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Editors and translators of every age must come to terms with essentially the same questions: What text shall I use for my source? And what style shall I adopt for the finished product? As already noted, the absence of any canon or standard edition of Aesop’s fables has made the first question particularly problematic. Most modern editors use a combination of fables found in the classical editions of Phaedrus and Babrius, supplemented by various medieval and renaissance collections. As to style, well into the twentieth century most English translators of Aesop have seemed to prefer intentionally antiquated language, sprinkling their texts with archaic words and outdated grammar. Fortunately, V. S. Vernon Jones, the translator of the present collection, resisted this temptation. His English is sprightly, concise, and idiomatic, just as the everyday Greek used by the original storytellers must have been. Jones’s translation was published under the title Æsop’s Fables in 1912 by W. Heinemann of London. I have added footnotes, cautiously modernized the punctuation, and brought the spelling to contemporary American standards, but have made essentially no other revisions to his admirable text.
D. L. Ashliman received a B.A. degree from the University of Utah, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Rutgers University, with additional studies at the Universities of Bonn and Göttingen in Germany. He taught folklore, mythology, German, and comparative literature at the University of Pittsburgh for thirty-three years and was emeritized in the year 2000. In addition to teaching, he held a number of administrative positions at the University of Pittsburgh, including Academic Dean for the Semester at Sea program. He also served as a guest professor in the departments of comparative literature and folklore at the University of Augsburg in Germany. D. L. Ashliman is the author of A Guide to Folktales in the English Language, published by Greenwood Press in 1987, as well as numerous articles and conference reports.