Aesop's Human Zoo: Roman Stories About Our Bodies

Title

en_US Aesop's Human Zoo: Roman Stories About Our Bodies

Description

en_US This is a hardbound book (hard cover)

en_US This book has a dust jacket (book cover)

en_US Language note: Bilingual: English/Latin

en_US Original language: lat

en_US First edition

en_US Translated from Phaedrus's Latin by John Henderson

Creator

en_US Bewick, Thomas

Contributor

en_US Bewick, Thomas

Date

2016-01-25T19:54:57Z

en_US 2004-11

en_US 2004

Date Available

2016-01-25T19:54:57Z

Date Issued

en_US 2004

Abstract

en_US This is a lively little book! Henderson makes his own choice of fifty of Phaedrus' texts to present and orders them creatively around our bodiliness. The book is not what a reader today would expect of another translation of a Latin classic. This book makes a reader think, take notice, even disagree. Henderson, like his Phaedrus, is intrusive. I felt after a half hour of reading that I wanted to get rid of him and get to Phaedrus, and I suppose he wants just that reaction. Playing with the several sides of fable, he often strains the principle of non-contradiction, as in this statement: Fable knows, perfectly well, that our bodies (don't) make us us (9). Struggling readers will ask whether they do or do not. Henderson and the fabulist will probably just nod their heads! I enjoyed my trip through a third of these texts, grateful for the Latin as well as the creative, lively, provocative translations. Whether they clarify as much as they provoke is a good question. The translations do offer the sharp, raw, sometimes bawdy, terse, colloquial English that the flyleaf promises. I found particularly stimulating the comments after some poems. This set on 111, on a conversation between a butterfly and a wasp, may be representative: Reincarnation -- as classical folklore? It seems far fetched./Maybe this is fakelore. It's always hard to tell, to be sure./Maybe we should be stung into looking for what fables are, not were./That's what this book wanted to be about. Has been. The indices at the back show, of course, Henderson's imaginative approach: Tables for the Fables, The Cast of Characters, and Tempting Topics.

Identifier

en_US 9780226326818 (cloth : alk. paper)

en_US 6514 (Access ID)

uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10504/81837

Language

en_US eng

Publisher

en_US University of Chicago Press

en_US Chicago, IL

Subject

en_US PA6564.E5 H455 2004

en_US Phaedrus

en_US Title Page Scanned

Type

en_US Book, Whole