r
sources. But as time went on, he began to invent fables of his own;
and out of the two hundred fables which he left at his death, forty
only are inspired by La Fontaine and seven suggested by AEsop: the
remainder are original. Krylov's translations of La Fontaine are not
so much translations as re-creations. He takes the same subject, and
although often following the original in every single incident, he
thinks out each _motif_ for himself and re-creates it, so that his
translations have the same personal stamp and the same originality as
his own inventions.

This is true even when the original is a masterpiece of the highest
order, such as La Fontaine's _Deux Pigeons_. You would think the
opening lines--

"Deux pigeons s'amoient d'amour tendre,
L'un d'eux s'ennuyant au logis
Fut assez fou pour entreprendre
Un voyage en lointain pays"--

were untranslatable; that nothing could be subtracted from them, and
that still less could anything be added; one ray the more, one shade
the less, you would think, would certainly impair their nameless
grace. But what does Krylov do? He re-creates the situation, expanding
La Fontaine's first line into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps
on it the impress of his personality and his nationality. Here is a
literal translation of the Russian, in rhyme. (I am not ambitiously
trying a third English version.)

"Two pigeons lived like sons born of one mother.
Neither would eat nor drink without the other;
Where you see one, the other's surely near,
And every joy they halved and every tear;
They never noticed how the time flew by,
They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh."

This gives the sense of Krylov's poem word for word, except for what
is the most important touch of all in the last line. The trouble is
that Krylov has written six lines which are as untranslatable as La
Fontaine's four; and he has made them as profoundly Russian as La
Fontaine's are French. Nothing could be more Russian than the last
line, which it is impossible to translate; because it should run--

"They were sometimes sad, but they never felt _ennui_"--

literally, "it was never _boring_ to them." The difficulty is that the
word for _boring_ in Russian, _skuchno_, which occurs with the utmost
felicity in contradistinction to _sad_, _grustno_, cannot be rendered
in English in its poetical simplicity. There are no six lines more
tender, musical, wistful, and su