Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N. T. di Giovanni)

  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.

  The Banshee

  Nobody seems to have laid eyes on this ’woman of the fairies’. She is less a shape than a mournful screaming that haunts the Irish night and (according to Sir Walter Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft) the Scottish highlands. Beneath the windows of the visited house, she foretells the death of one of the family. She is held to be a token of pure Celtic blood, with no mixture of Latin, Saxon, or Danish. The Banshee has also been heard in Wales and in Brittany. Her wail is called keening.

  The Barometz

  The vegetable Lamb of Tartary, also named Barometz and Lycopodium barometz and Chinese lycopodium, is a plant whose shape is that of a lamb bearing a golden fleece. It stands on four or five root stalks. Sir Thomas Browne gives this description of it in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646):

  Much wonder is made of the Boramez, that strange plant-animal or vegetable Lamb of Tartary, which Wolves delight to feed on, which hath the shape of a Lamb, affordeth a bloody juyce upon breaking, and liveth while the plants be consumed about it.

  Other monsters are made up by combining various kinds of animals; the Barometz is a union of animal and vegetable kingdoms.

  This brings to mind the mandrake, which cries out like a man when it is ripped from the earth; and in one of the circles of the Inferno, the sad forest of the suicides, from whose torn limbs blood and words drip at the same time; and that tree dreamed by Chesterton, which devoured the birds nesting in its branches, and when spring came put out feathers instead of leaves.

  The Basilisk

  Down through the ages, the Basilisk (also known as the Cockatrice) grows increasingly ugly and horrendous until today it is forgotten. Its name comes from the Greek and means ‘little king’; to the Elder Pliny (VIII, 333), it was a serpent bearing a bright spot in the shape of a crown on its head. Dating from the Middle Ages, it becomes a four-legged cock with a crown, yellow feathers, wide thorny wings, and a serpent’s tail ending either in a hook or in another cock’s head. The change in its image is reflected in a change in its name; Chaucer in The Persone’s Tale speaks of the ‘basilicok’ (‘the basilicok sleeth folk by the venim of his sighte’). One of the plates illustrating Aldrovandi’s Natural History of Serpents and Dragons gives the Basilisk scales instead of feathers, and the use of eight legs. (According to the Younger Edda, Odin’s horse Sleipnir also had eight legs.)

  What remains constant about the Basilisk is the deadly effect of its stare and its venom. The Gorgons’ eyes turned living beings into stone; Lucan tells us that from the blood of one of them all the serpents of Libya sprang the asp, the amphisbaena, the ammodyte, and the Basilisk. We give the following passages, in a literal translation, from Book IX of Pharsalia:

  In this body [Medusa’s] first did noxious nature produce deadly plagues; from those jaws snakes poured forth whizzing hisses with vibrating tongues, which, after the manner of a woman’s hair flowing along the back, flapped about the very neck of the delighted Medusa. Upon her forehead turned towards you erect did serpents rise, and viper’s venom flowed from her combed locks.

  What avails a Basilisk being pierced by the spear of the wretched Murrus? Swift flies the poison along the weapon, and fastens upon the hand; which, instantly, with sword unsheathed, he smites, and at the same moment severs it entirely from the arm; and, looking upon the dreadful warning of a death his own, he stands in safety, his hand perishing.

  The Basilisk dwelled in the desert; or, more accurately, it made the desert. Birds fell dead at its feet and the earth’s fruits blackened and rotted; the water of the streams where it quenched its thirst remained poisoned for centuries. That its mere glance split rocks and burned grass has been attested by Pliny. Of all animals, the weasel alone was unaffected by the monster and could be counted on to attack it on sight; it was also believed that the crowing of a rooster sent the Basilisk scurrying. The seasoned traveler was careful to provide himself with either a caged rooster or
a weasel before venturing into unknown territory. Another weapon was the mirror, its own image would strike the Basilisk dead.

  Isidore of Seville and the compilers of the Speculum Triplex (Threefold Mirror) rejected Lucan’s fables and sought a rational explanation for the Basilisk’s origin. (They could not deny its existence, since the Vulgate translates the Hebrew word Tsepha, the name of a poisonous reptile, as ‘cockatrice’.) The theory that gained most favour was that of a misshapen egg laid by a cock and hatched by a snake or a toad. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne found this explanation as farfetched as the monster itself. At much the same time, Quevedo wrote his romance ’The Basilisk’, in which we read:

  Si está vivo quien te vio, Toda su historia es mentira, Pues si no murió, te ignora, Y si murió no lo afirma.

  [If the man who saw you is still alive, your whole story is a lie, since if he has not died he cannot have seen you, and if he has died, he cannot tell what he saw.]

  Behemoth

  Four centuries before the Christian era, Behemoth was a magnification of the elephant or of the hippopotamus, or a mistaken and alarmist version of these animals; it is now precisely the ten famous verses describing it in Job (XL: 15-24) and the huge being which these lines evoke. The rest is wrangling and philology.

  The word ‘Behemoth’ is plural; scholars tell us it is the intensive plural form of the Hebrew b’hemah, which means ‘beast’. As Fray Luis de León wrote in his Exposición del Libro de Job: ‘Behemoth is a Hebrew word that stands for “beasts”; according to the received judgement of learned men, it means the elephant, so called because of its inordinate size; and being but a single animal it counts for many.’

  We are also reminded of the fact that in the first verse of Genesis in the original text, the Hebrew name for God, Elohím, is plural, though the form of the verb it takes is singular. Bereshit bará Elohím et hashamáim veet haáretz. Trinitarians, by the way, have used this incongruity as an argument for the concept of the godhead being Three-in-One.

  We give the ten verses in the translation from the Latin Vulgate by Father Knox (XL: 10-19):

  Here is Behemoth, my creature as thou art, fed on the same grass the oxen eat; yet what strength in his loins, what lustihood in the navel of his belly! Stiff as cedarwood his tail, close-knit the sinews of his groin, bones like pipes of bronze, gristle like plates of steel! None of God’s works can vie with him, no weapon so strong in the hands of its maker; whole mountainsides, the playground of his fellow beasts, he will lay under tribute, as he lies there under the close covert of the marsh-reeds, thick boughs for his shadow, among the willows by the stream. The flooded river he drinks unconcerned; Jordan itself would have no terrors for that gaping mouth. Like a lure it would charm his eye, though it should pierce his nostrils with sharp stakes.

  The Brownies

  Brownies are helpful little men of a brownish hue, which gives them their name. It is their habit to visit Scottish farms and, while the household sleeps, to perform domestic chores. One of the tales by the Grimms deals with the same subject.

  The famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson said he had trained his Brownies in the craft of literature. Brownies visited him in his dreams and told him wondrous tales; for instance, the strange transformation of Dr Jekyll into the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode of Olalla, in which the scion of an old Spanish family bites his sister’s hand.

  Burak

  In George Sale’s translation (1734), the opening verse of Chapter XVII of the Koran consists of these words: ‘Praise be unto him, who transported his servant by night, from the sacred temple of Mecca to his farther temple of Jerusalem, the circuit of which we have blessed, that we might show him some of our signs . . .’ Commentators say that the one praised is God, that his servant is Mohammed, that the sacred temple is that of Mecca, that the distant temple is that of Jerusalem, and that from Jerusalem the Prophet was transported to the seventh heaven. In the oldest versions of the legend, Mohammed is guided by a man or an angel; in those of a later date he is furnished with a heavenly steed, larger than an ass and smaller than a mule. This steed is Burak, whose name means ‘shining’. According to Richard Burton, translator of The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, Moslems in India usually picture Burak with a man’s face, the ears of an ass, a horse’s body, and the wings and tail of a peacock.

  One of the Islamic legends tells that Burak, on leaving the ground, tipped a jar of water. The Prophet was taken up to the seventh heaven, along the way speaking in each of the heavens with the patriarchs and angels living there, and he crossed the Unity and felt a coldness that chilled his heart when the Lord laid a hand on his shoulder. Man’s time is not commensurate with God’s time; on his return the Prophet raised the jar, out of which not a single drop had yet been spilled.

  Miguel Asm Palacios, the twentieth-century Spanish Orientalist, speaks of a mystic from Murcia of the 1200s who, in an allegory entitled the Book of the Night Journey to the Majesty of the All-Generous, has seen in Burak, a symbol of divine love. In another text he speaks of the ‘Burak of the pureness of heart’.

  The Carbuncle

  In mineralogy the carbuncle, from the Latin carbunculus, ‘a little coal’, is a ruby; as to the carbuncle of the ancients, it is supposed to have been a garnet.

  In sixteenth-century South America, the name was given by the Spanish conquistadors to a mysterious animal mysterious because nobody ever saw it well enough to know whether it was a bird or a mammal, whether it had feathers or fur. The poet-priest Martín del Barco Centenera, who claims to have seen it in Paraguay, describes it in his Argentina (1602) only as ‘a smallish animal, with a shining mirror on its head, like a glowing coal . . .’ Another conquistador, Gonzalo Fernández del Oviedo, associates this mirror or light shining out of the darkness two of which he glimpsed in the Strait of Magellan with the precious stone that dragons were thought to have hidden in their brain. He took his knowledge from Isidore of Seville, who wrote in his Etymologies:

  it is taken from the dragon’s brain but does not harden into a gem unless the head is cut from the living beast; wizards, for this reason, cut the heads from sleeping dragons. Men bold enough to venture into dragon lairs scatter grain that has been doctored to make these beasts drowsy, and when they have fallen asleep their heads are struck off and the gems plucked out.

  Here we are reminded of Shakespeare’s toad (As You Like It, II, i), which, though ‘ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head . . .’

  Possession of the Carbuncle’s jewel offered fortune and luck. Barco Centenera underwent many hardships hunting the reaches of Paraguayan rivers and jungles for the elusive creature; he never found it. Down to this day we know nothing more about the beast and its secret head stone.

  The Catoblepas

  Pliny (VIII, 32), relates that somewhere on the borders of Ethiopia, near the head of the Nile, there is found a wild beast called the catoblepas; an animal of moderate size, and in other respects sluggish in the movement of the rest of its limbs; its head is remarkably heavy, and it only carries it with the greatest difficulty, being always bent down towards the earth. Were it not for this circumstance, it would prove the destruction of the human race; for all who behold its eyes, fall dead upon the spot.

  Catoblepas, in Greek, means ‘that which looks downward’. The French naturalist Cuvier has conjectured that the gnu (contaminated by the basilisk and the gorgon) suggested the Catoblepas to the ancients. At the close of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Flaubert describes it and has it speak in this way:

  black buffalo with the head of a hog, hanging close to the ground, joined to its body by a thin neck, long and loose as an emptied intestine. It wallows in the mud, and its legs are smothered under the huge mane of stiff bristles that hide its face.

  ‘Obese, downhearted, wary, I do nothing but feel under my belly the warm mud. My head is so heavy that I cannot bear its weight. I wind it slowly around my body; with half-open jaws, I pull up with my to
ngue poisonous plants dampened by my breath. Once, I ate up my forelegs unawares.

  ‘No one, Anthony, has ever seen my eyes; or else, those who have seen them have died. If I were to lift my eyelids my pink and swollen eyelids you would die on the spot.’

  The Celestial Stag

  We know absolutely nothing about the appearance of the Celestial Stag (maybe because nobody has ever had a good look at one), but we do know that these tragic animals live underground in mines and desire nothing more than to reach the light of day. They have the power of speech and implore the miners to help them to the surface. At first, a Celestial Stag attempts to bribe the workmen with the promise of revealing hidden veins of silver and gold; when this gambit fails, the beast becomes troublesome and the miners are forced to overpower it and wall it up in one of the mine galleries. It is also rumoured that miners outnumbered by the Stags have been tortured to death.

  Legend has it that if the Celestial Stag finds its way into the open air, it becomes a foul-smelling liquid that can breed death and pestilence. The tale is from China and is recorded by G. Willoughby-Meade in his book Chinese Ghouls and Goblins.

  The Centaur