chapter 14

Aemulating Aesopus: Slovenian Fables and Fablers

between Tradition and Innovation

David Movrin

Among many invocations of Aesop, few have achieved the popularity of Len-
in’s preface in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Writing on the
eve of the October Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich remembered the tsarist cen-
sorship, which forced him “[…] to formulate the few necessary observations
on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an allegorical language—in that
accursed Aesopian language—to which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries
to have recourse […].”1 While scholars have since shown that the tsarist regime
was not unique in fostering such strategies,2 this quote from Lenin (1917) pro-
vides an interesting point of departure when dealing with a set of key fable
collections published in Slovenian during the last two centuries. Political un-
dertones loom large in this genre. F.R. Adrados was certainly right in pointing
out the fluctuating structure of ancient fables, a genre “hard to separate from
other genres, one with not very clearly defined limits.”3 Over the last two cen-
turies, the category has grown into one that is significantly more Protean than
its ancient prototypes;4 yet it is remarkable how it is precisely a thinly veiled
political agenda, leaving aside the ubiquitous moralistic associations, which
keeps tinging the discussions of Slovenian animals and springing up among
them as a leitmotif.
Fables constitute by far the most numerous remnant of Graeco-Roman lit-
erature within the corpus of Slovenian literature for children, offering enough
material to allow comparison and to decipher trends visible over decades.
­Beyond the obvious problem of how much their various authors were a­ ctually
indebted to “Aesopus”—some followed the tradition rather closely while

1 Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, 1970), 1.
2 Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature
(Munich: Otto Sagner, 1984).
3 Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, vol. 1: Introduction and from
the Origins to the Hellenistic Age, trans. Leslie A. Ray (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 17.
4 For an overview of research problems, see Niklas Holzberg, Die antike Fabel: Eine Einführung
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 22001; ed. pr. 1993).

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Aemulating Aesopus: SLOVENIAN FABLES AND FABLERS 209

others tended to be highly original—they seem to present a kind of litmus test

for the historical circumstances in which the authors were working. Valentin
Vodnik (1758–1819), the archegetes of Slovenian poetry, who in 1806 published
Pesme za pokušino [Poems for sampling], a book which was widely hailed,
sensu stricto, as the first Slovenian book of poems, translated thirty-one fables
from Aesop, but the ones that are intriguing are those he wrote himself.5 One
of them, called A German and Carniolan Horse, consists of a dialogue between
two horses, who apparently realise that their fortunes seem to be connected to
the ethnicity of their owners:

Nemški konj slovenjmu reče:

“Brate, kaj medliš na cest?
Ti li noga, glava neče,
al se teb ne ljubi jest?

Mene v dobri réji imájo,

ovs ponujajo trikrat,
čiste nôge mi igrajo,
nosim po labodje vrat.”

Kranjska para milo pravi:

“Tud bi lahko jaz bil tak,
al tepêjo me po glavi,
lačnemu je stati v mlak’.”

The German horse says to the Slovenian one:

“Brother, why are you so weak?
Is it your leg? Is it your head?
Maybe you do not eat enough?

Myself, I am fed well,

I get three portions of oats,
My legs are properly cleaned,
I carry my neck like a swan.”

The luckless Carniolan answers sadly:

“I could have been like you,

5 For a critical edition, see Valentin Vodnik, Zbrano delo [Collected works] (Ljubljana: Državna
založba Slovenije, 1988).

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But they keep hitting me on my head,

I have to stand hungry in a puddle.”6

The sources Vodnik used for the four of his fables not based on Aesop were
varied.7 This particular text was clearly influenced by the German poet Chris-
tian Fürchtegott Gellert, whose Fabeln und Erzählungen (1746–1748) remained
popular in the nineteenth century, and whose Das Kutschpferd [Coach horse]
was a recognised inspiration for Vodnik.8 Yet Vodnik gave it a different spin;
while Gellert furnished his two horses with a social agenda, Vodnik provided
them with a national programme. His push was somewhat astonishing, giv-
en the fact that the very adjective “Slovenian” as a term was far from settled.9
Vodnik himself put his money where his mouth was and started an ambitious
educational programme once Napoleon’s forces occupied the area in 1809, pro-
moting the use of Slovenian in schools and administration. But the Illyrian
provinces were short-lived and after the return of Austrian rule in 1813, Vodnik
was quickly pensioned off. Interestingly, his two horses were given yet another
spin in his personal copy, which is preserved in the National and University
Library in Ljubljana, with his own corrections dated March 1816. The Austrians
were back in power and German horses were again a difficult subject; so the
last version of his fable reads Czech and Carniolan Horse.10 As Cavafy put it in
one of his poems “In a Township of Asia Minor” describing the mutanda after
the battle of Actium: “It all fits brilliantly.”
Anton Martin Slomšek (1800–1862), an important bishop and educator,
wrote another series of fables in the middle of the nineteenth century, partly

6 Trans. D.M.
7 Boris Merhar, “Od kod Vodniku snov za basen Kos in brezen?” [Where did Vodnik get the
material for his fable about the blackbird and the march?], Slovenski etnograf [Slovenian
ethnographer] 9 (1956): 187–196.
8 Ivan Grafenauer, Zgodovina novejšega slovenskega slovstva, vol. 1: Od Pohlina do Prešerna
[History of Modern Slovenian literature: from Pohlin to Prešeren] (Ljubljana: Katoliška
Bukvarna, 1909), 26. Gellert was not the only literary model; according to Grafenauer,
­Vodnik was perhaps influenced by Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim.
9 In fact, some scholars, including France Kidrič, believed that his use of the term referred
to genus, “the Slavs,” rather than species, “Slovenians.” This remains problematic; for a
different opinion see Janez Rotar, “Viri Trubarjevega poimenovanja dežel in ljudstev in
njegova dediščina” [The Sources for Trubar’s naming of lands and peoples and its heri-
tage], Zgodovinski časopis [Historical review] 42.3 (1988): 350.
10 Vodnik, Zbrano delo, 401.

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Aemulating Aesopus: SLOVENIAN FABLES AND FABLERS 211

in verse,11 but mostly in prose.12 While their ancient foundations remain vis-
ible, the bishop was quick to add a distinctly Christian message—such as in
the following story, titled Swallow and Ants, from 1851:

“Kaj pa delate?” mlada lastovka pridne mravlje pobara. “Za zimo sprav­
ljamo,” ji mravljice odgovorijo. “Tako je prav,” lastovica reče, in brez odlo-
ga poberati začne mertve pajeke, suhe muhe, in jih v svoje gnjezdo nosi.
“Pokaj pa ti bode vse to?” stara lastovica mlado pobara. “Za zimo, ljuba
mamica! Le tudi vi nabirajte, kakor skerbne mravlje vidite,” ji mlada od-
govori. “Pusti pozemeljskim mravljam pozemeljsko blago naberati,” stara
mladi pravi. “Kar se njim spodobi, nama ne sodi. Naji je Stvarnik za kaj
višega poklical. Bo najno leto minulo, v ptuje kraje poletive. Popotnice
bove pospalo, dokler naji mlada vigred k novemu življenju ne obudi.
K čemu nama bo tamo nabrano blago?” – Potreba je, v mladosti z mravl-
jami za starost spravljati, pa tudi, kakor lastovke, na večnost ne pozabiti!

“What are you doing?” a young swallow asks some diligent ants. “We are
gathering food for the winter,” the ants reply. “Rightly so,” says the swal-
low, who starts gathering dead spiders and parched flies and carrying
them to her nest. “What are you going to do with them?” the young swal-
low is asked by the old one. “The winter is coming, dear mother! You too
should be gathering food, just as you see that the careful ants are doing,”
the young one retorts. “Let the earthly ants gather earthly goods,” the old
one replies to the young one. “What befits them is not suitable for us. We
have been called to something loftier by the Creator. Once our summer
is over, we will fly to foreign lands. We will sleep as travellers, until spring
awakes us to new life. Once there, what use can we have of the goods

11 Collected and published in Anton Martin Slomšek, Pesmi [Poems], ed. Mihael Lendovšek,
vol. 1 of Antona Martina Slomšeka zbrani spisi [Anton Martin Slomšek’s collected works]
(Celovec: Družba sv. Mohora, 1876). Of 190 fables, thirteen are written in verse. Among
their sources are Phaedrus and Aesop (e.g., Vulpis et corvus, Perae duae, Quercus et arun-
do), but more frequently La Fontaine and even Krylov. For a detailed list, see Sonja Hafner,
Prispevki k zgodovini odmevov antične basni na Slovenskem [Contributions toward the his-
tory of the reception of ancient fable in Slovenia] (Ljubljana: Diplomsko delo, Univerza v
Ljubljani, 1990), 57–60.
12 Published mostly in Drobtinice [Breadcrumbs], a journal started by Slomšek in 1846,
and later published as Anton Martin Slomšek, Basni, prilike in povesti [Fables, parables,
and tales], ed. Mihael Lendovšek, vol. 2 of Antona Martina Slomšeka zbrani spisi [Anton
­Martin Slomšek’s collected works] (Celovec: Družba sv. Mohora, 1878).

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gathered?” – In one’s youth, one should gather for old age; but like the two
swallows, one should not forget about eternity!13

This tone pervades the entire collection, which is frequently amusing, occa-
sionally nauseating. There are moments when the author feels the need to state
his opinion of contemporary politics; for instance, comparing the cat which
fell into ink to the revolutionaries (“prekucuhi”) of 1848. “Evildoers will turn
their coats with the wind, but keep their evil in their hearts.” His didactic writ-
ings were well received and Slomšek became—in 1999—the first S­ lovenian to
be beatified.
Josip Stritar (1836–1923), a highly prolific writer and critic, published a se-
ries of fifty fables in 1902. Stritar was himself an accomplished classicist who
studied with Hermann Bonitz in Vienna, and his poetic compositions are
­consciously modelled after Aesop (“freely after Aesop,” as he defined them).
Six of them can be found in Phaedrus, while the rest are taken from Karl Halm’s
Fabulae Aesopicae collectae—no fewer than forty of them from Aesop, the rest
from Babrius, Aristotle, and Plutarch.14 Poles apart from Slomšek, Stritar’s texts
are polished metrically, they are in rhyme, short, and to the point, and deliber-
ately based on ancient sources, to the extent that they can be considered their
poetic translations.
Quite dissimilar from these are the fables of Matej Bor (1913–1993), a well-
known partisan poet and later the president of the Writers’ Association of
­Yugoslavia. Bor, whose real name was Vladimir Pavšič, acquired a taste for
fables while translating The Telegraph Fables by Croatian poet Gustav Krklec
(1899–1977).15 Bor wrote his series of forty-six fables, entitled Sračje sodišče
[Magpie court],16 in the winter of 1954, during his stay on the Croatian coast,

13 Trans. D.M.
14 Fabulae Aesopicae collectae, ed. Karl Halm (Leipzig: Teubner, 1860); cf. Hafner, Prispevki
k zgodovini, 39, as well as Fedora Ferluga-Petronio, “Antični motivi v poeziji in dramatiki
Josipa Stritarja” [Ancient motifs in the poetry and drama of Josip Stritar] in Erika Mihevc-
Gabrovec, Kajetan Gantar, and Martin Benedik, eds., Antični temelji naše sodobnosti: refe-
rati slovenskih udeležencev na 4. znanstvenem zborovanju Zveze društev za antične študije
Jugoslavije v Pulju od 12. do 17. oktobra 1986 [Ancient foundations of our contemporaneity:
the contributions of Slovenian participants to the fourth scholarly symposium of the
­Federation of Classical Societies of Yugoslavia, Pula, October 12–17, 1986] (Ljubljana:
Društvo za antične in humanistične študije Slovenije, 1987), 54–67.
15 Gustav Krklec, Telegrafske basni [Telegraphic fables], trans. Matej Bor (Ljubljana: Mladin-
ska knjiga, 1952).
16 Matej Bor, Sračje sodišče ali je, kar je [Magpie court, or let bygones be bygones] (Ljubljana:
Mladinska knjiga, 1961).

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Aemulating Aesopus: SLOVENIAN FABLES AND FABLERS 213

but had to wait for the somewhat more liberal 1960s to be able to actually
publish them; he attributed this fact to their content, as well as to the two
hostile reviewers, whom he later immortalised, in a final, forty-seventh fable,
as ­“middle-aged goats,” once the book was finally published.17 Interestingly
enough, the offending content that was problematic to the eye of the party
censors in the mid-1950s seems downright innocuous by today’s standards, and
the issue that troubled the members of the nomenklatura looks slightly sur-
real. In Bor’s fables, there is hardly any mention of neuralgic political issues;
social criticism, if present, is vague and general, as may be seen in the following
fable about A Certain, Not Very Big, Mouse:

Neka miška, pa ne prav velika,

je tožila mačka, koleke plačala,
vendar pravda je slabo izpala,
ker je bil pač maček za sodnika.

A certain mouse, not very big,

Sued a cat; it paid for the stamp duty
Yet she was not successful in her case,
Since it was the cat who was the judge.18

Bor, who famously described himself as “the court poet of her majesty the
­Revolution” in his ecstatic verses written during the war,19 was in no way
harmed by the publication; in fact, he went on to become a member of the
Slovenian Academy in 1965.
The most recent—and perhaps the most creative—Slovenian redefini-
tion of a fable was developed by Tomaž Lavrič (b. 1964), a comic-strip author,
whose poignant Bosnian Fables, showered with international prizes, further
developed the genre in order to address the tragedy into which the Balkans ex-
ploded during the early 1990s.20 Fittingly, the book is dedicated to the author’s
friend Ivo Štandeker, a Slovenian journalist who died reporting the ­Sarajevo

17 The identity of the “goats,” Milan Klopčič and Filip Kumbatovič Kalan, was revealed two
decades later, in an angry note in Bor’s book of epigrams: Sto manj en epigram [Hundred
epigrams minus one] (Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije, 1985), 111.
18 Trans. D.M.
19 Matej Bor, Previharimo viharje [Outstorming the storms] (Glavno poveljstvo slovenskih
partizanskih čet [Published by the High Command of Slovenian Partisan Forces], 1942).
20 Tomaž Lavrič, Bosanske basni (Ljubljana: published by the author, 1997); later followed
by a French edition, Fables de Bosnie (Grenoble: Glénat, 1999), as well as a Croatian one,
Bosanske basne (Zagreb: Fibra, 2006).

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siege in 1992. Bosnian Fables are different from the representatives of the genre
described above. Each of the stories bears the name of an animal—Fish, Snake,
Fly, Bird, Dog, Pig, Cat, and Mule—yet its animals, where they appear at all, are
not anthropomorphic. Instead, the protagonists are humans, trying to survive
the surreal and often deadly circumstances of the Bosnian War. The frame-
work of the book is a routine flight of an American plane; its two pilots hover
far above the ground and eventually report that no hostile activity has been
spotted—­while death and destruction reign supreme on the ground. Critics
have noticed that the pilots’ vantage point creates “a sense of detachment” that
visually underscores the pilots’ indifference:

The point of view of the pilots, however, seems implicitly to allude to the
uninterested gaze of the West, which preferred observing the Yugoslav
wars from a safe distance. By alternating points of view, Lavrič constantly
reminds the reader not only of the huge difference between looking at
war and being physically involved in it but also of the problem of repre-
senting war: a biased perspective may prevent us from seeing anything at
all, let alone exposing at least a part of the truth about war.21

This complexity of perspectives is further mirrored by a linguistic c­ omplexity;

Bosnian Fables contain a Babel of languages that could be heard in the region
during the 1990s—various dialects of Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian, as
well as French and English spoken by the members of un and Nato units. This
­approach provides an impression of authenticity, without cheapening its
­subject. To quote the author:

I wish to be an objective observer, without being insensitive. I wish to

create an atmosphere of terror as authentically as possible, but ­without
explicit scenes of killing which could turn the comics into a cheap aes-
thetics of death.22

A remarkable example of this approach is the story “Mačka” [Cat] which starts
out in the Sarajevo zoo. The keeper decides to free the animals rather than
watch them starve to death: “At least you will die free.” After that, the story
focuses on Nermin, a boy whose childhood involves recognising armour by its
sound, avoiding the gaze of a sniper, wondering whether his father, missing in

21 Stijn Vervaet, “A Different Kind of War Story: Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia and
Tomaž Lavrič’s Bosnian Fables,” Slavic and East European Journal 55.2 (2011): 175.
22 Ibid., 181.

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Aemulating Aesopus: SLOVENIAN FABLES AND FABLERS 215

action, will ever return, and reading Kipling’s Jungle Book. (“Then Shere Khan
roared: ‘The man-cub has lived too long. Free People, he was my meat from the
first. Give him to me.’”) During the night, Nermin sees a tiger—freed from the
zoo—pass his window, but is unable to convince his mother and his friends
that this was not a dream. Distracted, he starts looking for tracks and forgets
about the sniper. The telling switch of perspective painfully reminds the reader
of what is about to happen (see figure 14.1).
What could be seen as an inventive take on the traditional fabula docet is
then accomplished with yet another change of perspective. As the child loses
his life, the tiger leaves Sarajevo and disappears into the Bosnian woods, ac-
companied by the words of William Blake:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The immortal eye belongs to the American pilot, who sees the animal from
the plane above. Unlike the Serbian sniper earlier on, who attributed the
exotic animal in his crosshairs to his drinking of rakija, the American now
exclaims to his colleague: “Are there any tigers in these hills?” His co-pilot replies:
“God knows! It’s a jungle down there…” Whatever the fable is telling us, its
message seems to be far from straightforward; in fact, one of the reviewers
in France complained that the fables are “too disparate and not didac-
tic enough” (“trop disparates, pas assez didactiques”).23 While this was
apparently meant to be a damning quality, readers have actually found it quite
refreshing.24
Building on centuries of literary heritage, the heterogenous fables described
above tend to reveal most of their hermeneutical framework when describing
unequal power relations. As Annabel Patterson pointed out, since the times
of “Aesopus” the slave, fable speaks “to the need for those without power […]
to encode their commentary”25 on society, using wit as a means of subversion
and emancipation. Contra potentes nemo est munitus satis. As can be seen from

23 Vincent Montagnana, “Tomaz Lavric—Fables de Bosnie,” Chronicart.com (2000), avail-

able at http://www.chronicart.com/bandes-dessinees/tomaz-lavric-fables-de-bosnie/
(accessed Dec. 27, 2015); cf. Vervaet, “A Different Kind of War Story,” 178.
24 A new edition was published in 2014.
25 Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, n.c.:
Duke University Press, 1991), 55.

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Figure 14.1 Fragments of “Mačka” [Cat] from Bosanske basni [Bosnian fables] by Tomaž Lavrič
(Ljubljana: published by the author, 1997; here from the French
edition: Fables de Bosnie, Grenoble: Glénat, 1999), 81–82, courtesy
of the author.

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Aemulating Aesopus: SLOVENIAN FABLES AND FABLERS 217

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218 Movrin

the examples presented above,26 the vestigial structures of this Aesopian lan-
guage, as opposed to what Lenin had in mind, were used to a different extent
by different authors and are quite impossible to crack without a careful con-
textual analysis. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why they count among the
most remarkable remnants of Graeco-Roman tradition in children’s literature.

26 For a different selection of Slovenian fables, see Igor Saksida and Mojca Honzak, eds.,
Kdo pojasni krasne basni? Izbor slovenskih in tujih basni [Who will explain the charming
fables? A selection of Slovenian and foreign fables] (Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 2014).

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