Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

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

  Did Steiner dream these things? Did he dream them because they had occurred ages earlier? What is undeniable is that they are far stranger than the demiurges, serpents, and bulls of other cosmogonies.

  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 Pisanel
lo’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.

  The Unicorn of China

  The Chinese Unicorn, the k’i-lin, is one of the four animals of good omen; the others are the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise. The Unicorn is foremost of all the 360 creatures that live on land. It has the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and the hooves of a horse. Its short horn, which grows out of its forehead, is made of flesh; its coat, on its back, is of five mixed colours, while its belly is brown or yellow. It is so gentle that when it walks it is careful not to tread on the tiniest living creature and will not even eat live grass but only what is dead. Its appearance foretells the birth of an upright ruler. To wound the Chinese Unicorn or to come across its dead body is unlucky. The span of this animal’s natural life is a thousand years.

  When Confucius’ mother bore him in her womb, the spirits of the five planets brought her an animal ‘having the shape of a cow, scales of a dragon, and a horn on its forehead’. This is the way Soothill reports the annunciation; a variant of this given by Wilhelm tells that the animal appeared on its own and spat out a jade tablet on which these words were read:

  Son of mountain crystal [or of the essence of water], when the dynasty crumbles, thou shalt rule as a throneless king. Seventy years later, some hunters killed a k’i-lin which still had a bit of ribbon around its horn that Confucius’ mother had tied there. Confucius went to look at the Unicorn and wept because he felt what the death of this innocent and mysterious animal foretold, and because in that ribbon lay his past.

  In the thirteenth century, a scouting expedition of the Emperor Genghis Khan, who had undertaken the invasion of India, met a creature in the desert ‘like a deer, with a head like that of a horse, one horn on its forehead, and green hair on its body’, which addressed them, saying, ‘It is time for your master to return to his own land.’ One of Genghis’ Chinese ministers, upon consultation, explained to him that the animal was a chio-tuan, a variety of the k’i-lin. ‘For four years the great army has been warring in western regions,’ he said. ‘Heaven, which has a horror of bloodshed, gives warning through the Chio-tuan. Spare the Empire for Heaven’s sake; moderation will give boundless pleasure.’ The Emperor desisted in his war plans.

  Twenty-two centuries before the Christian era, one of the judges of the Emperor Shun was in possession of a ‘onehorned goat’ which refused to attack the wrongly accused but would butt the guilty.

  Margoulies’ Anthologie raisonné de la littérature chinoise (1948) includes this mysterious, soft-spoken allegory, the work of a ninth-century writer of prose:

  It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable. Even village women and children know that the unicorn is a lucky sign. But this animal does not figure among the barnyard animals, it is not always easy to come across, it does not lend itself to zoological classification. Nor is it like the horse or bull, the wolf or deer. In such circumstances we may be face to face with a unicorn and not know for sure that we are. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse and that a certain animal with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn looks like.

  The Uroboros

  To us the ocean is a sea or a system of seas; to the Greeks it was a simple circular river that ringed the land mass. All streams flowed from it and it had neither outlets nor sources. It was also a god or a Titan, perhaps the most ancient of all Titans, since Sleep in Book XIV of the Iliad calls it the source from whom the gods are sprung. In Hesiod’s Theogony, it is the father of all the world’s rivers three thousand in number the leading of which are the Alpheus and the Nile. An old man with a flowing beard was the usual personification of the river-ocean; after centuries men found a better symbol.

  Heraclitus had said that in the circumference the beginning and the end are a single point. A third-century Greek amulet, preserved in the British Museum, gives us the image which best illustrates this endlessness: the serpent that bites its own tail or, as the Argentine poet Martínez Estrada so beautifully put it, ‘that begins at the end of its tail’. A story runs that Mary Queen of Scots had engraved on a gold ring the inscription ‘In my end is my beginning,’ meaning perhaps that real life begins after death. Uroboros (Greek for ‘the one that devours its tail’) is the learned name of this creature which became the symbol adopted by alchemists in the Middle Ages. The curious may read further in Jung’s study Psychologie und Alchemie.

  A world-circling serpent is also found in Norse cosmology; it is called the Miogarosormr literally, the middle-yard’sworm, middle-yard standing for the earth. In the Younger Edda, Snorri Sturluson recorded that Loki fathered a wolf and a serpent. An oracle warned the gods that these creatures would be the earth’s downfall. The wolf, Fenrir, was kept on a cord woven of six imaginary things: ‘the noise of a cat’s footfall, the beards of women, the roots of stones, the sinews of bears, the breath of fish, and the spittle of birds.’ The serpent, Jormungard, ‘was thrown into the sea surrounding the land and there it has grown so large that now it too surrounds the earth and bites its own tail.’

  In Jotunnheim, the land of giants, Utgard-Loki challenges the god Thor to pick up a cat; Thor, using all his strength, barely manages to lift one of the cat’s paws off the ground. The cat is really the serpent. Thor has been tricked by magic.

  At the Twilight of the Gods the serpent will devour the earth and the wolf the sun.

  The Valkyries

  Valkyrie means, in early German languages, the ‘chooser of the slain’. We do not know how the people of Germany and of Austria imagined them; in Norse mythology they are lovely maidens who bear weapons. Their usual number was three, though in the Eddas the names of more than a dozen are given.

  In popular myth they took the souls of those slain in battle and brought them to Odin’s epic paradise. There, in the Hall of the Slain, Valhalla, whose ceiling was of gold and was lighted by drawn swords and not lamps, the warriors battled from daybreak to sunset. Then those of them who had been killed were brought back to life, and all shared a divine feast in which they were served the meat of an immortal wild boar and inexhaustible hornfuls of mead. This idea of an endless battle seems to be Celtic in origin.

  An Anglo-Saxon charm against the pain of sudden stitches describes the Valkyries without naming them; the lines, as translated by Stopford A. Brooke, run this way:

  Loud were they, lo! loud, as over the land they rode; Fierce of heart were they, as over the hill they rode! For the mighty maidens have mustered up their strength . . .

  Under the spreading influence of Christianity, the name Valkyrie degenerated; in medieval England a judge had burned at the stake an unlucky woman charged with being a Valkyrie, that is to say, a witch.

  The Western Dragon

  A tall-standing, heavy serpent with claws and wings is perhaps the description that best fits the Dragon. It may be black, but it is essential that it also be shining; equally essential is that it belch forth fire and smoke. The above description refers, of course, to its present image; the Greeks seem to have applied the name Dragon to any considerable reptile. Pliny informs us that in summer the Dragon craves elephant blood, which is notably cool. It will make a sudden foray on the elephant, coil round it, and plunge its teeth into it. The bloodless elephant rolls on the ground and dies; so does the Dragon, crushed under the weight of its victim. We also read that Ethiopian Dragons, in se
arch of better pasturage, regularly cross the Red Sea and migrate to Arabia. To accomplish this, four or five Dragons coil together and form a kind of craft, with their heads lifted out of the water. In Pliny there is also a chapter devoted to remedies derived from the Dragon. Here we read that its eyes, dried and then stirred with honey, make a liniment that is effective against nightmares. The fat of the Dragon’s heart stored in the hide of a gazelle and tied to the arm with the sinews of a stag assures success in litigation; Dragon teeth, also bound to the body, ensure the indulgence of masters and the mercy of kings. With some scepticism Pliny cites a preparation that renders men invincible. It is concocted of the skin of a lion, a lion’s marrow, the froth of a horse which has just won a race, the nails of a dog, and the tail and head of a Dragon.

  In the eleventh book of the Iliad we read that there was a blue three-headed Dragon on Agamemnon’s shield; centuries later Norse pirates painted Dragons on their shields and carved Dragon heads on the prows of their long ships. Among the Romans, the Dragon was the insignia of the cohort, as the eagle was of the legion; this is the origin of present-day dragoons. On the standards of the Saxon kings of England there were Dragons; the object of such images was to impart fear to enemy ranks. In the ballad of Athis, we read: