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The Bird in Borrowed Feathers is a fable of Classical Greek origin usually ascribed to Aesop. It has existed in numerous different versions between that time and the Middle Ages, going by various titles and generally involving members of the corvid family. The lesson to be learned from it has also varied, depending on the context in which it was told. Several idioms derive from the fable. ==The main variations== While the details of the fable have always been varied,〔Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, tr.Gert-Jan van Dijk, ''The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable'' III, Leiden NL 2003 (pp.133-7 )〕 two main versions have been transmitted to European cultures in modern times. The first of these is mostly found in Greek sources and numbered 101 in the Perry Index.〔(Aesopica )〕 It concerns a daw or crow that dresses itself in the feathers of other birds before competing against them, only to have them recognised and stripped away by their owners; in some versions all its own feathers are also torn away. The lesson to be learned is that borrowed finery brings humiliation. The second version stems from the Latin collection of Phaedrus and is numbered 472 in the Perry Index.〔(Aesopica )〕 In this a jackdaw (or jay in Caxton's telling) that has found some peacock feathers and stuck them among its own, looks down on its kind and joins the peacocks. When they realise the intruder is not one of themselves, they attack it, stripping away the borrowed finery and leaving its so dishevelled that it is afterwards rejected by its fellows. The moral of the story is not to reach above one's station. Some mediaeval versions have different details. In Odo of Cheriton's telling the crow is ashamed of its ugliness and is advised by the eagle to borrow feathers from the other birds, but when it starts to insult them the eagle suggests that the birds reclaim their feathers.〔John C. Jacobs. ''The fables of Odo of Cheriton'', Syracuse University Press 1985, (pp.74-5 )〕 Froissart's Chronicles have a certain Friar John advising church leaders that their possessions depend on temporal rulers and illustrating the lesson with a story of a bird that is born featherless until all the other birds decide to furnish it with some of their own. When it starts to act too proudly, they threaten to take their feathers back.〔An extract from the Lord Berners translation in a (Harvard anthology )〕 Such stories addressed themselves to various kinds of pride and had given rise to the Latin idomatic phrase ''esopus graculus'' (Aesop’s jackdaw) that Erasmus recorded in his ''Adagia''.〔(III.vi 91 )〕 But the story has also been used to satirise literary plagiarists in Classical times. In one of his Epistles, the Roman poet Horace alludes to the Greek version of the fable when referring to the poet Celsus, who is advised not to borrow from others ‘lest, if it chance that the flock of birds should some time or other come to demand their feathers, he, like the daw stripped of his stolen colors, be exposed to ridicule.’〔Epistles I.3, (lines 18-20 )〕 It was in this sense too that the young William Shakespeare was attacked by the elder playwright Robert Greene as ‘an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’.〔''A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance'' (1592), quoted and commented on in the (Penguin Shakespeare )〕 When Jean de la Fontaine adapted the story in his ''Fables Choisies'' (IV.9), it was the Latin version of a bird disguised as a peacock that he chose, but he followed Horace in applying it to 'The human jay: the shameless plagiarist'.〔"The jay in peacock’s plumes", in Norman Shapiro's ''Fifty translations of La Fontaine'', University of Illinois 1997, (p.45 )〕 The very free version of John Matthews, his English translator, develops the suggestion much further: :::If you closely examine the men of the quill :::And search for goods stolen with sharp piercing eyes, :::Taking these from the pages their volumes which fill, :::Huge quartos would shrink to a very small size.〔Fables from La Fontaine, London 1820, () p.193〕 However, when La Fontaine's fable was rewritten to fit a popular air in the 18th century ''Nouvelles Poésies Spirituelles et Morales sur les plus beaux airs'', its focus was changed to dressing above one’s station.〔John Metz, ''The fables of La Fontaine: a critical edition of the eighteenth-century vocal settings'', Pendragon Press 1986, (p71 )〕 It is the Latin version too that lies behind the popular idiom 'to adorn oneself (or strut) in borrowed plumes', used against empty pretensions. This is made more obvious by the reference to peacock feathers in the Italian equivalent, ''Vestirsi con le penne del pavone''.〔''Lexicon of Common Figurative Units'', University of Trier, ( part 1, p.19 )〕 Ivan Krylov wrote his own variation of the fable called "The Crow". The fable gave rise to two expressions in Russian (after two different phrases in it): "Left the crows, but didn't join the peacocks" (От ворон отстала, а к павам не пристала) and "Neither peacock nor crow" (Ни пава, ни ворона). While keeping close to the fable at the start, he ends by extending the application to the human example of a merchant's daughter marrying a noble and fitting neither with their family nor her own.〔Lydia Razran Stone, ''The frogs who begged for a tsar'' (a dual language text), Russian Information Service 2010 (p.123 )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Bird in Borrowed Feathers」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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