Das Kleine Fabel-Buch

Abstract

This is a landscape-formatted book with twenty-five fables, most of them occupying one two-page spread. This time I read the first eight and the last of these fables. The beginning and ending stories match: Vom Wasser aufs Land and Vom Land ins Wasser. The first is a creation story whose moral is that ahead of every man there is a woman. The last is the story of lemmings rushing from land into the sea. Every man should be clear before his death, what he is fleeing, where he is fleeing, and why. New to me are, I believe, Der Unternehmungslustige Wolf (7), Die Rose und das Unkraut (9), Zwei Liebespaare (12), and Die Tigerin und Ihr Mann (15). Thurber is always fun and always insightful. I am surprised to find no reference to the various original works from which this booklet must have come. There is a copyright reference to 1956. Might Thurber have put together an English-language booklet like this then? I was lucky to find this book in the window of a bookstore in an overnight visit to Wolfenbüttel. It is strange that I had not seen it before.