Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (81 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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The Tigers of Annam
To the Annamites, tigers, or spirits who dwell in tigers, govern the four corners of space. The Red Tiger rules over the South (which is located at the top of maps); summer and fire belong to him. The Black Tiger rules over the North; winter and water belong to him. The Blue Tiger rules over the East; spring and plants belong to him. The White Tiger rules over the West; autumn and metals belong to him.
Over these Cardinal Tigers is a fifth tiger, the Yellow Tiger, who stands in the middle governing the others, just as the Emperor stands in the middle of China and China in the middle of the World. (That’s why it is called the Middle Kingdom; that’s why it occupies the middle of the map that Father Ricci, of the Society of Jesus, drew at the end of the sixteenth century for the instruction of the Chinese.)
Lao-tzu entrusted to the Five Tigers the mission of waging war against devils. An Annamite prayer, translated into French by Louis Cho Chod, implores the aid of the Five Heavenly Tigers. This superstition is of Chinese origin; Sinologists speak of a White Tiger that rules over the remote region of the western stars. To the South the Chinese place a Red Bird; the East, a Blue Dragon; to the North, a Black Tortoise. As we see, the Annamites have preserved the colours but have made the animals one.
The Bhils, a people of Central India, believe in hells for Tigers; the Malays tell of a city in the heart of the jungle with beams of human bones, walls of human skin, and eaves of human hair, built and inhabited by Tigers.
The Trolls
In England, after the advent of Christianity, the Valkyries (or ‘Choosers of the Slain’) were relegated to the villages and there degenerated into witches; in the Scandinavian countries the giants of heathen myth, who lived in Jotunnheim and battled against the god Thor, were reduced to rustic Trolls. In the cosmogony opening the Elder Edda, we read that in the Twilight of the Gods, the giants, allied with a wolf and a serpent, will scale the rainbow Bifrost, which will break under their weight, thereby destroying the world. The Trolls of popular superstition are stupid, evil elves who dwell in mountain crannies or in ramshackle huts. Trolls of distinction may bear two or three heads.
Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem
Peer Gynt
(1867) assures them their immortality. Ibsen depicts the Trolls as, above all, nationalists. They think, or do their best to think, that the foul concoction they brew is delicious and that their hovels are palaces. So that Peer Gynt would not witness the sordidness of his surroundings and the ugliness of the princess he is about to marry, the Trolls offer to put out his eyes.
Two Metaphysical Beings
The mystery of the origin of ideas brings a pair of strange creatures to imaginary zoology. One was evolved towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the other a hundred years later.
The first is Condillac’s sensitive statue. Descartes professed the Platonic doctrine of innate ideas; Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for the purposes of refuting him, conceived a marble statue in the likeness of the human body and inhabited by a soul that had never perceived or thought. Condillac begins by conferring on his statue a single sense, perhaps the least complex of all that of smell. A whiff of jasmine is the start of the statue’s biography; for one moment there is nothing but this odour in the whole universe or, to be more accurate, this odour is the universe, which a moment later will be the odour of a rose, then of a carnation. In the statue’s consciousness, once there is a single odour we have attention; once an odour lasts after the stimulus has ceased we have memory; once a present and a past impression occupy the statue’s attention we have the ability to compare; once the statue perceives likeness and unlikeness we have judgment; once the ability to compare and judgment occur a second time we have reflection; once a pleasant memory is more vivid than an unpleasant impression we have imagination. Once the faculty of understanding is born, the faculty of the will will be born: love and hate (attraction and repulsion), hope and fear. The consciousness of having passed through many states of mind will give the statue the abstract notion of numbers; the consciousness of being the odour of carnation and of having been the odour of jasmine, the notion of the I.
The author will then endow his hypothetical man with hearing, taste, sight, and finally, touch. This last sense will reveal to him that space exists and that in space he exists in a body; sounds, smells, and colours had been to him, before this stage, mere variations or modifications of his consciousness.
The allegory just related is called
Traité des sensations
and dates from 1754; for this summary we have made use of the second volume of Bréhier’s
Histoire de la philosophie
.
The other creature raised by the problem of consciousness is the ‘hypothetical animal’ of Rudolf Hermann Lotze. Lonelier than the statue that smells roses and finally becomes a man, this being has in its skin but one movable sensitive point at the extremity of an antenna. Its structure denies it, as is obvious, more than one perception at a time. Lotze argues that the ability to retract or extend its sensitive antenna will enable this all but bereft animal to discover the external world (without the aid of the Kantian categories of time and space) and distinguish a stationary from a moving object. This fiction may be found in the book
Medizinische Psychologie
(1852); it has been praised by Hans Vaihinger.
The Unicorn
The first version of the Unicorn is nearly identical with the latest. Four hundred years
b
.
c
.
, the Greek historian and physician Ctesias told that among the kingdoms of India there were very swift wild asses with white coats, purple heads, blue eyes, and in the middle of their foreheads a pointed horn whose base was white, whose tip was red, and
whose middle was black. Pliny, more precise, wrote (VIII, 31):
the fiercest animal is the unicorn, which in the rest of the body resembles a horse, but in the head a stag, in the feet an elephant, and in the tail a boar, and has a deep bellow, and a single black horn three feet long projecting from the middle of the forehead. They say that it is impossible to capture this animal alive.
Around 1892, the Orientalist Schrader conjectured that the Unicorn might have been suggested to the Greeks by certain Persian bas-reliefs depicting bulls in profile with a single horn.
In Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, composed at the beginning of the seventh century, we read that one thrust of the Unicorn’s horn may kill an elephant; this perhaps is echoed in the similar victory, in Sindbad’s second voyage, of the Karkadan, or rhinoceros, which can ’carry off a great elephant on its horn’. (We also find here that the rhinoceros’s horn ‘cleft in twain, is the likeness of a man’; al Qaswini says it is the likeness of a man on horseback, and others have spoken of birds and fishes.) Another of the Unicorn’s enemies was the lion, and a stanza in the tangled allegory
The Faerie Queene
records the manner of their duel in this way:
Like as a Lyon, whose imperiall powre
A prowd rebellious Unicom defyes,
T’ avoide the rash assault and wrathful stowre
Of his fiers foe, him to a tree applyes,
And when him ronning in full course he spyes,
He slips aside; the whiles that furious beast
His precious horne, sought of his enimyes,
Strikes in the stocke, ne thence can be releast,
But to the mighty victor yields a bounteous feast.
These lines (Book II, Canto V, Stanza X) date from the sixteenth century; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the union of the Kingdom of England with the Kingdom of Scotland brought together on the heraldic arms of Great Britain the English Leopard, or Lion, and the Scottish Unicorn.
In the Middle Ages, bestiaries taught that the Unicorn could be captured by a maiden; in the Greek
Physiologus
we read: ‘How it is captured. A virgin is placed before it and it springs into the virgin’s lap and she warms it with love and carries it off to the palace of kings.’ One of Pisanello’s medals and many famous tapestries illustrate this victory whose allegorical applications are obvious. Leonardo da Vinci attributes the Unicorn’s capture to its lust, which makes it forget its fierceness, lie in a girl’s lap, and so be taken by hunters. The Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ, mercury, and evil have all been represented by the Unicorn. In his
Psychologie und Alchemie
(1944), Jung gives a history and an analysis of these symbols. A small white horse with the forelegs of an antelope, a goat’s beard, and a long twisted horn projecting straight out from its forehead is the picture usually given of this imaginary animal.