No less a poet than the greatSeamus Heaney said of Norman Shapiro's Fifty Fables of La Fontaine, "It is a pleasure to open a book as sure and sly as these translations.. . . He gets the tune right and the tone right, and manages to echo boththe folk wisdom and the poker-faced formality of the originals."As surely as La Fontaine followedAesop, Shapiro has now made fabulous fifty more fables of the wonderfulLa Fontaine--among them "The Hare and the Tortoise," "TheOld Man and the Ass," and "The Frogs Who Asked for a King."David Schorr has just as captivatingly illustrated them.