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Professor Robert Temple is de-scribed by The Manchester Evening News as ‘a rare kind of author who can stir the magic within you’. Certainly, my memory of our dis-cussion is of a sense of kineticism; through his vivid and potent storytelling, I was transported back to the hardships of his student life in the 1960’s, but also to a greater understanding of that fundamental, but misunderstood, work of classical Greek antiquity: Aesop’s Fables.

Temple’s account of life as an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania casts new light on that ever-present figure of contemporary debate, the all-suffering student. He was awarded a scholarship at just 16 years of age, by the Ivy League College, but unlike to-day’s student, to whom maintenance loans’ are available, Temple had to work in what without exaggeration he describes as ‘a system of slave labour’, in order to earn his food. ‘Ridiculously long hours of intense labour’ working in his hall’s cafeteria, resulted in ‘a miserable food ticket’, which in itself was not even enough to earn ‘a full breakfast of the kind growing boys wanted and needed’.

As a student, Temple survived on one breakfast every two days, there being no provision for lunch, and an ‘unidentifiable’ kitchen slop for supper that ‘exceeded anything the demented imagination of a sadist could conceive of’. The revolting supper time provision was something Temple imagined as being eaten ‘on Devil’s Island’, and it was thus avoided. As a ‘penniless’ student unable to afford food on his annual allowance of $15, Temple was only prevented from wasting away by the occasional piece of pie snuck to him by a fellow kitchen worker, who would do so ‘with fear in her eyes’ at the risk of losing her job. Such a description of toil and privation in the name of education certainly communicates a sense of the relative prosperity we experi-ence as students today, and of our need to recognize this, instead of chastising it.

Yet it was discussing Temple’s co-authorship of the first complete English version of Aesop’s Fables, written with his wife Olivia, which was most illuminating. Published by Penguin in 1998, his work raises profound questions about the nature of translation, and its potential to sub-vert the original meaning of a text. Aesop’s fables, as they are known in popular culture today,

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Eleanor Taylor talks to the author, producer and explorer Professor Robert Temple about

his university experience, and influential work on a groundbreaking translation of Aesop’s Fa-bles.

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DISCUSSION WITH ROBERT TEMPLE

by Eleanor Taylor

REVIEWS

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have in fact been ‘so heavily rewritten and artificially expanded’ that they have only ‘a tenuous connection’ with the originals. In other words, The Tale of the Tortoise and the Hare has been bowdlerised to such an extent that Aesop himself might not recognize it.

Far from being ‘the sugary children’s stories’ with which we associate them today, Aesop’s fables are ‘savage (…) brutal’, and ‘lacking in all mercy or compassion’. The ‘coarse peasant humour’, which Temple asserts as so all pervasive in Aesop’s original work, has been tragically filtered out through a process of Victorian and Edwardian censorship.

In the first complete and authentic translation of the fables ever to exist in the English language, Temple is understandably at pains to establish that Aesop’s fables ‘are not the petty purveyors of Victorian morals that we have been led to believe.’ A process of 19th century translation has meant that the original fables, which offered ‘fascinating glimpses of ordinary life in ancient Greece’, have become a kind of ‘clothes horse for Victorian morals’, when in fact they contain ‘no such morals (…) at all.’ Indeed, before their subversion through this process of Victorian moralization, the original fables conveyed very little sense that ‘compassion towards one’s fellow human beings had anything particularly to recommend it’. Temple reveals Aesop’s world to be a place of ‘cunning, of wickedness’, ‘of savage humour’ and ‘deft wit’, a world which has been dismally oppressed because of Victorian prudery. Luckily for modern readers, this world has been brought out of the shadows as a result of this true and unswerving translation. In his stripping back of the didactic framework Temple purges the fables of their artificial sweet-ness, leaving us with a glimpse of rugged, harsh ancient Greek life.

The Daily Telegraph’s assertion that Robert Temple is an author ‘honest with his readers’ and ‘careful with his sources’ is undoubtedly supported by his work translating these misunderstood texts. For he has raised from obscurity the true meaning of a fundamental text of the ancient Greek canon, and has heightened our awareness of the power of translation, as both a positive but also potentially subversive force.