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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires. In 1955, with the overthrow of Perón, he was named Director of the Argentine National Library, and in the same year became professor of English and American literatures at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961, he shared the International Publishers’ Prize with Samuel Beckett. He has made three trips to the United States—the latest, in 1969, to attend a conference devoted to his writings at the University of Oklahoma.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Norman Thomas di Giovanni was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1933, and was graduated from Antioch College in 1955. He met Borges in 1967 while the latter was at Harvard. In 1968, on Borges’ invitation, he went to live in Buenos Aires, where he worked with the author in daily sessions. Together they produced ten of Borges’ books in English versions. The first of these, The Book of Imaginary Beings, was published in 1969. In 1991, di Giovanni was appointed a Commander of the Order of May by the government of Argentina, one of the country’s highest honours. He died in February, 2017.
Notes
[←1]
Among my memories are also some lines of a satire in which he lashed out unsparingly at bad poets. After accusing them of dressing their poems in the warlike armor of erudition, and of flapping in vain their unavailing wings, he concluded with this verse:
But they forget, alas, one foremost fact—beauty!
Only the fear of creating an army of implacable and powerful enemies dissuaded him (he told me) from fearlessly publishing this poem.
[←2]
“I received your pained congratulations,” he wrote me. “You rage, my poor friend, with envy, but you must confess—even if it chokes you!—that this time I have crowned my cap with the reddest of feathers; my turban with the most caliph of rubies.”
[←3]
In the course of this review, I have referred to the Mantiq ut-Tair (Parliament of Birds) by the Persian mystic Farid al-Din Abu Talib Mohammad ibn-Ibraham Attar, who was killed by the soldiers of Tului, one of Genghis Khan’s sons, during the sack of Nishapur. Perhaps it would be useful to summarize the poem. The distant king of birds, the Simurgh, drops one of his splendid feathers somewhere in the middle of China; on learning of this, the other birds, tired of their age-old anarchy, decide to seek him. They know that the king’s name means “thirty birds”; they know that his castle lies in the Kaf, the range of mountains that ring the earth. Setting out on the almost endless adventure, they cross seven valleys or seas, the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last, the name Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; the journey takes its toll among the rest. Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them. (Plotinus [Enneads, V, 8, 4] also states a divine extension of the principle of identity: “All things in the intelligible heavens are in all places. Any one thing is all other things. The sun is all the stars, and each star is all the other stars and the sun.”) The Mantiq ut-Tair has been translated into French by Garcin de Tassy; parts of it into English by Edward FitzGerald. For this footnote, I have consulted the tenth volume of Burton’s Arabian Nights and Margaret Smith’s study The Persian Mystics: Attar (1932).
[←4]
Montaigne (Essays, I, 49) says that this manner of fighting with cloak and dagger is very old, and quotes Caesar’s finding, “Sinistras sagis involvunt, gladiosque distringunt”—”They wrapped their cloaks around their left arms and drew their swords” (Civil War, I, 75). Lugones, in El payador (1916), quotes these verses from a sixteenth-century romance of Bernardo del Carpio:
Revolviendo el manto al brazo,
la espada fuera a sacar.
[Wrapping the cape round his arm, he drew his sword.]
[←5]
The great South American literary journal edited in Buenos Aires by Victoria Ocampo.—Editor’s note.
[←6]
Haslam has also published A General History of Labyrinths.
[←7]
Bertrand Russell (The Analysis of Mind, 1921, p. 159) hypothesizes that the world was created a few minutes ago, together with a population that ‘remembers’ an unreal past.
[←8]
A century, in terms of the duodecimal system, is equivalent to a period of a hundred and forty-four years.
[←9]
At present, one of Tlön’s churches takes the platonic view that a given pain, a given greenish shade of yellow, a given temperature, a given sound, are the only reality. All men, in the dizzying moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who recite a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
[←10]
Buckley was a freethinker, a fatalist, and a defender of slavery.
[←11]
There remains, of course, the problem of the material of certain objects.
[←12]
In the course of this review, I have referred to the Mantiq ut-Tair (Parliament of Birds) by the Persian mystic Farid al-Din Abu Talib Mohammad ibn-Ibraham Attar, who was killed by the soldiers of Tului, one of Genghis Khan’s sons, during the sack of Nishapur. Perhaps it would be useful to summarize the poem. The distant king of birds, the Simurgh, drops one of his splendid feathers somewhere in the middle of China; on learning of this, the other birds, tired of their age-old anarchy, decide to seek him. They know that the king’s name means “thirty birds”; they know that his castle lies in the Kaf, the range of mountains that ring the earth. Setting out on the almost endless adventure, they cross seven valleys or seas, the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last, the name Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; the journey takes its toll among the rest. Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, re
ach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them. (Plotinus [Enneads, V, 8, 4] also states a divine extension of the principle of identity: “All things in the intelligible heavens are in all places. Any one thing is all other things. The sun is all the stars, and each star is all the other stars and the sun.”) The Mantiq ut-Tair has been translated into French by Garcin de Tassy; parts of it into English by Edward FitzGerald. For this footnote, I have consulted the tenth volume of Burton’s Arabian Nights and Margaret Smith’s study The Persian Mystics: Attar (1932).
[←13]
Madame Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation of St Francis of Sales’sIntroduction à la vie dévote. No trace of this work is to be found in Pierre Menard’s library. The ascription must have arisen from something our friend said in jest, which the lady misunderstood.
[←14]
I had a secondary purpose as well—to sketch a portrait of Pierre Menard. But dare I compete with the gilded pages that I am told the Baroness of Bacourt is preparing, or with Carolus Hourcade’s delicate, precise pencil?
[←15]
I remember his notebooks with their square-ruled pages, the heavy black deletions, the personal system of symbols he used for marginal emendations, and his minute handwriting. He liked to stroll through the outskirts of Nîmes at sunset, often taking along a notebook with which he would make a cheerful bonfire.
[←16]
So much for Herbert Quain’s learning; so much for the learning on page 215 of a book published in 1893. A speaker in Plato’s Statesman had long since described a similar regression—that of an earth-born race who, subjected to the power of a contrary rotation of the universe, went from old age to manhood, from manhood to boyhood, from boyhood to disappearance, or wasting away. Then there is Theopompus, who, in his Philippics, speaks of certain northern fruits that produce in those who eat them the same backward progression. More interesting is the idea of a reversal of Time, when we might remember the future and forget, or barely perceive, the past. Cf. the tenth canto of theInferno, lines 97-102, in which prophetic and presbyopic sight are compared.
[←17]
The original manuscript has neither numerals nor capital letters. Punctuation was limited to the comma and full stop. These two signs, the space, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet were the twenty-five symbols found to be sufficient by the unknown author. —Editor’s Note.
[←18]
Formerly, for every three hexagons, there was one man. Suicides and lung diseases have upset the ratio. There have been times when I travelled for nights along corridors and worn stairways without finding a single librarian. The memory of this fills me with inexpressible melancholy.
[←19]
Let me reiterate that for a book to exist it has only to be possible. The impossible alone is excluded. For example, no book is also a stairway, although there are certainly books that argue or deny or demonstrate the possibility and others whose structure resembles that of a stairway.
[←20]
Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has remarked that the vast Library is useless. In point of fact, a single ordinary-sized volume, printed in nine- or ten-point type and consisting of an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves, would be enough. (Early in the seventeenth century, Cavalieri noted that all solids are the superimposition of an infinite number of planes.) Handling such a silky vade-mecum would be awkward, for each apparent leaf would divide into others. The unimaginable middle leaf would have no reverse.
[←21]
An outrageous and despicable suggestion. The Prussian spy Hans Rabener, alias Viktor Runeberg, drew an automatic pistol on Captain Richard Madden, the bearer of an arrest warrant. In self-defence, Madden inflicted wounds from which Runeberg later died. [Editor’s Note.]
[←22]
Borelius mockingly interrogates: Why did he not renounce to renounce? Why not renounce renouncing}
[←23]
Euclydes da Cunha, in a book ignored by Runeberg, notes that for the heresiarch of Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro, virtue was ‘a kind of impiety almost.’ An Argentine reader could recall analogous passages in the work of Almafuerte. Runeberg published, in the symbolist sheet Sju insegel, an assiduously descriptive poem, ‘The Secret Water’: the first stanzas narrate the events of one tumultuous day; the last, the finding of a glacial pool; the poet suggests that the eternalness of this silent water checks our useless violence, and in some way allows and absolves it. The poem concludes in this way:
The water of the forest is still and felicitous,
And we, we can be vicious and full of pain.
[←24]
Maurice Abramowicz observes: ‘Jésus, d’aprés ce scandinave, a toujours le beau role; ses déboires, grace á la science des typographes, jouissent d’une reputation polyglotte; sa residence de trente-trois ans parmis les humains ne fut, en somme, quune villégiature.’ Erfjord, in the third appendix to the Christelige Dogmatik, refutes this passage. He writes that the crucifying of God has not ceased, for anything which has happened once in time is repeated ceaselessly through all eternity. Judas, now, continues to receive the pieces of silver; he continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple; he continues to knot the hangman’s noose on the field of blood. (Erfjord, to justify this affirmation, invokes the last chapter of the first volume of the Vindication of Eternity, by Jaromir Hladík.)
[←25]
The Eastern Shore (of the Uruguay River); now the Orient Republic of Uruguay.
—Editor’s note.
[←26]
I recall, nevertheless, the following lines from a satire in which he harshly fustigated bad poets:
This one gives his poem bellicose armorings
Of erudition; that one puts in pomp and jubilee.
Both in vain beat their ridiculous wings . . .
Forgetting, the wretches, the factor BEAUTY!
Only the fear of creating for himself an army of implacable and powerful foes dissuaded him (he told me) from fearlessly publishing this poem.
[←27]
“I received your pained congratulations,” he wrote me. “You huff and puff with envy, my lamentable friend, but you must confess—though you choke!—that this time I was able to crown my bonnet with the reddest of feathers, to put in my turban the caliph of rubies.”
[←28]
There is an erasure in the manuscript; perhaps the name of the port has been removed.
[←29]
Ernesto Sabato suggests that the "Giambattista" who discussed the formation of the Iliad with the antique dealer Cartaphilus is Giambattista Vico; this Italian defended the idea that Homer is a symbolic character, after the manner of Pluto or Achilles.
[←30]
Taylor’s spelling.
[←31]
Barlach observes that Yauq is mentioned in the Koran (71, 23); that the prophet is Al-Mokanna (the Veiled One); and that no one except Philip Meadows Taylor’s astonishing informant ever linked them to the Zahir.
[←32]
This account of a knife fight with Martín Fierro, the Argentine gaucho of José Hernández’ great folk poem, takes up the story of Fierro where the popular poem leaves off. A singing encounter, or challenge, with a black man (one of ten brothers, the eldest of whom has been killed) occurs towards the end of the poem. A fight is at that time averted. Borges here gives us the account of a subsequent meeting. (And see Prologue to Artifices.) —Editor’s note.
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Collected Stories Page 59