events of the fable. Mondovy's version of Aesop's Fables, with its attractively simple metal engravings, may date back to 1476 and is often considered to have been the earliest. Unfortunately, it is not in our collection (nor are other museums in the United States) and therefore cannot be included in this book. Woodcuts in Ulm, among German book illustrations, are the first to show the unique personality of the creator. Augsburg republished the book a few years later, making it the most popular and printed edition of the 15th century. Verona's version of Aesop's Fables is completely different: the carvings are more rugged and appear to have been designed by carvers with a carving knife. Another major edition of the 15th century was the Neapolitan edition of 1485. Its illustrations, surrounded by decorative lace, are particularly lively and sophisticated in capturing dramatic scenes.
In the following century, more diverse approaches were adopted. The emergence of etching technology makes line drawing more arbitrary; Chiaroscuro and detail rendering have also become more convenient. There was also greater interest in treating animals as animals, and the illustrations in Aesop's Fables, especially those of Geeraerts, showed the painters taking a more nuanced look at various animals. The scenery and background have also become more refined.
In the 17th century, there were two English-language versions of Aesop's Fables illustrated. The illustrations of Barlow, first published in 1666, are etched in a free-spirited, even somewhat careless, but with a pleasantly simple and natural style. In stark contrast is the copperplate engravings by Hollar, a mid-17th-century painter who lived in England and where much of his best works were completed. His copperplate engravings for the 1665 and 1668 editions of Aesop's Fables are extremely elegant in style, reflecting his meticulous observations of nature and often using the places he himself visited as a backdrop. While the vast majority of his works are original, some (including the lion and the mouse) are almost exactly the same as Gilettes.
In contrast, the 1677 French edition documents the labyrinth of versailles, with fountains themed around Aesop's fables scattered in its labyrinths, suggesting that they could serve as guides in the journey of life. Unfortunately, when gardening customs changed, the fountains were demolished and only a few statues remained, making Labyrinte the only record of the fascinating, extremely rare three-dimensional representation of Aesop's Fables.
The outstanding 18th-century edition is the deluxe edition of La Fontaine Fables, with large copperplate engravings based on Oudry's paintings. Audrey's paintings, engraved by Cochin and other excellent engravers, depict allegorical stories in scenes of Regent life, and their opulence in some cases almost overshadows the storyline itself. Compared with this elegant book, the design method of trancribing the picture onto the plate is a bit rough. The technique of transcribed etched or engraved images onto ceramics as a cheap alternative to hand-drawn was developed shortly after the mid-18th century. Because it is not possible to transcribe a painting on metal directly onto a ceramic sheet, it is necessary to print it on a soft cloth before transferring it to a plate. The picture reproduced in this way is reversed, because it is later printed on the paper so that it is flipped a second time in order to finally get the correct picture.
As the centuries passed, artists' creative interests became more diverse, just as illustration techniques became more abundant. In the 15th century, the only possible means of reproduction was simple woodcuts or metal carvings; By the 19th century, techniques such as etching, engraving, woodcut engraving, lithography and photographic intaglio were readily available. In particular, the invention of woodcut engravings led to an unprecedented increase in the number of editions of Aesop's Fables. Beivik popularized this technique by using tools similar to metal engraving and woodcut printing, engraving the ends of a piece of hardwood while using it as a printing mold.
He used this technique when he produced the first edition of Aesop's Fables at the end of the 18th century. Neither this edition nor the revised editions of 1818 and 1823 were his best works—considering his genius in animal illustration, they were, on the whole, surprising extensions. He was largely based on a metal engraving by Croxsol from 1722; Croxall's work is mainly based on the illustrations created by Chauveau in the first edition of the Fables of La Fontaine in 1688; The latter is largely a reference to earlier illustrations by Barlow and even Gilettes.
However, before the middle of this century, there were already several other versions using woodcut engravings. Grandvile's illustrations in 1838 and 1839 were particularly successful. He was experienced in depicting people pretending to be animals, and because many of his cartoons used them in this way, he could easily turn around and draw animals that behaved like humans. In Doré's 1868 version, the animals lived in a dark, gloomy world, much like the world he painted in The Divine Comedy of Hell, but many of the vignettes were painted in a lighter and humorous style, and he was also very good at it.
At a time when woodblock carving was at its peak in refinement, the emerging lithography technique greatly simplified the process of reproduction of drawings. Crane was one of the first pioneers to use this new technique to create illustrations of Aesop's fables. They have some art nouveau vibrancy, especially suitable for the dense composition of Birds, Beasts and Bats. Both Rackham and Calder took this approach, replicating their very different but equally pleasing paintings.
It is appropriate to conclude this anthology with the work of two contemporary painters who go back and employ techniques similar to those who first illustrated Aesop's Fables. The woodcuts of Frasconi and the hemp engravings of Low, concise and vibrant in their expression, are similar to the illustrations of Aesop's Fables in the 15th century, but can never be mistaken for works from that time, just as the illustrations in Ulm and other editions of the 1470s cannot be mistaken for works of the 20th century.
Bick felt that Croxor's version of Aesop's Fables had led hundreds of young people down a path full of wisdom and justice. The goal of our edition is not so ambitious, just to make the reader realize that Aesop's Fables has been accompanied by a huge number of illustrations in style. If this book may have played any other role, it is all thanks to Aesop.