Review
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AESOPUS VIVIT! Laura Gibbs' recent book, Aesop's
Fables in Latin: Ancient Wit and Wisdom from the Animal Kingdom
is a truly inspiring labor of love. Most of us were introduced as
little children to these stories, especially the animal tales, in
colorful, illustrated editions with simple language, complete
with a moral lesson attached. It is likely that most of us have
not picked up a copy of Aesop's Fables to read for enjoyment in
years, except perhaps to our own children or grandchildren. But
like the stories themselves, there is much more to this book than
initially meets the eye! When you buy a copy of Aesop's Fables in
Latin, you get much more than the 80 tales contained within.
Gibbs' book is an open door to a rich, unbroken tradition of
literature that spans the centuries, from ancient times to the
middle ages and the Renaissance and on into the modern world, as
well as to the incredible collection of ancillary resources that
Gibbs' has created online.
Aesop's Fables in Latin is beautifully organized. Be sure to read
the author's introduction, which provides a guide to all the
features included in the book as well as some of the best study
tips and reading strategies for reading Latin that I have ever
seen in a transitional reader. While Gibbs' provides a thorough
grammatical overview to the fables, she encourages nascent
readers to go beyond mere translation, suggesting innovative ways
to experience the fables beyond simply rendering them into
English. She furnishes ideas for oral and dramatic
interpretations of the stories as well as suggestions for
incorporating composition and creative writing. The fables
themselves are presented in a graduated order of difficulty,
accompanied by their own individual introductions, grammatical
overview, facing vocabulary, and helpful notes. Although no
morals are provided in the Latin text, relevant and pithy Latin
proverbs (another passion of the author) are interspersed
throughout the book, providing inspiration for students to draw
their own conclusions, consider different perspectives, and,
hopefully, write their own morals in Latin. Other helpful
features include lists of dramatis personae, a vocabulary
frequency list, and a full Latin-English glossary. Forty original
black-and-white illustrations by the 17th century painter and
engraver Francis Barlow are included, providing additional
context to many of the stories. --Sharon Kazmierski, Latin Teach
Aesop's Fables in Latin is a wonderful new resource for
second-year Latin courses and for independent learners who have
completed an elementary program. Gibbs'...has taken a collection
of Latin fables from the seventeenth century and repackaged it as
a serious and smart intermediate reader. Aesop's Fables in Latin
is made up of 80 of the original 110 Latin fables composed by the
writer and translator Robert Codrington(1602-1665) for a
trilingual fable book (Latin, French, and English) that became
famous primarily because of its illustrations (of which Gibbs has
included 40) by the English artist Francis Barlow (d.1704). All
of the fables are presented with extensive notes and instructive
commentary, and more than half of them are also adorned with one
or more apposite proverbs in large shadowed textboxes. There is
something refreshingly unfashionable about an intermediate reader
that features the work of an author who is emphatically neither
canonical nor ancient, and, moreover, one who is linked rather
tenuously to an essentially anonymous ancient fable tradition.
But Aesop's Fables in Latin is anything but a radical break with
tradition....fables have held a prominent place in Latin(and
Greek curricula for more than two millennia. As one reads through
Gibbs' meticulous and thoughtful presentation of these fables it
is easy to see why they have endured for so long in the
classroom.
...Gibbs' has stripped all of the fables in Aesop's Fables in
Latin of their original morals, reformatted them, and reorganized
them according to the difficulty of the Latin. While the simplest
fables are not easy to incorporate into a first-year course,
anyone who has completed such a course ought to be able to handle
even the most difficult ones. For example, the very first fable
in the book uses indirect statement as well as subjunctives
introduced by both cum and quod, while the last two fables have
the gerund, deponent verbs, indirect questions introduced by uter
and quomodo, and a causal subjunctive. The most distinctive
feature of Aesop's Fables in Latin is the way in which Gibbs' has
constructed a total of 80 discussions of Latin grammar and style
adapted to the 80 fables, so that each fable is also devoted to a
particular mini-lesson.
Each Latin fable is preceded by a brief Introduction and a
Grammar Overview. The Introductions provide some background
information, including references to one or two extant Greek,
Roman, or English versions of the same fable. Gibbs' then
discusses one item of Latin grammar or style before each fable in
the Grammar Overviews, including topics such as unusual verb
forms, points of syntax, 'little' words (postpositive particles,
correlatives, and relative pronouns), word formation, and
stylistic matters. The issues covered range from the very
specific ('huc and illuc'; 'cum + subjunctive'; 'Frequentative
Verbs') to the more general ('Adjectives and Adverbs,' on the
ways in which Latin often uses an adjective where English would
use an adverb; and 'Ambiguous Parts of Speech,')... Each fable
nicely demonstrates the lesson of its Grammar Overview, but,
because the fables were not originally composed for this purpose,
many of the grammatical features best exemplified in one fable in
fact surface in comparable ways throughout the other fables, and
a few of the fables do not have particularly distinctive
grammatical features best exemplified in one fable in fact
surface in comparable ways throughout the other fables, and a few
of the fables do not have particularly distinctive grammatical
features. Thus, one may have encountered a certain phenomenon a
few times by the time it receives its own Grammar Overview; this
is not, however, a major problem because the goal of Aesop's
Fables in Latin is to improve reading skills, not to introduce
grammatical concepts. --Jeremy Lefkowitz, Swarthmore College
I purchased this when it was first available, and I love it!
Thank you so much for making such a great text available to
people. My students love it, too! It's great to read some of
these fables and then apply them to current events.--Kristen
Kanipe
Aesop's Fables in Latin: Ancient Wit and Wisdom from the Animal
Kingdom, by Laura Gibbs (366 pages, February 2009), includes 80
Latin fables from the 1687 edition of British illustrator Francis
Barlow's Aesop's Fables. Designed for beginning students of
Latin, the text is a fun lesson supplement that includes an
introduction to each fable, a grammar overview, vocabulary, and
grammar notes, Gibbs' scatters relevant Latin proverbs throughout
the book, along with forty 17th-century etchings by Francis
Barlow. --George M. Eberhart, Senior Editor, American Libraries
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