The cross sack
The Quersack (French: La Besace ) is the title of a fable by the French poet Jean de La Fontaine , which he classified as the seventh in the first book of his collection of fables. The fabulist was inspired by ancient fables, but transformed it into an animal fable, which puts it in a lively, dramatic context. In La Fontaine's version, it is not initially clear how the fable gets its title; this only happens through the proclamation of morality at the end of the fable.
content
One day Jupiter called all beasts from heaven to gather around his throne. If one has to complain about his own form or being, let him bring it forward without fear. He first asks the monkey to present his complaint. He then announces that he is very satisfied with his appearance, but shows pityingly at the big, clumsy and " half-licked " bear. The bear, happy with its admirable figure, says of the massive elephant that you can add something to its tail and remove something from its ears; the elephant is convinced that he is exactly right, but does not find the obesity of the “whale” lady to suit his appetite. So it goes in turn down to the smallest creatures; the lady ant sees herself as a real colossus measured by the tiny mite ("ciron") . Jupiter sent them all home after they had all vowed themselves.
The moral: we are lynxes to our fellow human beings and moles to ourselves, we forgive ourselves everything and nothing to our neighbors. We were all created by the Almighty Creator as rag people with a cross sack on our back, the back pocket for our mistakes and the front pocket for the mistakes of others.
interpretation
Unlike his role models, La Fontaine made his version of the fable lively and metrically varied. Jupiter solemnly offers the animals the opportunity to think about themselves and, if necessary, to improve themselves, thereby emphasizing his own size.
La Fontaine was the first to submit his complaint to the monkey, as he ("pour cause") had the most reason to do so (the monkey is considered the ugliest and most disgusting of animals and, as a courtier, is characterized by almost universal treason and hypocrisy).
The title names lady are often used at La Fontaine - here lady fourmi (German woman ant) and lady baleine (woman whale), which are respect for the ants as the most industrious and for the whale as the largest animal. Lady was once a title of nobility given only to women of high rank, La Fontaine used it here in a comical way to qualify a male character. The elephant's appetite, which the obese Lady Baleine does not match, is an allusion to a letter from Madame de Sévigné ( "M. le prince l'a lu d'un bout a tente, l'autre avec le même appétit" ). Ciron (from ahd . Sur ) is the name for an almost imperceptible insect that spawns between leather and meat.
He took up the proverbial sharp eyes of the lynx and the blindness of the mole in Rabelais , who had already used them in this context in his Le Tiers Livre to describe the alternating blindness and visual acuity of being in love with yourself. Rabelais, in turn, borrowed it from the Adagium in which Erasmus said that Plutarch defined curiosity as "the love of hearing about other people's misfortunes" and that curious people are like vampires who exchange their eyes at home and use them again when they go out with the result that they cannot see anything at home and can see very clearly outdoors.
With the description of the bear, La Fontaine refers to the French idiom ours mal léché (half-licked bear) - a half-licked bear that remained unfinished was a symbol of clumsiness. This expression came from the superstition that a bear cub was born as a misshapen mass and licked into shape by its mother. This idea was seriously reported in Pliny , in Aristotle 's History of Animals (VI. 27), and by other ancient and medieval writers.
According to the verse in which the "whale woman" is described as too fat, La Fontaine makes a leap from the greatest to the smallest in the animal kingdom. Jupiter breaks the thread of patience, which destroys the solemnity. The narrator lets Jupiter with the boyish French alternative name Jupine become a human being, who is the crowning glory of creation and surpasses animals in conceit and delusion. La Fontaine's morality points to God's providence (whom he almost disrespectfully calls a “fabricateur sovereign” ) that everyone carries his begging sack with him - otherwise he leaves the reader to decide how he wants to deal with the teaching.
background
La Fontaine took up one of the earliest, most authoritative and most frequently quoted of all anti-self-love texts "We don't see what's in the back pocket" for the morality of his most famous fables about self-love. Erasmus, who also commented on the proverb, named Catullus , Persius , Horace and Hieronymus among the users of the fable proverb. It was also used by Rabelais and Montaigne.
In Aesop and Phaedrus (From the vices of mankind) La Fontaine has the idea of cross-sack borrowed, gave the Jupiter of humanity to bear. It is a double bag that is closed in the middle and thus forms two pockets. Suspended over the shoulders, it was usually carried by poor wanderers or beggars. From Avianus he has the appearance of the animals before Jupiter, but La Fontaine's version has a different meaning. At Avianus, the animals are supposed to offer their loved ones that they have created themselves, here too a monkey precedes - it is a mother monkey who, full of monkey love, presents her ugly child as the most beautiful.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Jean de La Fontaine: Lafontaine's Fables . First book. W. Moser Hofbuchhandlung, 1877, Seventh Fable. - The transverse sack., P. 16-17 ( Dohm's translation of “Der Quersack” online at the Badische Landesbibliothek, original French text online at the Landesbibliothek Oldenburg - French: Fables Choisies. Livre Premier. Fable VII. La Besace . Translated by Ernst Dohm).
- ↑ a b c d e f g Andrew Calder: The Fables of La Fontaine: Wisdom Brought Down to Earth . Librairie Droz, 2001, ISBN 978-2-600-00464-0 , pp. 75 ( Google Books [accessed December 5, 2020]).
- ↑ a b c Fables of la Fontaine . Cambridge at the University Press, 1916, pp. 145 ( Google Books [accessed December 5, 2020]).
- ^ A b c Jürgen von Stackelberg: Seneca's death and other consequences of reception in the Romance literatures of the early modern period . Walter de Gruyter, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-091279-1 , p. 52-53 ( Google Books [accessed December 6, 2020]).
- ^ Adolf Laun : La Fontaine's fables . Gebr. Henninger, 1877, p. 47 ( Google Books [accessed December 5, 2020]).
- ↑ Fables de La Fontaine: Nouvelle édition . Belin fréres, 1891, p. 84 ( Google Books [accessed December 5, 2020]).
- ^ William Shepard Walsh: Handy-book of Literary Curiosities . JB Lippincott Co., 1909, Licked into shape, p. 631 ( online from Internet Archive [accessed January 7, 2021]).
- ↑ PHÆDRUS: The Fables of Phaedrus ... Translated, Literally, Into English Prose. For the Use of Schools and Academies, Etc . A. Jameson, 1817 ( Google Books [accessed December 5, 2020]).
