La Fontaine's Complete Fables in Modern Verse - Paperback

by Randolph Paul Runyon (Author)

The fox and the crow, the tortoise and the hare, the hen that laid the golden eggs - all of these familiar characters, and more, are present and accounted for in this complete translation of La Fontaine's fables. Runyon's translation is delightfully fresh and faithful to the original French. He brings new life to these timeless tales. "Dr. Randy Runyon brings La Fontaine's fables alive for a new generation of English readers. Moving from the rhyme-rich, late seventeenth-century French to rhyme-poor English, he employs the couplet to maintain surprising, apt and often humorous rhyme patterns throughout the twelve books of the fables. The wisdom and good sense of the fables is no surprise, the feeling, in this translation, that they are of and for our time is a surprise." James A. Perkins, Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Westminster College, and author of Decembers and The All-American, Coast-to-Coast, Icebox Poetry Anthology.

Author Biography

Randolph Paul Runyon, recently retired after 35 years of teaching French at Miami University of Ohio, is the author of eleven other books since 1981, including a commentary on the Fables (In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: A Thread Through the Fables) and the first genuinely complete English translation of the Contes et Nouvelles en Vers (La Fontaine's Complete Tales in Verse: An Illustrated and Annotated Translation). In these and other books he draws out the "intratextuality" of literary collections such as La Fontaine's Fables and Tales, showing how the individual parts of such collections fit together in surprising ways. These books include commentaries on Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and Spleen de Paris, Montaigne's Essays, Robert Penn Warren's poetry, and Raymond Carver's short stories. In a totally different vein, in Delia Webster and Underground Railroad he narrates the remarkable life of the first white woman to be imprisoned for helping slaves escape. That book has been praised as a "Victorian melodrama [that] reads like a detective story, and yet is serious scholarship that makes a significant contribution to the historiography of slavery, abolitionism, the Old South, and nineteenth-century American reform. Many of the aging 'new social' historians will wish that they had written a book as appealing as this one." He has maintained in addition an active musical career as composer, organist and choir director, and as an exponent of American popular piano styles from ragtime to the Jazz Age. Several of his organ compositions have been published by Evensong: Music, Media and Graphics (http: //www.evensongmusic.net/runyonorgan.html), and have been recorded by other artists on YouTube.