"In this contemporary translation, Craig Hill has captured the liveliness, satiric wit, and poetic beauty that made Jean de La Fontaine famous during his lifetime and his Fables celebrated as a masterwork of world literature ever since." "Despite La Fontaine's deceptively modest claim that all he intended was to put the moral tales of Aesop and other ancient fabulists into poetry for the pleasure of Louis XIV's young son, his real accomplishment, as later generations have understood, was holding a mirror up to the society of his day and in the process fashioning a work that has become a classic." "Borrowing from a variety of sources, La Fontaine gave the hitherto mute animals in ancient fables the power of speech. Putting his characters on stage and endowing them with irresistibly witty dialogue, he portrayed with great humor the flaws and pretensions that still dog us. Backstabbing poli