Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (58 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
Tags: #Short stories
"Let's get on our way," said the other man.
They went out and if Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt.
Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann went out into the plain.
- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN
The Book of Imaginary Beings
An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis
Animals in the Form of Spheres
The Cheshire Cat and the Kilkenny Cats
A Creature Imagined by C. S. Lewis
The Crocotta and the Leucrocotta
The Elephant That Foretold the Birth of the Buddha
An Experimental Account of What Was Known, Seen, and Met by Mrs. Jane Lead in London in 1694
Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel
The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard
Preface
As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition. The compilation and translation of this volume have given us a great deal of such pleasure; we hope the reader will share something of the fun we felt when ransacking the bookshelves of our friends and the mazelike vaults of the Biblioteca Nacional in search of old authors and abstruse references. We have done our best to trace all our quoted material back to original sources and to translate it from the original tongues medieval Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Lemprière and the Loeb and Bohn collections have, as is their wont, proved most helpful with the classics. As for our invincible ignorance of Eastern languages, it enables us to be grateful for the labours of such men as Giles, Burton, Lane, Waley, and Scholem. The first edition of this book, containing eighty-two pieces, was published in Mexico in 1957. It was called then
Manual de zoología fantástica
(Handbook of Fantastic Zoology). In 1967, a second edition
El libro de los seres imaginarios
was published in Buenos Aires with thirty-four additional articles. Now, for this English-language edition, we have altered a good number of the original articles, correcting, adding, or revising material, and we have also compiled a few brand-new ones. This latest edition contains 120 pieces. We extend warm thanks for their help to Marian Skedgell, of E. P. Dutton, and to José Edmundo Clemente, Assistant Director of the Argentine National Library.
Buenos Aires, 23 May 1969
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Preface to the 1967 Edition
The title of this book would justify the inclusion of Prince Hamlet, of the point, of the line, of the surface, of n-dimensional hyperplanes and hypervolumes, of all generic terms, and perhaps of each one of us and of the godhead. In brief, the sum of all things the universe. We have limited ourselves, however, to what is immediately suggested by the words ‘imaginary beings’; we have compiled a handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination. We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods. A book of this kind is unavoidably incomplete; each new edition forms the basis of future editions, which themselves may grow on endlessly. We invite the eventual reader in Colombia or Paraguay to send us the names, accurate description, and most conspicuous traits of their local monsters. As with all miscellanies, as with the inexhaustible volumes of Robert Burton, of Frazer, or of Pliny, The Book of Imaginary Beings is not meant to be read straight through; rather, we should like the reader to dip into these pages at random, just as one plays with the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope. The sources of this collection are manifold; they are re-corded in each piece. May we be forgiven any accidental omission.
Martínez, September 1967
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