Misadventures in the Land of Fables #41
Time for another up-date on my adventures in Cooper’s ‘Argosy of Fables.’ After a thrilling period of discovery, I began to find I recognized many of the ‘Hindoo’ fables. I have already read the Panchatantra and many tales were drawn from that ancient text.
I have now reached the dusty, sun-baked expanse of Persia. The tales—of camels, rats, and stray dogs—are pithy and incisive with a wisdom that is difficult to dispute, if a little cynical. I was nodding along, with a wry smile, until I came to the tale of ‘The Red Wasp and the Honey Bee’.
A MISTAKEN MORAL
Like many editions of Aesop, the Persian fables conclude with a statement the moral of the tale, an epimythium. In the case of ‘The Red Wasp and the Honey Bee.’ The moral was not what I’d been expecting. It was the opposite. In fact, it was, as I exclaimed at the time, insane.
It’s a short tale, a dialogue. A wasp attacks a honey bee “eager to feast upon her sweetness.” To discourage it, the bee points to the flowers and sweet nectar all around them, but the wasp is not impressed as he considers the bee the source of sweetness, “its fountainhead.”
Surely, the wasp is making a categorical mistake here. The bee may participate in the production of honey, but it is not itself sweet. And yet the moral of the tale endorses the wasps attack.
“Happy is the man who knows true from false, and refuses to accept less.”
Huh? I mean, yes, very good, but this isn’t the place—the action here points to a very different observation. The moral was the wrong way around and it needed redress.
THE ANGRY WASP
Now some of you may be aware that wasps tell each other stories and that most prominent in their folklore is a character called ‘the Angry Wasp,’ a kind of anti-hero, a trickster and taboo-breaker, by turns hapless idiot or selfish-git. (An example is available to purchase here.) The Persian tale of a ‘Red Wasp’ seemed as if it could have been derived from that same folklore, the Angry Wasp story turning up in the land of fables.
This is how I think it should have been rendered: ‘The Angry Wasp and the Honey Bee.’
