Let’s talk Aesop.
Specifically let’s talk Fables, a collection of Aesop’s tales by Editions Milan, illustrated by one Jean-Francois Martin. When Cristina from The Tea Box asked me to join her in sitting in on the discussion, I wasn’t certain how interested I would be. I knew that Fables was one of the few books to win the coveted 2011 Bologna Ragazzi Fiction Award (Honors this year went to Hyacinthe et Rose by Francois Morel, paintings by Martin Jarrie and The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, illustrated by Laura Carlin). Aside from that it was an unknown entity. I just knew its name, really. The fact it had anything to do with Aesop had eluded me entirely.
In this particular discussion you had a panel consisting of Antonio Faeti, Chairman of the Jury, along with the editorial director Sophie Chanourdi, Mr. Martin the illustrator, and the moderator Marcella Terrusi of the University of Bologna. There was also Super Translator Woman, a human being capable of taking notes on what everyone said and then translating them into English and French respectively. And let me tell you, these weren’t one sentence answers either. Some explanations or discussions went on for thousands of words. This translator was next unto a god at this talk.
First let’s talk a little about the book. In spite of the fact that an Aesop fable recently won a Caldecott Award, I’ve always felt that they’re difficult beasts to illustrate. Like nursery rhymes, an Aesop fable’s length is its strength when working in an oral medium, and its weakness when viewed on the written page. Too short to justify full picture books per fable (unless you rewrite them or do away with the words entirely) the collections are also difficult to put down. Often I’ll see the same layout time and time again, where an illustrator places the fable on one page and an illustration of that fable on the other. In graduate school, library science students studying children’s literature will be given a list of core titles from the canon. Aesop is usually on there (my own personal favorite versions being the Arnold Lobel and the Barbara McClintock).
What’s remarkable about Martin’s version is that it solves a lot of the difficulties I’ve perceived in the editions of the past. True, the book also follows the format of having the text on one page and the story on the other, but thanks to a clever design team that layout is broken up nicely.
This is a version of Aesop where anthropomorphism is taken to an extreme. The animals here look as if they’ve stepped out of propaganda posters from the 1930s. They are displayed in a bold palette of br