Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (83 page)

The Zaratan

There is one story that has ranged the whole of geography and all epochs the tale of mariners who land on an unknown island which then sinks into the sea and drowns them because it is a living creature. This invention is found in the first voyage of Sindbad and in Canto VI, Stanza 37, of
Orlando Furioso
(
Ch’ella sia una isoletta ci credemo
‘We believed it [the whale] to be a small island’); in the Irish legend of St Brendan and in the Greek bestiary of Alexandria; in the
Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus
(Rome, 1555) by the Swedish ecclesiastic Olaus Magnus and in this passage from the opening of Paradise Lost, in which Satan, ‘stretched out huge in length’, is compared to a whale (203-8):

Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam,

The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff

Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,

With fixed anchor in his scaly rind,

Moors by his side under the lee, while night

Invests the sea . . . 

Paradoxically, one of the earliest versions of the legend gives it in order to refute it. This is recorded in the
Book of Animals
by al-Jahiz, the ninth-century Moslem zoologist. We translate its words from the Spanish version by Miguel Asín Palacios:

As for the zaratan, I never met anyone who actually saw it with his own eyes.

There are sailors who assert that they have drawn alongside certain sea islands, seeing wooded valleys and crevices in the rock, and landed to light a big fire; and when the heat of the flames reached the zaratan’s spine, the beast began to slip under the waters with them on top of him, and with all the plants growing on him, until only those able to swim away were saved. This outdoes even the boldest, most imaginative piece of fiction.

Let us now consider a thirteenth-century text by al-Qaswini, the Persian cosmographer who wrote in Arabic. It comes from a work of his entitled
Wonders of Creation
, and runs this way:

As for the sea turtle, it is of such huge size that people on shipboard take it for an island.

One merchant has reported:

‘Rising out of the sea we discovered an island with green plants, and we went ashore and dug pits for a cooking fire, and the island began to move and the sailors said: “Back to the ship! It’s a turtle! The heat of the fires has wakened him and we’ll be lost!” ’

This story is repeated in the
Navigation
of St Brendan: 

And than they sayled forth, and came soone after to that lond; but bycause of the lytell depthe in some place, and in some place were grete rockes, but at the last they wente upon an ylonde, wenynge to them they had ben safe, and made theron a fyre for to dresse theyr dyner, but saynt Brandon abode styll in the shyppe. And whan the fyre was ryght hote, and the meet nygh soden, than thisylonde began to move; whereof the monkes were aferde, and fledde anone to the shyppe, and lefte the fyre and meet behynde them, and mervayled sore of the movying. And saynt Brandon comforted them, and sayd that it was a grete fisshe named Jasconye, whiche laboureth nyght and daye to put his tayle in his mouth, but for gretnes he may not.

In the Anglo-Saxon bestiary of the
Exeter Book
, the dangerous island is a whale, ‘skilled in treachery’, that deliberately tricks seafarers. They camp on its back seeking rest from their labours at sea; suddenly the Ocean’s Guest sinks down and the men drown. In the Greek bestiary, the whale stands for the whore of the Proverbs (‘Her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on hell’); in the Anglo-Saxon bestiary it stands for the Devil and Evil. These same symbolic values will be found in
Moby Dick
, written ten centuries later.