Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (59 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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Preface to the 1957 Edition
A small child is taken to the zoo for the first time. This child may be any one of us or, to put it another way, we have been this child and have forgotten about it. In these grounds these terrible grounds the child sees living animals he has never before glimpsed; he sees jaguars, vultures, bison, and what is still stranger giraffes. He sees for the first time the bewildering variety of the animal kingdom, and this spectacle, which might alarm or frighten him, he enjoys. He enjoys it so much that going to the zoo is one of the pleasures of childhood, or is thought to be such. How can we explain this everyday and yet mysterious event?
We can, of course, deny it. We can suppose that children suddenly rushed off to the zoo will become, in due time, neurotic, and the truth is there can hardly be a child who has not visited the zoo and there is hardly a grown-up who is not a neurotic. It may be stated that all children, by definition, are explorers, and that to discover the camel is in itself no stranger than to discover a mirror or water or a staircase. It can also be stated that the child trusts his parents, who take him to this place full of animals. Besides, his toy tiger and the pictures of tigers in the encyclopedia have somehow taught him to look at the flesh-and-bone tiger without fear. Plato (if he were invited to join in this discussion) would tell us that the child had already seen the tiger in a primal world of archetypes, and that now on seeing the tiger he recognizes it. Schopenhauer (even more wondrously) would tell us that the child looks at the tigers without fear because he is aware that he is the tigers and the tigers are him or, more accurately, that both he and the tigers are but forms of that single essence, the Will.
Let us pass now from the zoo of reality to the zoo of mythologies, to the zoo whose denizens are not lions but sphinxes and griffons and centaurs. The population of this second zoo should exceed by far the population of the first, since a monster is no more than a combination of parts of real beings, and the possibilities of permutation border on the infinite. In the centaur, the horse and man are blended; in the Minotaur, the bull and man (Dante imagined it as having the face of a man and the body of a bull); and in this way it seems we could evolve an endless variety of monsters combinations of fishes, birds, and reptiles, limited only by our own boredom or disgust. This, however, does not happen; our monsters would be stillborn, thank God. Flaubert had rounded up, in the last pages of his Temptation of Saint Anthony, a number of medieval and classical monsters and has tried so say his commentators to concoct a few new ones; his sum total is hardly impressive, and but few of them really stir our imaginations. Anyone looking into the pages of the present handbook will soon find out that the zoology of dreams is far poorer than the zoology of the Maker.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distinct places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one, such as the three-headed chimera or the catoblepas. Of course, we are fully aware that this book, perhaps the first of its kind, does not exhaust the sum total of imaginary animals. We have delved into classical and Oriental literatures, but we feel that our subject goes on for ever.
We have deliberately excluded the many legends of men taking the shapes of animals: the lobisón, the werewolf, and so on.
We wish to acknowledge the help given us by Leonor Guerrero de Coppola, Alberto D’Aversa, and Rafael López Pellegri.
Martínez, 29 January 1957
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A Bao A Qu
If you want to look out over the loveliest landscape in the world, you must climb to the top of the Tower of Victory in Chitor. There, standing on a circular terrace, one has a sweep of the whole horizon. A winding stairway gives access to this terrace, but only those who do not believe in the legend dare climb up. The tale runs:
On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow. At the same time, its body and almost translucent skin begin to stir. But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor’s heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most worn by the generations of pilgrims. At each level the creature’s colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralysed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant. The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk. Its span of life is brief, since as soon as the traveler climbs down, the A Bao A Qu wheels and tumbles to the first steps, where, worn out and almost shapeless, it waits for the next visitor. People say that its tentacles are visible only when it reaches the middle of the staircase. It is also said that it can see with its whole body and that to the touch it is like the skin of a peach.
In the course of centuries, the A Bao A Qu has reached the terrace only once.
This legend is recorded by C. C. Iturvuru in an appendix to his now classic treatise On Malay Witchcraft (1937).
Abtu and Anet
As all Egyptians knew, Abtu and Anet were two life-sized fishes, identical and holy, that swam on the lookout for danger before the prow of the sun god’s ship. Their course was endless; by day the craft sailed the sky from east to west, from dawn to dusk, and by night made its way underground in the opposite direction.
The Amphisbaena
The
Pharsalia
(IX, 701-28) catalogues the real or imaginary reptiles that Cato’s soldiers met up with on their scorching march across the African desert. Among them are the Pareas, ‘content with its tail to cleave its track’ (or as a seventeenth-century Spanish poet has it, ‘which makes its way, erect as a staff’), and the Jaculi, which darts from trees like javelins, and ‘the dangerous Amphisbaena, also, that moves on at both of its heads’. Pliny uses nearly the same words to describe the Amphisbaena, adding: ‘as though one mouth were not enough for the discharge of all its venom’
Brunetto Latini’s Tesoro the encyclopedia which Latini recommended to his old disciple in the seventh circle of Hell is less terse and clearer: The Amphisbaena is a serpent having two heads, the one in its proper place and the other in its tail; and it can bite with both, and run with agility, and its eyes glare like candles.’ Sir Thomas Browne in his Vulgar Errors (1646) wrote that there is no species without a bottom, top, front, back, left, and right, and he denied the existence of the Amphisbaena, ‘for the senses being placed at both extreams, doth make both ends anterior, which is impossible . . . And therefore this duplicity was ill contrived to place one head at both extreams . . .’ Amphisbaena, in Greek means ‘goes both ways’. In the Antilles and in certain parts of America, the name is given to a reptile commonly known as the doble andadora (Both ways goer), the ‘two-headed snake’, and ‘mother of ants’. It is said that ants nourish it. Also that if it is chopped in half, its two parts will join again.
The Amphisbaena’s medicinal properties were celebrated by Pliny.
An Animal Imagined by Kafka
It is the animal with the big tail, a tail many yards long and like a fox’s brush. How I should like to get my hands on this tail some time, but it is impossible, the animal is constantly moving about, the tail is constantly being flung this way and that. The animal resembles a kangaroo, but not as to the face, which is flat almost like a human face, and small and oval; only its teeth have any power of expression, whether they are concealed or bared. Sometimes I have the feeling that the animal is trying to tame me.
What other purpose could it have in withdrawing its tail when I snatch at it, and then again waiting calmly until I am tempted again, and then leaping away once more?
F
ranz
K
afka
:
Dearest Father
(Translated from the German by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins)
An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis
The noise was very loud now and the thicket very dense so that he could not see a yard ahead, when the music stopped suddenly. There was a sound of rustling and broken twigs and he made hastily in that direction, but found nothing. He had almost decided to give up the search when the song began again a little farther away. Once more he made after it; once more the creature stopped singing and evaded him. He must have played thus at hide-and-seek with it for the best part of an hour before his search was rewarded.
Treading delicately during one of the loudest bursts of music he at last saw through the flowery branches a black something. Standing still whenever it stopped singing, and advancing with great caution whenever it began again, he stalked it for ten minutes. At last it was in full view, and singing, and ignorant that it was watched. It sat upright like a dog, black and sleek and shiny, but its shoulders were high above Ransom’s head, and the forelegs on which they were pillared were like young trees and the wide soft pads on which they rested were large as those of a camel. The enormous rounded belly was white, and far up above the shoulders the neck rose like that of a horse. The head was in profile from where Ransom stood the mouth wide open as it sang of joy in thick-coming trills, and the music almost visibly rippled in its glossy throat. He stared in wonder at the wide liquid eyes and the quivering, sensitive nostrils. Then the creature stopped, saw him, and darted away, and stood, now a few paces distant, on all four legs, not much smaller than a young elephant, swaying a long bushy tail. It was the first thing in Perelandra which seemed to show any fear of man. Yet it was not fear. When he called to it it came nearer. It put its velvet nose into his hand and endured his touch; but almost at once it darted back and, bending its long neck, buried its head in its paws. He could make no headway with it, and when at length it retreated out of sight he did not follow it. To do so would have seemed an injury to its fawn-like shyness, to the yielding softness of its expression, its evident wish to be for ever a sound and only a sound in the thickest centre of untraveled woods. He resumed his journey: a few seconds later the song broke out behind him, louder and lovelier than before, as if in a paean of rejoicing at its recovered privacy.
The beasts of that kind have no milk [said Perelandra] and always what they bring forth is suckled by the she-beast of another kind. She is great and beautiful and dumb, and till the young singing beast is weaned it is among her whelps and is subject to her. But when it is grown it becomes the most delicate and glorious of all beasts and goes from her. And she wonders at its song.
’
C. S. L
ewis
: Perelandra