Arthur Golding’s A Moral Fabletalk and Other Renaissance Fable Translations. Edited by Lisa Blake and Kathryn Vomero Santos. MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations. Vol. 12. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017. xvii + 574 pp. £35. ISBN 978-1-78188-606-9.
Volume 12 of the new MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series is an edition by Liza Blake and Kathryn Vomero Santos of Arthur Golding’s translation of Arnold Freitag’s Mythologia ethica, ‘and other renaissance fable translations’. Golding’s Moral Fabletalk takes about about 250 pages of this large volume, with 200 pages given over to selections from William Caxton, Richard Smith, John Brinsley and — best of all — John Ogilby. The fables are all illustrated with beautifully clear images taken from old texts. There is a concise and useful introduction covering literary-theoretical and -historical aspects of the fable as a kind of writing, and also the editorial principles used in preparing the texts. The editors have certainly been assiduous in this later respect, and one gasps to learn that they have consulted 106 of the 123 surviving copies of Ogilby’s works, especially since they have reproduced only 17 of his130 odd fables, including the intriguing fable of ‘The young man and his cat’ which mixes the myth of Pygmalion with the story of the Clerk and the Girl, and has an extraordinary image of a cat in mid-transformation to a maid. (The editors are both aleurophiles, by the way, and the volume is dedicated to their cats).
This is not the first time that Golding’s manuscript has been edited. There is a PhD thesis from 1979, and R. G. Barnes prepared a modern-spelling version, with notes and illustrations, in a limited edition from the Arion Press in 1987 (it may still be purchased at $315). The new MHRA edition is justified on the grounds of its greater availability (it costs £35), and also because it contains a lot more material in the form of the fables by other authors. The range of authors and texts offered by the new edition is surely what will make it so valuable (and cheap) an edition to any university library. The fables by other writers have been chosen to allow for comparisons to be made across the corpus, and one can see teachers of courses not only in Renaissance literature, but also in translation studies, directing their students to this volume as a source of research projects. The section on further reading will also be invaluable for these students — and for scholars, too. So this is a good score for Blake and Vomero Santos, and also for the MHRA series.
One or two quibbles might be raised. It would have been useful to have a little more biographical information about the authors, especially the main man, Golding. But it is not hard to find this information elsewhere. More surprisingly, there is hardly any allusion to the actual text of Freitag’s Mythologia, nor any account of how well (or otherwise) Golding has translated it. Freitag’s text is easily accessible via the Internet Archive for those who wish to make their own comparisons. The merest glance at the first fable, the one about the poor horse flogged to death by its cruel master, shows that Golding, like so many of his contemporaries, follows the syntax of his Latin source — which is formed of a single long sentence — too rigidly to produce the sort of colloquial style we might expect from a fable. In the new edition, the text of the English version is divided into three sentences, the second beginning ‘From whence’, and the third ‘Wherefore’. A modern translator might have started these sentences with ‘From here’ (a muddy pool) and ‘Therefore’, but Golding sticks doggedly to Freitag’s unde and quare. A little more of this sort of thing would have been useful.[1]
Perhaps we might also note that the layout of Freitag’s book (it was printed by Christopher Plantin at Antwerp in 1579) is superior to the MHRA volume in that it does not waste so much space when fitting the words around the illustrations. To be sure, there is a house-style to consider, but it is a pity that the publisher did not see fit to employ an imaginative designer to make the book more beautiful. However, these quibbles should not detract from the real value of this new book.
Finally, then, a few words on the interesting problem of the fable itself, as they are raised by Blake and Vomero Santos in their introduction. They are aware that it is difficult to define the fable as a genre, which is true, but this leads them to a very dubious conclusion: ‘The best approach, therefore, might be to define fables not formally, but historically’ (2). They quote E. Wheatley’s proposition that ‘formalist definitions of fable as a genre’ should be dismissed as ‘superfluous to a historicized understanding’ of particular corpora, in his case, ‘the elegiac Romulus collection’, and, in theirs, a loosely organised set of collections that accumulated in various permutations over the period of the renaissance.[2] They are quite rightly not concerned to concoct ‘a transcendent, timeless definition of “fable”, but to give a basic sketch of the contours of a historical definition’ (2). That involves a survey of the historical semantics of the words mythos, fabula, and fable, with particular emphasis on the connection with the name Aesop. This is all very useful, and we learn that these words meant different things to different people at different times. Moreover, for mainly paedogogical reasons, explained more fully in the sections which follow, fuzziness crept in: ‘Early modern authors were aware that Aesop’s fables were closer to a swarm than a defined body of work’ (11). But what allowed this authors nevertheless to perceive or suppose that these fables actually had enough in common to be called fables? A swarm still has a form, even if it is more dynamic and elusive than the form of a body.
It is not as though Blake and Vomero Santos are unaware of all this. Here and there, formalism of the usual non-transcendental kind turns up in their introduction, as when they puzzle over the fable of the chameleon (32), and the balance between the emblematic and the narrative elements of the fables they have read, and perhaps even of ‘the Renaissance fable’ as a historical genre. Or again, when they ask: ‘What kinds of patterns appear in terms of what morals are offered, what animals appear, and so on? What is the relationship between narrative, however brief, and moral?’ (30). For a moment there, the phantom of structuralism, even more alarming than the straw man of Platonic formalism, seems to loom up to terrify the reader who has been assured comfort and safety in the irreducible historical diversity of the quasi-genre in question.
So it is a pity that Blake and Vomero Santos did not attend more to the formal and aesthetic aspects of the fable, but there is still plenty of really solid literary-cultural and book-historical substance in this introduction, and, that, I suspect, is what most readers actually want. The development of the corpus – or corpora – of Aesopian writing, and the teaching of fables in the class-room, are given a succinct but comprehensive treatment which will be useful to any reader interested in the genre.
Mike Pincombe
Newcastle University
[1] So, in the first case, Freitag writes: ‘in difficilem quendam altoque coeno demersum locum deducitur, unde cum se explicare nequiret’. See Arnold Freitag, Mythologia ethica (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin for Philipp Galle, 1579), 2. Golding writes: ‘was driven into a cumbersome and deep miry place. From whence when he could not wind himself out’ (62).
[2] Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and his Followers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 5.
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The tales by different writers have been chosen to allow comparisons throughout the corpus, and Renaissance literature and translation studies teachers are having their students use this volume for research projects.
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