Death and the woodcutter
The Death and the Woodcutter (French. La mort et le bûcheron ) is the 16th fable from the first book of the collection Fables Choisies, Mises En verse of Jean de La Fontaine . It depicts the lamentation of a woodcutter who, in desperation, calls on death, but when he appears, he only wishes that he would help him shoulder his bundle of wood. The moral of the fable in La Fontaine is essentially the same as in the fable "Old Man and Death" in Aesop : "Everyone depends on life, even if he is badly."
The enumeration of the sufferings of the woodcutter, his wife and children, as well as the burden of taxes, interest, labor and billeting of soldiers, suggests that the fable at the time of the wood shortage crisis (French : Crise de l'Avènement ) around 1661–1662 originated.
The Spanish fabulous poet Félix María Samaniego took up the same subject under the title El viejo y la muerte (The old man and death), although morality boils down to consolation (“Be patient, oh man, even in the most deplorable situation life still has something lovable! ").
Individual evidence
- ↑ La Fontaine, Jean de: Fables Choisies, Mises En Vers. In: Landesbibliothek Oldenburg . 1755, accessed December 14, 2019 (French).
- ^ A b Jürgen von Stackelberg: Counter seals: case studies on the phenomenon of literary replica . Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-091026-1 , p. 24–26 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
- ^ Jürgen Grimm : French Classical: Textbook Romance Studies . Springer-Verlag, 2017, ISBN 978-3-476-05030-4 , pp. 50 ( google.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).