La Fontaine's Bawdy—of Libertines, Louts, and Lechers,

translations from Contes et nouvelles en vers by Norman R. Shapiro

m a dirty old man. I've been a dirty old man since I was 12 or 13 years old. You don't need to be old to be a dirty old man. You don't even need to be a man. I know a few respectable ladies who could qualify. It's a question of mind and attitude. Being a dirty old man doesn't necessarily mean being a pervert. At least not in my understanding and use of the expression. It means being able to see the funny side of certain sex situations, a play on words, a double-entendre. A dirty old man is not necessarily vulgar in speech or manners. Witness La Fontaine.

What liberation when I discovered Rabelais and his gutsy stories of giants with erections so tall you could attach a sheet to them and use them as sails to power a boat. And what pleasure to discover that poets I'd read and learned to admire, like Verlaine, Apollinaire, or even the sacred Jean de La Fontaine, author of the celebrated fables, had also written verse that the good fathers in the private school I was attending would not let us read.

Most if not all of the stories in La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers are borrowed from somewhere else: Boccacio's Decameron or Petronius's Satyricon or some such tale going back to the Middle Ages. As far as I know, La Fontaine did not make use of Chaucer's bawdy stories, but he could have. Norman Shapiro's poetic translations in a sense re-translates in English what La Fontaine had translated into verse. Both their minds work in the same fashion. La Fontaine makes the stories even more amusing to read by giving them a poetic form that is usually associated with elevated feelings, thus creating a rich ironic contrast. And Shapiro takes this one step further by putting this verse in another language and allowing English readers the iconoclastic pleasure of smashing literary idols. No respect for the classics. We dirty old men can't be trusted.