Opinion: Hot v. Cold leaves me lukewarm
- Share via
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Willis G. Regier surveys Aesop translations:
Nine translators dominated Aesop in English over the past 500 years, and new ones are vying for attention. What do the translations show? Most obviously, some Aesops have more Aesop, much more, than others. Some have been much more reprinted, and more popular. And some change the fables: In some editions a lion outwits three bulls, in others four. Animals are altered: A weasel in one translation is a cat in another, toads become frogs, crows become ravens, a bear becomes a tiger, a lion becomes a leopard, and so on.
There follows a colorful tale of Royalists fighting Roundheads, Anglicans lecturing souls into heav’n, and the winner of the best-overall-translation wreath: Laura Gibbs’ Aesop’s Fables. Yet it still leaves my lifelong Aesop question unanswered...
What the hell is the fable ‘The Man and the Satyr’ about?
Here, try reading another version of the tale. Or try this one and see if you can figure out what the moral could possibly be.
Is the moral that satyrs are too dumb to understand rudimentary heat transfer?
Or is the idea that the satyr is right, and it is wrong to produce breath that is warmer than frost but colder than porridge? That seems to be the point of this version, which includes a moral:
The man who talks for both sides is not to be trusted by either.
So, I give up: Why is a man who maintains a body temperature of 98.6 fahrenheit more or less trustworthy than any other man who maintains the same body temperature? Do you need to know the temperature of satyr breath to understand this one?