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A Mouse fell from an Owl’s beak:
I would not have picked it up;
But a Brahmin did; I readily believe it:
Every land has its own way of thinking.
The Mouse was badly bruised:
For this sort of neighbor
We care little; but the Brahmin folk
Treat it as a brother; they hold in their heads
That our soul, upon leaving a King,
Enters a mite, or such other beast
As Fate pleases. This is one of the points of their law.
Pythagoras drew this mystery from them.
On such a foundation the Brahmin thought it well
To pray a Sorcerer to lodge the Mouse
In a body it had once inhabited long ago.
The sorcerer made of it a girl
Of the age of fifteen, and so fair, and so charming,
That the son of Priam for her would have attempted
Even more than he did for the Greek beauty.
The Brahmin was astonished at so new a thing.
He said to this object so sweet:
You have only to choose; for each is jealous
Of the honor of being your spouse.
– In that case I give, said she,
My voice to the most powerful of all.
– Sun, then cried the Brahmin on his knees,
It is you who shall be our son-in-law.
– No, said he, this thick cloud
Is more powerful than I, since it hides my rays;
I advise you to take it.
– Well then, said the Brahmin to the flying cloud,
Were you born for my daughter? – Alas no; for the wind
Drives me at its pleasure from country to country;
I will not encroach on the rights of Boreas.
The Brahmin, angered, cried:
O wind then, since wind there is,
Come into the arms of our fair one.
It came running; a mountain stopped it on the way.
The ball passing to that one,
He sends it back, and says: I would have a quarrel
With the Rat; and to offend him
Would be madness, he who can pierce me.
At the word Rat, the Damsel
Pricked up her ear; he was the spouse.
A Rat! a Rat; it is one of those blows
That Love deals, as witness such and such:
But let this be said between us.
We always keep something of the place we come from. This Fable
Proves this point well enough: but seen up close,
Some little sophism enters among its strokes:
For what spouse is not preferable to the Sun
By taking it thus? Shall I say that a giant
Is less strong than a flea? She bites him nonetheless.
The Rat should also have sent back, to do things right,
The beauty to the cat, the cat to the dog,
The dog to the wolf. By means
Of this circular argument,
Pilpay would at last have climbed back to the Sun;
The Sun would have enjoyed the young beauty.
Let us return, if we can, to metempsychosis:
The Brahmin’s sorcerer doubtless did a thing
Which, far from proving it, shows its falsity.
I take right there against the Brahmin himself:
For it must be, according to his system,
That man, mouse, worm, in short each one
Goes to draw its soul from a common treasure:
All are therefore of the same temper;
But acting diversely
According to the organ only
One rises, and another crawls.
How comes it then that this body so well organized
Could not oblige its hostess
To unite with the Sun, a Rat won her tenderness?
All debated, all well weighed,
The souls of mice and the souls of beauties
Are very different from one another.
One must always come back to one’s destiny,
That is to say, to the law established by Heaven.
Speak to the devil, employ magic,
You will divert no being from its end.
Jean de La Fontaine
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/fable-the-mouse-metamorphosed-into-a-maid-jean-de-la-fontaine/