The Flying Fish

Fable by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian Period 18th century

Certain flying fish, unhappy with his lot,
Said to his old grandmother:
I do not know how I should act
To preserve myself from death.
From our sea eagles I dread the talon
When I rise into the air,
And the sharks wage war on me
When I plunge to the depths of the seas.
The old one answered him: My child, in this world
When one is not an eagle or a shark,
One must very gently follow a little path,
Swimming near the air and flying near the wave.

Florian

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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