Verse fables with a moral, for B2

Literary Fables Fábulas literarias

Name: Literary Fables
Author: Tomás de Iriarte

Tomás de Iriarte, 1917

Tomás de Iriarte’s fables in the original Spanish, first published in 1782 and read here in the 1917 Oxford University Press edition, not an adaptation. In the catalog they are B2: about 14,000 words and 16 words per sentence on average. 75 short fables of 75 to 410 words each, almost all in verse, in which animals mock vanity, envy and bad writers; the moral is printed in parentheses above each one.

B2
13 976 words
2-4 hours

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Will this text hold?

B1

Earlier

At B1 the old spellings (fué, dióle) and words like albarda or bambolla will need translating, and sentences that run across several short verse lines are easy to lose.

B2

This text

You can manage it at B2: each fable is short, the moral comes first in plain prose, and the verse can be read slowly, translating single words and the odd whole sentence.

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C1

With room to spare

At C1 the fables read freely; only the allusions to 18th-century literary quarrels need a note.

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The average sentence has 16 words and one word in fourteen has 9 letters or more. That puts the book beside the other B2 verse in the catalog, Martín Fierro (25 words per sentence), Campos de Castilla (17) and Romancero gitano (12), and well above the B1 adaptations at 11-12. The difficulty is the verse itself: about 2,400 short lines of around 5 words, word order bent by the rhyme, and 18th-century vocabulary and spelling (albarda, bambolla, fué, sólo). Sentences average from about 7 to 27 words from one fable to the next, but each fable is only 75 to 410 words, so the work comes in small portions. Hence B2. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.

13 976: words
16: words in an average sentence
2-4: hours of reading
1917: Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press, 1917. Project Gutenberg

What it is about, without the ending

A collection of short fables in which animals talk like people to make fun of everyday follies and, above all, of vain authors and spiteful critics. In the first fable an elephant lectures the other animals on their vices; a Spider brags to a Silkworm about how fast she weaves; a Peacock and a Raven challenge each other to a flying race; a donkey finds a flute lying in a meadow. Every fable has its moral printed in parentheses before the verses. How each little story ends is not revealed here.

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Fábulas literarias

I. El Elefante y otros animales

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XXXVI. La compra del Asno

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Choose an underlined word.

Project Gutenberg

Assonance, not rhyme

The lines are short, about seven syllables, and only the even ones are tied by assonance: remotas, jerigonza, moda, reforma, convoca all end in the vowels o-a. So the line endings sound alike without rhyming fully, and the word order bends to fit them. Read the sentence, not the line: Notó el sabio Elefante / Que entre ellos era moda / Incurrir en abusos is a single clause. The capitals on animal names (el Elefante, la Hormiga) are the fable habit of the time, not proper names.

Read verse as prose

Short lines cut sentences in odd places. Parece que el dueño, que es, según me han dicho, un chalán gitano de los más ladinos, vendió aquella alhaja a un hombre sencillo is one sentence: the subject (el dueño) and the verb (vendió) are three lines apart. Skip the line breaks, find the verb first, then add the aside. Alhaja means a jewel, used here with irony for a donkey.

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In fable XXXVI the subject and the verb are split by an aside of three verse lines: translating the whole sentence in Reader (Parece que el dueño, que es, según me han dicho, un chalán gitano de los más ladinos, vendió aquella alhaja a un hombre sencillo) shows who sold what to whom.

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Before you read

Is this the original or a learner adaptation?

It is the original, not a learner’s abridgement: Tomás de Iriarte’s fables, first published in 1782. The text follows the 1917 Oxford University Press edition arranged by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, taken from Project Gutenberg and without the editor’s notes. The fables are numbered I to LXXVI, and the contents skip XXII, La Lechuza, because the Project Gutenberg copy prints no separate text under that number.

Is there an audiobook?

Literary Fables has no audio on MovaReader: the text is read on screen. The translation appears when you tap a word, and you will need it most for old or rare words such as albarda or bambolla.

Can I translate a whole sentence?

Yes, with the Reader plan. In these fables it helps most where one sentence runs across several short verse lines, as in fable XXXVI: Parece que el dueño, que es, según me han dicho, un chalán gitano de los más ladinos, vendió aquella alhaja a un hombre sencillo. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.

How many hours does it take?

The whole book takes about 2-4 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. The 75 fables are short, from about 75 to 410 words each, so you can read several in one sitting.

Where does the text get easier?

It is even. From the first fable to the last the lines stay short, at about 5 words, and sentences average 16 words. The shortest fables, such as XXIV (about 75 words), are a gentle start; the longest, such as XXXIX (about 410 words), take more patience. Fable LXX, about the Canary and the Jackdaw, is the one fable in prose.

Will my place in the book be saved?

Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your last place and the words you opened, so you can come back to the fables where you left off. Any of the 75 fables also opens from the contents on this page, for example fable I, El Elefante y otros animales.

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