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Volunteers bring you 8 recordings of The Old Man and the Ass by Jean de La Fontaine. (There was no translator acknowledged in the text.) This was the Weekly Poetry project for July 7, 2013.

Jean de La Fontaine was the most famous French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, and in French regional languages.
According to Flaubert, he was the only French poet to understand and master the texture of the French language before Hugo. A set of postage stamps celebrating La Fontaine and the Fables was issued by France in 1995.