Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (60 page)
Read Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Online
Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
Tags: #Short stories
The Animal Imagined by Poe
In his
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
, published in 1838, Edgar Allan Poe attributed to certain Antarctic islands an astounding yet credible fauna. In Chapter XVIII, we read:
We also picked up a bush, full of red berries, like those of the hawthorn, and the carcass of a singular-looking land-animal. It was three feet in length, and but six inches in height, with four very short legs, the feet armed with long claws of a brilliant scarlet, and resembling coral in substance. The body was covered with a straight silky hair, perfectly white. The tail was peaked like that of a rat, and about a foot and a half long. The head resembled a cat’s, with the exception of the ears; these were flapped like the ears of a dog. The teeth were of the same brilliant scarlet as the claws.
No less remarkable was the water found in those southern regions. Towards the close of the chapter, Poe writes:
On account of the singular character of the water, we refused to taste it, supposing it to be polluted . . . I am at a loss to give a distinct idea of the nature of this liquid, and cannot do so without many words. Although it flowed with rapidity in all declivities where common water would do so, yet never, except when falling in a cascade, had it the customary appearance of limpidity. It was, nevertheless, in point of fact, as perfectly limpid as any limestone water in existence, the difference being only in appearance. At first sight, and especially in cases where little declivity was found, it bore resemblance, as regards consistency, to a thick infusion of gum-arabic in common water. But this was only the least remarkable of its extraordinary qualities. It was not colourless, nor was it of any one uniform colour presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk . . . Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighbouring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify.
Animals in the Form of Spheres
The sphere is the most uniform of solid bodies since every point on its surface is equidistant from its centre. Because of this, and because of its ability to revolve on an axis without straying from a fixed place, Plato (Timaeus, 33) approved the judgment of the Demiurge, who gave the world a spherical shape. Plato thought the world to be a living being and in the Laws (898) stated that the planets and stars were living as well. In this way, he enriched fantastic zoology with vast spherical animals and cast aspersions on those slow-witted astronomers who failed to understand that the circular course of heavenly bodies was voluntary.
In Alexandria over five hundred years later, Origen, one of the Fathers of the Church, taught that the blessed would come back to life in the form of spheres and would enter rolling into Heaven.
During the Renaissance, the idea of Heaven as an animal reappeared in Lucilio Vanini; the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino spoke of the hair, teeth, and bones of the earth; and Giordano Bruno felt that the planets were great peaceful animals, warm-blooded, with regular habits, and endowed with reason. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler debated with the English mystic Robert Fludd which of them had first conceived the notion of the earth as a living monster, ‘whose whalelike breathing, changing with sleep and wakefulness, produces the ebb and flow of the sea
’
. The anatomy, the feeding habits, the colour, the memory, and the imaginative and shaping faculties of the monster were sedulously studied by Kepler.
In the nineteenth century, the German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner (a man praised by William James in his A Pluralistic Universe) rethought the preceding ideas with all the earnestness of a child. Anyone not belittling his hypothesis that the earth, our mother, is an organism an organism superior to plants, animals, and men may look into the pious pages of Fechner’s Zend-Avesta. There we read, for example, that the earth’s spherical shape is that of the human eye, the noblest organ of our body. Also, that ‘if the sky is really the home of angels, these angels are obviously the stars, for the sky has no other inhabitants’.
Antelopes with Six Legs
It is said that Odin’s horse, the grey-coated Sleipnir who travels on land, in the air, and down into the regions of Hell is provided (or encumbered) with eight legs; a Siberian myth attributes six legs to the first Antelopes. With such an endowment it was difficult or impossible to catch them; Tunk-poj, the divine huntsman, made some special skates with the wood of a sacred tree which creaked incessantly and that the barking of a dog had revealed to him. The skates creaked too and flew with the speed of an arrow; to control or restrain their course, he found it necessary to wedge into the skates some blocks made of the wood of another magic tree. All over heaven Tunk-poj hunted the Antelope. The beast, tired out, fell to the ground, and Tunk-poj cut off its hindmost pair of legs.
‘Men,
’
said Tunk-poj, ‘grow smaller and weaker every day. How are they going to hunt six-legged Antelopes if I myself am barely able to?’
From that day on, Antelopes have been quadrupeds.
The Ass with Three Legs
Pliny attributes to Zarathustra, founder of the religion still professed by the Parsis of Bombay, the composition of two million verses; the Arab historian al-Tabari claims that Zarathustra’s complete works as set down by pious calligraphers cover some twelve thousand cowhides. It is well known that Alexander of Macedonia had these parchments burned in Persepolis, but thanks to the retentive memory of the priests, it was possible to preserve the basic texts, and from the ninth century these have been supplemented by an encyclopedic work, the Bundahish, which contains this page:
Of the three-legged ass it is said that it stands in the middle of the ocean and that three is the number of its hooves and six the number of its eyes and nine the number of its mouths and two the number of its ears and one the number of its horn. Its coat is white, its food is spiritual, and its whole being is righteous. And two of its six eyes are in the place where eyes should be and two on the crown of its head and two in its forehead; through the keenness of its six eyes it triumphs and destroys.
Of its nine mouths, three are placed in the face and three in the forehead and three on the inside of its loins . . . Each hoof, laid on the ground, covers the space of a flock of a thousand sheep, and under each of its spurs up to a thousand horsemen can manoeuvre. As to its ears, they overshadow [the north Persian province of] Mazanderan. Its horn is as of gold and is hollow, and from it a thousand branchlets have grown. With this horn will it bring down and scatter all the machinations of the wicked.
Amber is known to be the dung of the three-legged ass. In the mythology of Mazdaism, this beneficent monster is one of the helpers of Ahura Mazdah (Ormuzd), the principle of Life, Light, and Truth.
Bahamut
Behemoth’s fame reached the wastes of Arabia, where men altered and magnified its image. From a hippopotamus or elephant they turned it into a fish afloat in a fathomless sea; on the fish they placed a bull, and on the bull a ruby mountain, and on the mountain an angel, and over the angel six hells, and over these hells the earth, and over the earth seven heavens. A Moslem tradition runs:
God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel’s feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues and feet. But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach.
Others have it that the earth has its foundation on the water; the water, on the crag; the crag, on the bull’s forehead; the bull, on a bed of sand; the sand, on Bahamut; Bahamut, on a stifling wind; the stifling wind on a mist. What lies under the mist is unknown.
So immense and dazzling is Bahamut that the eyes of man cannot bear its sight. All the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish’s nostrils, would be like a mustard seed laid in the desert. In the 496th night of the Arabian Nights we are told that it was given to Isa (Jesus) to behold Bahamut and that, this mercy granted, Isa fell to the ground in a faint, and three days and their nights passed before he recovered his senses. The tale goes on that beneath the measureless fish is a sea; and beneath the sea, a chasm of air; and beneath the air, fire; and beneath the fire, a serpent named Falak in whose mouth are the six hells.
The idea of the crag resting on the bull, and the bull on Bahamut, and Bahamut on anything else, seems to be an illustration of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This proof argues that every cause requires a prior cause, and so, in order to avoid proceeding into infinity, a first cause is necessary.
Baldanders
Baldanders (whose name we may translate as Soon-another or At-any-moment-something-else) was suggested to the master shoemaker Hans Sachs (1494-1576) of Nuremburg by that passage in the
Odyssey
in which Menelaus pursues the Egyptian god Proteus, who changes himself into a lion, a serpent, a panther, a huge wild boar, a tree, and flowing water. Some ninety years after Sachs’s death, Baldanders makes a new appearance in the last book of the picaresque fantastic novel by Grimmelshausen,
The Adventuresome Simplicissimus
(1669). In the midst of a wood, the hero comes upon a stone statue which seems to him an idol from some old Germanic temple. He touches it and the statue tells him he is Baldanders and thereupon takes the forms of a man, of an oak tree, of a sow, of a fat sausage, of a field of clover, of dung, of a flower, of a blossoming branch, of a mulberry bush, of a silk tapestry, of many other things and beings, and then, once more, of a man. He pretends to teach Simplicissimus the art ‘of conversing with things, which by their nature are dumb, such as chairs and benches, pots and pans’; he also makes himself into a secretary and writes these words from the Revelation of St John: ‘I am the first and the last’, which are the key to the coded document in which he leaves the hero his instructions. Baldanders adds that his emblem (like that of the Turk, and with more right to it than the Turk) is the inconstant moon.
Baldanders is a successive monster, a monster in time. The title page of the first edition of Grimmelshausen’s novel takes up the joke. It bears an engraving of a creature having a satyr’s head, a human torso, the unfolded wings of a bird, and the tail of a fish, and which, with a goat’s leg and vulture’s claws, tramples on a heap of masks that stand for the succession of shapes he has taken. In his belt he carries a sword and in his hands an open book showing pictures of a crown, a sailing boat, a goblet, a tower, a child, a pair of dice, a fool’s cap with bells, and a piece of ordnance.