Fabeln

The new bilingual edition of Phaedrus' Fables is based on the most recent research on this author, which Ursula Gärtner has presented since 2002; in addition, the text-critical findings of Giovanni Zago, who is preparing the new edition in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana, as well as a manuscript discovered in 2014 have been taken into account for the first time. In the tradition of his metrical translations of Ovid's and Virgil's works in the Tusculum collection, Niklas Holzberg has now also rendered the iambs of the original in German iambs, again avoiding the conventional but nowadays incomprehensible classicisms and writing in modern German. His introduction and explanatory notes are the first to present the "new" Phaedrus as a poet who does not write for children, but rather links his fables intertextually with the great poetry of the Greeks and Romans and deconstructs many of the fables inherited from the Aesopian tradition by remodelling them. In addition, the introduction opens up the reception of Phaedrus, which, until the end of the 16th century, still took place via prose phrases, making the "Aesopus" of 1476/77, which was reprinted until the 19th century, one of the greatest bestsellers in book history.