Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges — The Giovanni Translations (and others)
Jorge Luis Borges
—Table of Contents—
The Aleph & Other Stories
Preface
The Aleph
Streetcorner Man
The Approach to al-Mu’tasim
The Circular Ruins
Death and the Compass
The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)
The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths
The Dead Man
The Other Death
Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth
The Man on the Threshold
The Challenge
The Captive
Borges and Myself
The Maker
The Immortals
The Meeting
Pedro Salvadores
Rosendo’s Tale
An Autobiographical Essay
Commentaries
A Universal History of Infamy
Preface to the 1954 Edition
Preface to the First Edition
A Universal History of Infamy
The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell
Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor
The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate
Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan
The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké
The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv
Etcetera
A Theologian in Death
The Chamber of Statues
Tale of the Two Dreamers
The Wizard Postponed
The Mirror of Ink
A Double for Mohammed
The Generous Enemy
Of Exactitude in Science
The Book of Sand
Author's Note
The Other
Ulrike
The Congress
There Are More Things
The Sect of the Thirty
The Night of the Gifts
The Mirror and the Mask
Undr
Utopia of a Tired Man
The Bribe
Avelino Arredondo
The Disk
The Book of Sand
Afterword
In Praise of Darkness
The Anthropologist
Legend
A Prayer
His End and His Beginning
Doctor Brodie's Report
Foreword
Preface to the First Edition
The Gospel According to Mark
The Unworthy Friend
The Duel
The End of the Duel
The Intruder
Juan Muraña
The Elder Lady
Guayaquil
Doctor Brodie’s Report
Afterword
The Garden of Branching Paths
Prologue
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote
The Lottery in Babylon
A Glimpse Into the Work of Herbert Quain
The Library of Babel
The Garden of Branching Paths
Other Fictions (translations by Anthony Kerrigan)
Three Versions of Judas
Funes, The Memorious
The Form of the Sword
Theme of the Traitor and Hero
The Secret Miracle
The End
The Sect of the Phoenix
The South
The Book of Imaginary Beings
Preface
Preface to the 1967 edition
Preface to the 1957 edition
A Bao A Qu
Abtu and Anet
The Amphisbaena
An Animal Imagined by Kafka
An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis
The Animal Imagined by Poe
Animals in the Form of Spheres
Antelopes with Six Legs
The Ass with Three Legs
Bahamut
Baldanders
The Banshee
The Barometz
The Basilisk
Behemoth
The Brownies
Burak
The Carbuncle
The Catoblepas
The Celestial Stag
The Centaur
Cerberus
The Cheshire Cat and the Kilkenny Cats
The Chimera
The Chinese Dragon
The Chinese Fox
The Chinese Phoenix
Chronos or Hercules
A Creature Imagined by C. S. Lewis
The Crocotta and the Leucrocotta
A Crossbreed
The Double
The Eastern Dragon
The Eater of the Dead
The Eight-Forked Serpent
The Elephant That Foretold the Birth of the Buddha
The Eloi and the Morlocks
The Elves
An Experimental Account of What Was Known, Seen, and Met by Mrs. Jane Lead in London in 1694
The Fairies
Fastitocalon
Fauna of Chile
Fauna of China
Fauna of Mirrors
Fauna of the United States
Garuda
The Gnomes
The Golem
The Griffon
Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel
Haokah, the Thunder God
Harpies
The Heavenly Cock
The Hippogriff
Hochigan
Humbaba
The Hundred-Heads
The Hydra of Lerna
Ichthyocentaurs
Jewish Demons
The Jinn
The Kami
A King of Fire and His Steed
The Kraken
Kujata
The Lamed Wufniks
The Lamias
Laudatores Temporis Acti
The Lemures
The Leveller
Lilith
The Lunar Hare
The Mandrake
The Manticore
The Mermecolion
The Minotaur
The Monkey of the Inkpot
The Monster Acheron
The Mother of Tortoises
The Nagas
The Nasnas
The Norns
The Nymphs
The Odradek
An Offspring of Leviathan
One-Eyed Beings
The Panther
The Pelican
The Peryton
The Phoenix
The Pygmies
The Rain Bird
The Remora
The Rukh
The Salamander
The Satyrs
Scylla
The Sea Horse
The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard
The Simurgh
Sirens
The Sow Harnessed with Chains and Other Argentine Fauna
The Sphinx
The Squonk
Swedenborg's Angels
Swedenborg’s Devils
The Sylphs
Talos
The T’ao T’ieh
Thermal Beings
The Tigers of Annam
The Trolls
Two Metaphysical Beings
The Unicorn
The Unicorn of China
The Uroboros
The Valkyries
The Western Dragon
Youwarkee The Zaratan
Preface
Since my fame rests on my short stories, it is only natural that we should want to include a selection of them among the several volumes of my writings we are translating for E. P. Dutton. At the same time, one of our aims here has been to make available in English all my previously untranslated older stories, as well as to offer a sampling from my latest work in this form.
Perhaps the chief justification of this book is the translation itself, which we have undertaken in what may be a new way. Working closely together in daily sessions, we have tried to make these stories read as though they had been written in English. We do not consider English and Spanish as compounded of sets of easily interchangeable synonyms; they are two quite different ways of looking at the world, each with a nature of its own. English, for example, is far more physical than Spanish. We have therefore shunned the dictionary as much as possible and done our best to rethink every sentence in English words. This tampered with the original, though in certain cases we have supplied the American reader with those things—geographical, topographical, and historical—taken for granted by any Argentine.
We would have preferred a broader selection that might have included such stories as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” “Funes el memorioso,” “La secta del Fénix,” and “El Sur” from Ficciones, and “Los teólogos,” “Deutsches Requiem,” “La busca de Averroes,” and “El Zahir” from El Aleph. However, rights to make our own translations of these stories were denied us, despite the unselfish and unswerving efforts of Dr. Donald Yates on our behalf.
The autobiographical essay and commentaries, prepared especially for this volume, were written directly in English.
J.L.B.
N.T. di G.
Buenos Aires, August 12,1970
The Aleph
To Estela Canto
(1945)
O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space. . . .
Hamlet, II, 2
But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the Schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of Place.
Leviathan, IV, 46
On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realized that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series. The universe may change but not me, I thought with a certain sad vanity. I knew that at times my fruitless devotion had annoyed her; now that she was dead, I could devote myself to her memory, without hope but also without humiliation. I recalled that the thirtieth of April was her birthday; on that day to visit her house on Garay Street and pay my respects to her father and to Carlos Argentino Daneri, her first cousin, would be an irreproachable and perhaps unavoidable act of politeness. Once again I would wait in the twilight of the small, cluttered drawing room, once again I would study the details of her many photographs: Beatriz Viterbo in profile and in full color; Beatriz wearing a mask, during the Carnival of 1921; Beatriz at her First Communion; Beatriz on the day of her wedding to Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz soon after her divorce, at a luncheon at the Turf Club; Beatriz at a seaside resort in Quilmes with Delia San Marco Porcel and Carlos Argentino; Beatriz with the Pekinese lapdog given her by Villegas Haedo; Beatriz, front and three-quarter views, smiling, hand on her chin. . . . I would not be forced, as in the past, to justify my presence with modest offerings of books—books whose pages I finally learned to cut beforehand, so as not to find out, months later, that they lay around unopened.
Beatriz Viterbo died in 1929. From that time on, I never let a thirtieth of April go by without a visit to her house. I used to make my appearance at seven-fifteen sharp and stay on for some twenty-five minutes. Each year, I arrived a little later and stayed a little longer. In 1933, a torrential downpour coming to my aid, they were obliged to ask me to dinner. Naturally, I took advantage of that lucky precedent. In 1934, I arrived, just after eight, with one of those large Santa Fe sugared cakes, and quite matter-of factly I stayed to dinner. It was in this way, on these melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries, that I came into the gradual confidences of Carlos Argentino Daneri Beatriz had been tall, frail, slightly stooped; in her walk there was (if the oxymoron may be allowed) a kind of uncertain grace, a hint of expectancy. Carlos Argentino was pink-faced, overweight, gray-haired, fine-featured. He held a minor position in an unreadable library out on the edge of the Southside of Buenos Aires. He was authoritarian but also unimpressive. Until only recently, he took advantage of his nights and holidays to stay at home. At a remove of two generations, the Italian “S” and demonstrative Italian gestures still survived in him. His mental activity was continuous, deeply felt, far-reaching, and—all in all— meaningless. He dealt in pointless analogies and in trivial scruples. He had (as did Beatriz) large, beautiful, finely shaped hands. For several months he seemed to be obsessed with Paul Fort—less with his ballads than with the idea of a towering reputation. “He is the Prince of poets,” Daneri would repeat fatuously. “You will belittle him in vain—but no, not even the most venomous of your shafts will graze him.”
On the thirtieth of April, 1941, along with the sugared cake I allowed myself to add a bottle of Argentine cognac. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it “interesting,” and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern man.
“I view him,” he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, “in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins. . . .”
He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed.
So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn’t write them down. As might be foreseen, he answered that he had already done so—that these ideas, and others no less striking, had found their place in the Proem, or Augural Canto, or, more simply, the Prologue Canto of the poem on which he had been working for many years now, alone, without publicity, without fanfare, supported only by those twin staffs universally known as work and solitude. First, he said, he opened the floodgates of his fancy; then, taking up hand tools, he resorted to the file. The poem was entitled The Earth; it consisted of a description of the planet, and, of course, lacked no amount of picturesque digressions and bold apostrophes.
I asked him to read me a passage, if only a short one. He opened a drawer of his writing table, drew out a thick stack of papers—sheets of a large pad imprinted with the letterhead of the Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur Library—and, with ringing satisfaction, declaimed:
Mine eyes, as did the Greek’s, have known men’s towns and fame,
The works, the days in light that fades to amber;
I do not change a fact or falsify a name—
The voyage I set down is . . . autour de ma chambre.
“From any angle, a greatly interesting stanza,” he said, giving his verdict. “The opening line wins the applause of the professor, the academician, and the Hellenist—to say nothing of the would-be scholar, a considerable sector of the public. The second flows from Homer to Hesiod (generous homage, at the very outset, to the father of didactic poetry), not without rejuvenating a process whose roots go back to Scripture—enumeration, congeries, conglomeration. The third—baroque? decadent? example of the cult of pure form?—consists of two equal hemistichs. The fourth, frankly bilingual, assures me the unstinted backing of all minds sensitive to the pleasure
s of sheer fun. I should, in all fairness, speak of the novel rhyme in lines two and four, and of the erudition that allows me—without a hint of pedantry!—to cram into four lines three learned allusions covering thirty centuries packed with literature—first to the Odyssey, second to Works and Days, and third to the immortal bagatelle bequeathed us by the frolicking pen of the Savoyard, Xavier de Maistre. Once more I’ve come to realize that modern art demands the balm of laughter, the scherzo. Decidedly, Goldoni holds the stage!”
He read me many other stanzas, each of which also won his own approval and elicited his lengthy explications. There was nothing remarkable about them. I did not even find them any worse than the first one. Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri’s real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others. Daneri’s style of delivery was extravagant, but the deadly drone of his metric regularity tended to tone down and to dull that extravagance.*
Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino’s similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already displaced a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the color “celestewhite,” which he felt “actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the continent Down Under.” But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the socalled Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.
Two Sundays later, Daneri rang me up—perhaps for the first time in his life. He suggested we get together at four o’clock “for cocktails in the salon-bar next door, which the forward-looking Zunino and Zungri—my landlords, as you doubtless recall—are throwing open to the public. It’s a place you’ll really want to get to know.”
Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Page 1