Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/194

186 ing; but, as he explains in his preface that his translation is intended to serve as a text-book to the Syriac student, we have, we suppose, no right to quarrel with his choice.

The first thing that strikes a reader of this curious book is the inaptness, from the European point of view, of the title, "The Fables of Bidpai," to what is practically a collection of moral discourses, interspersed with illustrative anecdotes, parables and apologues, strung together upon the slenderest possible thread of narrative and bearing scant resemblance to what is commonly known in Europe as a fable, as will at once appear from a comparison with the fables of Æsop, Lafontaine, Yriarte, or even Kriloff. The European conception of the fable is essentially Æsopic, and (as Mr. Falconer points out in his Introduction) in fables of this form animals are allowed to act as animals, whilst Indian fables make them act as men in form of animals. Indeed, the unknown author of the Indian original of Kalilah and Dimnah, whether Bidpai (Pilpay) or another, does not trouble himself to conceal the purely human character of the (nominally) beast-personages of which he makes use for the purpose of enouncing and illustrating the moral instances and rules of life and faith he desires to impress upon his readers, and the artistic worth of his production suffers enormously by his carelessness in this respect. What, indeed (to cite only one or two instances), can be more destructive to the illusion of a reader, whose object is not exclusively scientific or scholastic, than to find, in a story where all the speakers are beasts, jackals (see Kalilah and Dimnah), hares, owls, and crows (see the story of the Owls and Crows) constantly spoken of as men and addressed as "O man," "madman," "insolent man," &c., &c., and to find them all, as a rule, expressing and referring to the sentiments, circumstances, and motives of action peculiar not to the bestial but the human part of the Creation? It may, indeed, be surmised, that for some, at least, of these incongruities the translator himself is responsible, as he has in other instances of the same character substituted (as he would, perhaps, have done well to do throughout) the word "one" (e.g., "O ill-starred one," &c.) for the unsatisfactory "man." We have not the Syriac text to refer to, but in Arabic the original of the vocative examples cited above would stand thus; ya hadha, lit.