[In the following essay, Keller and Keating trace the history of Aesopic fables in Spain until the fifteenth-century publication of the Spanish Ysopet.]

Aesop's Fables, with a Life of Aesop—in Spanish La vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas hystoriadas—along with versions with similar titles in many western languages, represents the apogee of that body of stories we know as Aesop's Fables. This may seem an unusual statement to make, since the Ysopet, as we shall term it in this introduction, was not translated into Castilian until the late fifteenth century and not printed in its entirety in Spain until 1489. An incomplete version was printed in Saragossa in 1482 with woodcuts colored by hand. According to Victoria Burrus, who pointed out to me the existence of this incomplete incunable, the 1489 edition we have used as the basis of our translation is a corrected and augmented version of the 1482 text. While the 1482 edition should be the basis of a critical edition, since it is incomplete it cannot be the text from which a translation should be made. The edition of 1488, printed in Toulouse and edited by Victoria Burrus and Harriet Goldberg, would not have influenced the many Spanish versions listed by Cotarelo y Mori in his introduction to the facsimile edition of Ysopete hystoriado of 1489. The edition of 1482 would quite probably have been the one used by the printed in Toulouse. Be that as it may, since the text of 1482 is incomplete, and since the text of Toulouse of 1488 contains woodcuts not asexcellent as those in the printing of 1489 in Saragossa, we are confident that our choice of edition is best for the present translation, which is the first into the English language.

To begin with, we do not know if indeed in the sixth century B.C. there actually lived an author named Aesop any more than we can be certain that about three thousand years ago a man named Homer flourished. But we believe in an Aesop because ancient writers of consequence—Herodotus, Plato, and Aristotle, to name but three—mention him as a fabulist and because various ancient writers—Babrius, Phaedrus, Avianus, and others—gathered and set down fables they attributed to him. No manuscripts of Aesop have survived from that early period and, what is worse, nothing like a complete collection of those fables has survived the ages. We do not know, therefore, how many fables go back to the original collections. But fables attributed to Aesop were gathered and set down in writing across the centuries, some collections copious and some limited as to number, in both Greek and Latin. Wherever Greek colonists went in ancient times, they surely took some of the fables with them, and in Spain this would have scattered Aesop along the eastern seaboard. Roman conquerors and settlers surely brought Aesop with them to Rome's favorite colony.

Closer to us, because Aesop began to appear in the vernacular literatures of the West, is the impact of Aesop in the Middle Ages. In Spain, Odo of Cheriton's Fabulae, containing a great deal of Aesopic material, was probably translated from the Latin in the thirteenth century, when Odo flourished, even though the only extant manuscript of it in Spanish translation, El libro de los gatos, is of fifteenth-century vintage. The collection of eastern fables and stories Kalila wa Dimna, translated from the Arabic in 1251 at the behest of Prince Alfonso (to be crowned in 1252 as Alfonso X) and entitled Calila e Digna, contained some Aesopic fables, attesting to the fact that Aesop had penetrated the literatures of the Islamic world. In the fourteenth century Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, inserted more than twenty-five Aesopic fables into his Libro de buen amor, and his contemporary Don Juan Manuel adapted several in his Conde Lucanor. In the first quarter of the fifteenth century the Archdeacon Clemente Sanchez used a considerable number in his Libro de los exenplos por a.b.c., the most copious book of brief narratives in the medieval Spanish language. Aesop, then, was well known in Spain long before the printing of the Ysopet.

We must trace the ancestry of Spain's great corpus of Aesopic fables as they appeared in the West to the Middle Ages' most comprehensive anthology collected and written down in one volume in medieval Greek by Maximus Planudius, ambassador to Venice from Constantinople in 1327. From what sources this ecclesiastic garnered the many fables he set down is not known, nor do we know the authorship of the fictitious thirteenth-century Life of Aesop which Planudius included as an important preface to his anthologyof fables. It is certain that he did not stop with fables considered as belonging to an Aesopic tradition, for he included a good many brief narratives definitely not fables at all. These stemmed from eastern tales, many of which originated in the Panchatantra, written in Sanskrit, and passed through Pahlevi into Arabic and thence into Planudius's native Greek. It is even possible that a few included by him were taken from folklore.

Had Planudius's anthology remained in Greek, the fate of Aesopic fables in the West would have been far less happy than it is. Though we owe much to Planudius, since he saved many fables from virtual oblivion, we owe almost as much to his translator into Latin, one Rinuccio Thesalo or d'Arezzo, who toward the middle of the fifteenth century brought into Western Europe the first nearly complete anthology of Aesopic material. Some debt is owed, too, to Cardinal Antonio Cerda of Mallorca, to whom d'Arezzo dedicated his book, for it is likely that this important ecclesiastic did much to publicize Aesop and to aid in the dissemination of d'Arezzo's translation. It may be more than coincidence that Saragossa in the Kingdom of Aragon became a center of Aesopic fables in Spanish so that eventually the Ysopet was published there. Lending support to this statement is the fact that d'Arezzo's Latin work was translated into Castilian probably in the 1460s at the behest of Enrique, viceroy of Catalufia under his cousin Ferdinand of Aragon, who married Isabella of Castile. Enrique, to whom the manuscript of the Ysopet had been submitted for approval in the 1460s, could not see it printed, since printing did not reach Spain until 1480.

It should be noted that d'Arezzo's translation from the Greek was also translated into other European tongues, but the way in which this affected the course of Aesopic fables in Spain will be treated below. Suffice to say that one important center of translation was Germany.

The work of d'Arezzo in Latin had great success in most of Europe, at least among the erudite, but much less among vernacular speakers whose Latin was weak or nonexistent. Almost as soon as the printing press was invented in Germany vernacular versions of Aesop began to appear. Doctor Heinrich Steinhöwel's translation from d'Arezzo was published by Johannes Zeiner in Ulm and Augsburg at some time between 1474, when printing reached Ulm, and 1483, when it came to Augsburg. The Steinhöwel translation followed the order of fables in d'Arezzo, as might have been expected, and included the lengthy "Life of Aesop," which should be regarded as an important contribution to the rise and development of the European novel. This fictitious biography runs to just over twenty-five pages. It contains a frontispiece illustrating Aesop himself and twenty-eight woodcuts, each depicting an event in his life.

The corpus of fables is divided into eight separate sections variously called "books" or "parts." In the Editio Princeps' table of contents each fable or other form of brief narrative is listed by title. Books I, II, III, and IV contain twenty fables each andare composed of many fables we recognize as belonging to the Aesopic tradition. Book V contains seventeen fables and bears the title Fabulas extravagantes, possibly because these stories belong to less familiar collections, such as the Roman de Renart, the French fabliaux, and folkloric sources. We have labeled this book The Fanciful Fables of Aesop, since this is one meaning of extravagantes. Book VI also contains seventeen fables and bears the title Las fabulas de Remicio, that is, fables of Rinuccio d'Arezzo, a significant fabulist.

Book VII, Las fabulas de Aviano, comes from fables written by one Avianus, who flourished sometime between the second and fifth centuries. It contains twenty-seven stories. Book VIII, Las fabulas collectas de Alfonso e de Poggio y de otros en la forma e orden seguiente, contains twenty-two. The Alfonso of the title is Petrus Alfonsus, the Aragonese Jew whose twelfth-century Disciplina Clericalis was perhaps the most oft quoted of collections. Poggio is Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), whose humorous and often scatological Facetiae were among the most popular of fable anthologies. We have not been able to identify "los otros" as to source.

In 1489, just six years after the printing in Augsburg, a German printer named Jan Hurus, transplanted to Saragossa, published the Editio Princeps of La vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas hystoriadas. Hurus must have known the German version. He had brought the science of printing to Aragon, and he embellished his printing of Ysopet with the same woodcuts, or virtually identical copies, printed in the editions of Zeiner in Ulm and Augsburg. One can state, therefore, that the relationship between the German translation of d'Arezzo and the Spanish is remarkably close. The only noticeable difference between the two, insofar as content is concerned, lies in the section entitled "Collectas," in which there are four fables not found in the German text. In a Spanish version of 1496 four more were added. The similarity of the woodcuts and ignorance of the origin of the Spanish translation have led some to believe that the Spanish Ysopet was a translation of the German—an obvious error, since both the German and the Castilian were translated from the Latin of d'Arezzo.

Such, in the very briefest terms, is the history of the definitive collections of Aesopic fables in Spain.

The famous woodcuts deserve more attention, for they served not only to enliven the fables and other brief narratives but to fix them in the memories of readers. Narrative art in book illustration had, in medieval times, developed to a remarkable extent. It is not strange, then, that this art continued in the Renaissance in a form not well known in earlier times, that is, in woodcuts, which could be printed as easily as letters. It was primarily in Germany and the Netherlands that this art reached its height. These were the times of Durer and the "little masters," Aldorfer, Behams, and Pencz, who first began to forsake religious topics in woodcuts to produce, with a touch of the decorative quality learned from Italian masters, the humor and studied debauchery of everyday life.

And so it was that the Editio Princeps of the Ysopet, printed in 1489 and made available to thousands, began the centuries-long influence of the greatest fables of the ancient world. From this first volume all the later Spanish editions came, and from this tradition all Spanish writers who mentioned Aesop or used his fables in their works drew their references. It can be stated without fear of contradiction that the romantic life of Aesop and the collection of fables made available to Spaniards in 1489 was the most widely read body of literature across at least two centuries in Spain. Nor should we wonder at this. After all, the same fables from their inception in distant Antiquity until the present, have attracted and held human attention. It is fortunate that the Royal Spanish Academy in 1929 published a complete facsimile of the single extant copy of the Editio Princeps, thereby preserving it for posterity. With the scholarly introduction by Emilio Cotareli y Mori, it contributes vastly to our understanding of a great work of the past.

Today Aesop is read for the pleasure his fables afford rather than for the utilitarian value of their lessons, although these lessons are present, as they were in the fifteenth century and, for that matter, in all the previous centuries. These lessons are universal and are at home in any age and any culture, for they are based upon life itself and the practical wisdom one needs to survive. One can, of course, dispense with the lesson and simply enjoy the stories per se, as children do. And yet it may be impossible to divorce dulce (story) from utile (lesson), because the moralization found in each fable is actually a component of narrative technique perhaps as much as are plot, conflict, characterization, and the other elements of narrative. People expected the moralization, even if they did not always realize they were imbibing it. Moreover, the fables led to the creation of proverbs, which are always a delight and a convenience—even a necessity in daily parlance. In Spain, where proverbs are still a way of life, the Ysopet must have generated more of such witty or sententious sayings than anywhere else. In our own daily parlance we seldom pass a day without uttering an "Aesopic proverb," even in abbreviated form, as in "like a dog in the manager," "sour grapes," "cat's paw," and many more.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the Roman Catholic Church allowed Aesopic fables to creep into its sermons and homilies, despite the fact that Aesopic "morality" in its utter utilitarianism was a far cry from the tenets of Christianity. Not even the weak excuse that examples of duplicity and selfishness could be used to teach the avoidance of such qualities actually justified the telling of such fables in the pulpit. The influenceof Aesop was everywhere. People heard the fables recited and read them in books, they were depicted in sculpture, in tapestries, in carvings of wood and ivory and stone, they were seen on the capitals of columns and in frescoes and other paintings, and most of all they were familiar in book illustrations.

And today where does one find Aesop? His fables appear in story books for children; some can be found in school books; reciters of folktales include Aesopic fables; in some parts of the world professional tellers or readers offer such fables in their repertories; anthologies like ours in translation contain them; and fables concerned with adultery and cuckoldry, which are not found in true Aesopic fables but are often found accompanying them, have appeared in as popular a magazine as Playboy in its "Ribald Classics." Stories in this last category have reached perhaps the largest possible audience, upwards of more than two million subscribers, not counting the many others who read each copy. Aesop's fables are not dead.

The language of La vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas hystoriadas is good fifteenth-century Castilian colored somewhat by Aragonese, since it is quite likely that the translator was a native of Aragon. But since translations are often shaped to some degree by the original tongue, specialists may see something not quite typical. They should consider, even so, that a work accepted by a humanist of such consequence as the Viceroy of Catalufia could not have been regarded by him as faulty or dialectal. To the reader of the modern English version none of this is significant, of course. In short, the Spanish from which the present translation was made must have been well received in the Peninsula, to judge by the number of subsequent editions.

The present translation of the Ysopet follows to a rather remarkable degree the philosophy of the translator from the Latin, and one may read that interesting concept of the translator's art in the first few lines of the Ysopet. The approach to translation taken by the author five hundred years ago and the present-day translators are surprisingly parallel. Modern scholars can improve upon the original, however, and can achieve better success in rendering the imagery, speech, concepts, and thought of the Spanish text. Our parlance is of the most modern American vintage. We have broken up the inordinately lengthy sentences of the original into more manageable form, have created paragraphs, have punctuated where the original did not, and have avoided many of the archaisms and strictures that Hurus's book contained. We believe we have succeeded in offering to modern readers one of the most complete anthologies of Aesopic fables, together with a number of those non-Aesopic tales that by the fifteenth century tended to be included with the true fables. Readers of our translation of La vida del Ysopet con susfabulas hystoriadas are in essence reading what d'Arezzo gave his readers in Latin and therefore what Maximus Planudius offered his readers in Greek.