Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (75 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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An Offspring of Leviathan
In the
Golden Legend
, a thirteenth-century compendium of lives of the saints written by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine, read and re-read in the Middle Ages but now neglected, we find much curious lore. The book went through numerous editions and translations, among them the one into English printed by William Caxton. Chaucer’s ‘Second Nonne’s Tale’ has its source in the
Legenda aurea
; Longfellow also was inspired by the work of Jacobus, taking the, title from the
Golden Legend
for one of the books of his trilogy Christus.
Out of Jacobus’ medieval Latin, we translate the following from the chapter on St Martha (CV [100]):
There was at that time, in a certain wood above the Rhone between Arles and Avignon, a dragon that was half beast and half fish, larger than an ox and longer than a horse. Armed with a pair of tusks that were like swords and pointed as horns, it lay in wait in the river, killing all wayfarers and swamping boats. It had come, however, from the sea of Galatia in Asia Minor and was begotten by Leviathan, the fiercest of all water serpents, and by the Wild Ass, which is common to those shores . . .
One-Eyed Beings
Before it became the name of an optical instrument, the word ‘monocle’ was applied to beings who had a single eye. So, in a sonnet composed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Góngora writes of the Monóculo galán de Galatea (‘The monocle who yearns for Galatea’) referring, of course, to Polyphemus, of whom he had previously written in his
Fábula de Polifemo
:
Un monte era de miembros eminente
Este que, de Neptuno hijo fiero,
De un ojo ilustra el orbe de su frente,
Émulo casi del mayor lucero;
Cíclope a quien el pino más valiente
Bastón le obedecía tan ligero,
Y al grave peso junco tan delgado,
Que un día era bastón y otro caiado.
Negro el cabello, imitador undoso
De las oscuras aguas del Leteo,
Al viento que le peina proceloso
Vuela sin orden, pende sin aseo;
Un torrente es su barba impetuoso
Que, adusto hijo de este Pirineo,
Su pecho inunda, o tarde o mal o en vano
Surcada aún de los dedos de su mano.
[An eminent peak of limbs he was, this uncouth son of Neptune, lighting the orb of his forehead with an eye almost rivaling the greatest star; a Cyclops to whom the stoutest pine obeyed as a light cane, and was to his bulky mass a reed so slender that one day it was a walking-stick and the next a shepherd’s crook.
Jet black his hair, a wavy imitator of the dark waters of the Lethe, in the wind which stormily combs it, blowing in a tangle and dangling in disorder; a plunging torrent is his beard, which stern son of this Pyrenee overflows his breast, too late or badly or in vain furrowed by the fingers of his hand.]
These lines outdo and are weaker than others from the third book of the
Aeneid
(praised by Quintilian), which in turn outdo and are weaker than still other lines from the ninth book of the Odyssey. This literary decline matches a decline in the poet’s faith; Virgil wishes to impress us with his Polyphemus, but scarcely believes in him; and Góngora believes only in words or in verbal trickery.
The Cyclops were not the only race of men having one eye; Pliny (VII, 2) also mentions the Arimaspians, a nation remarkable for having but one eye, and that placed in the middle of the forehead. This race is said to carry on a perpetual warfare with the Griffons, a kind of monster, with wings as they are commonly represented, for the gold which they dig out of the mines, and which these wild beasts retain and keep watch over with a singular degree of cupidity, while the Arimaspi are equally desirous to get possession of it.
Five hundred years earlier, the first encyclopedist, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, had written (III, 116):
This is also plain, that to the north of Europe there is by far more gold than elsewhere. In this matter again I cannot with certainty say how the gold is got; some will have it that one-eyed men called Arimaspians steal it from griffons. But this too I hold incredible, that there can be men in all else like other men, yet having but one eye.
The Panther
In medieval bestiaries the word ‘panther’ deals with a very different animal from the carnivorous mammal of present-day zoology. Aristotle had written that it gives off a sweet smell attractive to other animals; Aelian the Roman author nicknamed ‘Honey-Tongued’ for his perfect command of Greek, a language he preferred to Latin stated that this odour was also pleasant to men. (In this characteristic some see a confusion of the Panther with the civet cat.) Pliny endowed the Panther’s back with a large circular spot that waxed and waned with the moon. To these marvelous circumstances came to be added the fact that the Bible, in the Septuagint version, uses the word ‘panther’ in a verse (Hosea, V: 14) that may be a prophetic reference to Jesus: ‘I am become as a panther to Ephraim.’
In the Anglo-Saxon bestiary of the
Exeter Book
, the Panther is a gentle, solitary beast with a melodious voice and sweet breath (likened elsewhere to the smell of allspice) that makes its home in a secret den in the mountains. Its only foe is the dragon, with which it fights incessantly. After a full meal it sleeps and ‘On the third day when he wakes, a lofty, sweet, ringing sound comes from his mouth, and with the song a most delightful stream of sweet-smelling breath, more grateful than all the blooms of herbs and blossoms of the trees.’ Multitudes of men and animals flock to its den from the fields and castles and towns, drawn on by the fragrance and the music. The dragon is the age-old enemy, the Devil; the waking is the resurrection of the Lord; the multitudes are the community of the faithful; and the Panther is Jesus Christ. To attenuate the amazement this allegory can awaken, let us remember that the Panther was not a wild beast to the Saxons but an exotic sound unsupported by any very concrete image. It may be added, as a curiosity, that Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’ speaks of ‘Christ the tiger’.
Leonardo da Vinci notes:
The African panther is like a lion, but with longer legs, and a more slender body. It is completely white, spattered with black spots like rosettes. Its beauty delights the other animals, which would all flock to it were it not for the panther’s terrible stare. Aware of this, the panther lowers its eyes; other animals approach it to drink in such beauty, and the panther pounces on the nearest of them.
The Pelican
The Pelican of everyday zoology is a water bird with a wingspan of some six feet and a very long bill whose lower mandible distends to form a pouch for holding fish. The Pelican of fable is smaller and its bill is accordingly shorter and sharper. Faithful to popular etymology
pelicanus
, white-haired the plumage of the former is white while that of the latter is yellow and sometimes green. (The real origin of pelican is from the Greek ‘I hew with an axe’, in a confusion of its large bill with that of the woodpecker’s.) But more unusual than its appearance are its habits. With its bill and claws, the mother bird caresses her offspring with such devotion that she kills them. After three days the father arrives and, despairing over the deaths of his young, rips at his own breast with his bill. The blood that spills from his wounds revives the dead birds. This is the account given in medieval bestiaries, though St Jerome in a commentary on the 102nd Psalm (‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert’) attributes the death of the nestlings to the serpent. That the Pelican opens its breast and feeds its young with its own blood is the common version of the fable.
Blood that gives life to the dead suggests the Eucharist and the cross, and so a famous line of the
Paradiso
(XXV, 113) calls Jesus Christ
nostro Pellicano —
mankind’s Pelican. The Latin commentary by Benvenuto of Imola amplifies this point: ‘He is called pelican because he opened his side for our salvation, like the pelican that revives its dead brood with the blood of its breast. The pelican is an Egyptian Bird.’
The Pelican is common in ecclesiastical heraldry and it is still engraved on chalices. The bestiary by Leonardo da Vinci describes the Pelican in this way:
It is greatly devoted to its young and, finding them in the nest killed by snakes, tears at its breast, bathing them with its blood to bring them back to life.
The Peryton
The Sibyl of Erythraea, it is said, foretold that the city of Rome would finally be destroyed by the Perytons. In the year
a
.
d
.
642 the record of the Sibyl's prophecies was consumed in the great conflagration of Alexandria; the gram
marians who undertook the task of restoring certain charred fragments of the nine volumes apparently never came upon the special prophecy concerning the fate of Rome.
In time it was deemed necessary to find a source that would throw greater light upon this dimly remembered tradition. After many vicissitudes it was learned that in the sixteenth century a rabbi from Fez (in all likelihood Jakob Ben Chaim) had left behind a historical treatise in which he quoted the now lost work of a Greek scholiast, which included certain historical facts about the Perytons obviously taken from the oracles before the Library of Alexandria was burned by Omar. The name of the learned Greek has not come down to us, but his fragments run:
The Perytons had their original dwelling in Atlantis and are half deer, half bird. They have the deer’s head and legs. As for its body, it is perfectly avian, with corresponding wings and plumage . . .
Its strangest trait is that, when the sun strikes it, instead of casting a shadow of its own body, it casts the shadow of a man. From this, some conclude that the Perytons are the spirits of wayfarers who have died far from their homes and from the care of their gods . . .. . . and have been surprised eating dry earth . . . flying in flocks and have been seen at a dizzying height above the Columns of Hercules.
. . . they [Perytons] are mortal foes of the human race; when they succeed in killing a man, their shadow is that of their own body and they win back the favour of their gods.
. . . and those who crossed the seas with Scipio to conquer Carthage came close to failure, for during the passage a formation of Perytons swooped down on the ships, killing and mangling many . . . Although our weapons have no effect against it, the animal if such it be can kill no more than a single man.
. . . wallowing in the gore of its victims and then fleeing upward on its powerful wings.
. . . in Ravenna, where they were last seen, telling of their plumage which they described as light blue in colour, which greatly surprised me for all that is known of their dark green feathers.
Though these excerpts are sufficiently explicit, it is to be lamented that down to our own time no further intelligence about the Perytons has reached us. The rabbi’s treatise, which preserved this description for us, had been on deposit until before the last World War in the library of the University of Dresden. It is painful to say that this document has also disappeared, and whether as a consequence of bombardment or of the earlier book burning of the Nazis, it is not known. Let us hope that one day another copy of the work may be discovered and again come to adorn the shelves of some library.