New Shine on Old Truths

THE FABLES OF LA FONTAINE (342 pp.)--Translated by Marianne Moore--Viking ($5).

For a quarter of a century, some of the finest poetry written in the U.S. has come from a modest apartment on a rundown street in Brooklyn. But in recent years it has come only in a thin trickle. Since 1945, only three poems have been published by the charming grey-haired spinster who has won every U.S. poetry prize worth winning. Not that Marianne Moore had been idle in the last eight years; she had never worked so hard in her life. Now 66, she has finished her labor of love: a new verse translation of the 241 Fables of La Fontaine.

Whether a fine poetess (Selected Poems, 1935, What Are Years, 1941, Nevertheless, 1944} should have given up that much of her own writing life in homage to th 17th-century French fabulist is a question critics may well ask. Translator Moore's answer is ready and certain: "Compared with the fables, my own work is insignificant. No poet now living could have written them." By now, Poetess Moore is so soaked in the lessons learned the hard way by La Fontaine's zoo and barnyard folk that "subconsciously I live by his precepts."

The Serpent's Tail. Admittedly, most La Fontaine precepts are as sound as Ben Franklin's--e.g., "Better think of the outcome before you begin," "A counterfeit's sure to be exposed to light"--although they are dressed in brocade rather than homespun. The fables he borrowed from Aesop in La Fontaine's hands became tart and graceful satires on society, with neat plots and sharp blackout punch lines.

But whether they lend themselves to English translation is another matter. Marianne Moore is the only first-rate poet who has ever undertaken to do the whole job. How much better she has done than the standard translators becomes quickly apparent in The Head and Tail of the Serpent. A turn-of-the-century version put the familiar stanza this way:

Two parts the serpent has-- Of men the enemies-- The head and tail: the same Have won a mighty fame, Next to the cruel Fates;-- So that, indeed, hence They once had great debates About precedence.

Poetess Moore's version: A serpent has mobility Which can shatter intrepidity. The tail-tip's mental to-and-fro And taillike taper head's quick blow-- Like Fate's--have the power to appall. Each end had thought for years that it had no equal And that it alone knew What to do.

She was determined to capture not only the literal meaning but the intricate minuets of La Fontaine's rhyme schemes. Two things made the task gargantuan:1) Jean de la Fontaine was one of the cleverest versifiers in all literature; 2) Miss Moore started with the seemingly fatal handicap of only three years of school French. Her first try was so faulty that it had to be thrown away. (Said her mother, who did know French: "This is so coarse, and French is so delicate.") Some of the fables Miss Moore translated ten times before she and her editor were satisfied.

The Purple Grapes. What had seemed at first an amiable chore became a daily burden:"There was no fun in it until after the first five years." Now, the job done, she feels "like a tramp" without a job. Alone in the same apartment where she has lived since 1929, she wonders how her poetic restatement of the old La Fontaine truths will fare in the bookstores. Both the difficulties she faced and the quality of her frequent triumphs can be sensed in her freshening of the ancient favorite, The Fox and the Grapes:

A fox of Gascon, though some say of Norman descent, When starved till faint gazed up at a trellis to which grapes were tied-- Matured till they glowed with a purplish tint As though there were gems inside. Now grapes were what our adventurer on strained haunches chanced to crave, But because he could not reach the vine He said, "These grapes are sour, I'll leave them for some knave." Better, I think, than an embittered whine.

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