Competition | 31 October 2009

In Competition No. 2619 you were invited to submit a short fable culminating in a mangled aphorism. The fabulous theme of this comp is a salute to Jaspistos, celebrated translator of fables, whose rendering of La Fontaine’s was deemed by the not-easily-pleased Geoffrey Grigson to have been unsurpassed, ‘earthier and sharper than Marianne Moore’s’. The assignment was also a somewhat backhanded tribute to that most exacting of forms, the aphorism, described by Auden and Louis Kronenberger, in their foreword to The Faber Book of Aphorisms, as ‘an aristocratic genre of writing’.

There was a lot to live up to, then, which perhaps accounted for a lower than usual turnout and a patchy standard overall. Some fables were going great guns, like Aesop’s hare, but then faltered short of the finishing line and failed to deliver on the aphoristic challenge. Commendations, none the less, to Tom Durrheim, Shirley Curran, Virginia Price Evans and Brian Murdoch.