I. Libro primero
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Eighteenth-century verse fables for B2
Fables Fábulas
Félix María de Samaniego, 1902
Félix María de Samaniego’s complete verse fables, from the 1902 Armand Colin edition, not an adaptation. In the catalog it is B2: about 28,800 words and 27 words per sentence on average. 157 fables in nine books, with the author’s prose prologue; the animals speak in short rhymed lines and every fable closes with a moral.
- B2
- 28 784 words
- 5-8 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the verse order will trip you: in “Del olor atraído / Un Zorro muy maestro, / Le dijo estas palabras” the participle comes before the subject, and forms like vióse, oyólo and díme need unpacking. The prose prologue, at 39 words per sentence, is the slowest stretch.
B1B2
This text
You can manage it at B2: the fables are short, about 175 words each, with everyday farm and forest vocabulary. Read one or two at a sitting, put the lines back into prose order in your head and translate single words such as denuedo or halagüeño.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the fables read freely; what remains is the 18th-century wit of the morals and the learned references to Ceres, Bacchus and Minerva that Samaniego scatters through the verse.
Start readingThe average sentence has 27 words, inside the catalog’s B2 band for complete texts (13-30 words). In verse that number overstates the strain, because one sentence is spread over about six short rhymed lines; for comparison, Martín Fierro averages 25 and Lazarillo de Tormes 30, both B2. One word in fourteen has 9 letters or more (7.2%), well short of the one in ten that marks C1. The difficulty is uneven: Samaniego’s prose prologue averages 39 words per sentence with a long word about every ninth word, while the fables themselves use everyday farm and forest vocabulary and run at 20 to 33 words per sentence in each book. What slows a reader is verse word order (the participle before the subject, the verb at the end) and 18th-century forms such as vióse, oyólo, díme and the old spelling á for the preposition a. Hence B2. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 28 784
- words
- 27
- words in an average sentence
- 5-8
- hours of reading
- 1902
- Librería Armand Colin
Librería Armand Colin, 1902. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
Samaniego collects 157 short fables in verse, written in the early 1780s for the pupils of the Basque Seminary at Bergara. Most retell Aesop, Phaedrus and La Fontaine; books VI to VIII follow the English poet John Gay, and book IX is Samaniego’s own. A cicada begs a stingy ant for food, a crow with a piece of cheese listens to a flatterer, a donkey envies a pig, a cat moves into a house full of mice. Each story is about 175 words long and closes with a moral set in italics, and a verse dedication to the pupils opens the first fable. How each little story ends, and what moral it draws, is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Fábulas
V. Libro quinto
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Choose an underlined word.
The old respectful “vos”
The cicada speaks to the ant in the old courteous vos: vuestros graneros, prestad, no dudéis. Read these as polite usted forms (sus graneros, preste, no dude); only the endings differ. La dijo here means le dijo, “said to her”.
Put the verse lines in prose order
“Del olor atraído / Un Zorro muy maestro, / Le dijo estas palabras” reads in prose as “Un zorro muy maestro, atraído por el olor, le dijo estas palabras”. When a line seems to have no subject, read on to the next lines and put the subject first. Note also á and ó, the old spelling of the preposition a and the conjunction o.
Chapters
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
Reader
€1 a month
In the fable of the crow, a sentence such as “De vanidad llevado quiso cantar el Cuervo” puts the participle first and the subject last: translating the whole sentence in Reader shows at once that it means “carried away by vanity, the Crow wanted to sing”.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
All books at this levelBefore you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not a learner’s abridgement: all 157 verse fables of Félix María de Samaniego in nine books, with the author’s prose prologue, his note on his sources and the verse dedication to the pupils that opens the first fable. The reader follows the 1902 edition of Librería Armand Colin (Paris), from Project Gutenberg, without the editor’s notes, vocabulary and index. The fables first appeared in 1781 and 1784.
Is there an audiobook?
Fables has no audiobook 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 rural words such as denuedo, halagüeño or tabique.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. In verse it helps most where the word order is inverted, as in “De vanidad llevado quiso cantar el Cuervo”, which means “carried away by vanity, the Crow wanted to sing”. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole book takes about 5-8 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. The nine books run from about 2,300 to 3,900 words and hold 9 to 25 fables each; the prologue is about 1,400 words. A single fable is about 175 words, so a book an evening takes about ten days.
Where does the text get easier?
From the first fable. Samaniego’s prose prologue is the densest part: 39 words per sentence on average and a long word about every ninth word. After it the book is even: each of the nine books runs at about 20 to 33 words per sentence, with short rhymed lines and everyday vocabulary, so the difficulty is the verse word order, not the length.
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 nine books also opens from the contents on this page, for example book V, which holds the fable of the crow and the fox.