《蚂蚁和蚱蜢》出自古希腊的《伊索寓言》，在现代学者佩里整理的编号里是第373号。有趣的是，希腊原文里的主角其实是「蚂蚁和蝉」，夏天在树上鸣叫的正是蝉；后来这个故事传到气候较冷、蝉比较少见的地方，翻译时才渐渐变成了蚱蜢。

The Ant and the Grasshopper comes from the Aesop fables of ancient Greece and is number 373 in the Perry Index compiled by a modern scholar. Interestingly, in the Greek original the characters are actually an ant and a cicada, the insect that sings in the trees all summer. Later, as the story spread to cooler places where cicadas are rare, translators gradually turned it into a grasshopper.

1668年，法国诗人拉封丹出版了他的《寓言诗》，第一卷第一篇就是《蝉和蚂蚁》，法国孩子几乎人人会背。现实中，夏天会唱歌的蝉，幼虫要在地下生活好几年，北美有一种周期蝉甚至要在地下待13年或17年才钻出来，而大多数蚂蚁过冬时则躲在地下巢穴里减少活动。

In 1668, the French poet Jean de La Fontaine published his Fables, and the very first fable of the first book is The Cicada and the Ant, which almost every French child learns by heart. In real life, the cicadas that sing in summer spend several years underground as young insects; some periodical cicadas in North America stay underground for 13 or 17 years before coming out, while most ants spend the winter resting deep inside their nests.

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