"...what makes us all ashamed is that we see on our shores only unhappy princes, because they only love pleasures and an unlimited authority; it is that we see in the most beautiful countries of the world only miserable peoples, because they are almost all slaves, almost all victims of the arbitrary wills and the insatiable greed of the masters who govern them, or rather who crush them."—"The Nile and the Ganges"

While producing my Kindle edition of Adventures of Telemachus, I searched for any other work by François Fénelon that might attract my efforts. Soon, I discovered he had written a series of fables, intended for the same pupil. I am a great fan of fables and fairy tales, and am on the lookout for any nearly-forgotten treasures along those lines [my first Kindle publication was a transcription of W.R.S. Ralston's translation of Ivan Krylov's fables].

Unfortunately, the only English translations of Fénelon's fables I could find are from the 18th century, suffer from archaic language and typography, and are incomplete. As far as I could tell, the most complete collections are only available in French. Eventually, I decided to attempt an informal translation.

First, I carefully transcribed, spell-checked and proof-read the French text from this scan of the 1872 Hachette Library edition, which overall is in very good condition, backed up by this scan of the 1849 edition. I also referred to this text of the 1898 edition by M.L.C. Michel.

For the translation, I initially ran the text through Google Translate. At first I tried feeding entire fables, but the results were bad; after some experimentation, I obtained the best overall results by feeding just one sentence at a time. When the result was well-formed and made good sense, I retained it. When the result didn't make sense or otherwise seemed off (especially in the case of idioms), I consulted French dictionaries, grammars, and other online resources in order to create a better translation. I ended up doing the latter more often than expected, and have no desire to undertake another such exercise.

After completing the initial draft, I took a break away from it to work on other projects. When I finally returned to it, I reviewed it to check its readability. Originally I had thought to rewrite it altogether in a looser style, but I changed my mind and decided to keep revisions to a minimum.

So here it is: the master HTML version of my English text, along with my French text. I have no intention of creating a home-brew Kindle version or publishing to Amazon. Instead, here's a link on how to send the HTML to your Kindle.

October 14, 2023