Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - the Giovanni Translations (And Others)

by Jorge Luis Borges

  The Simurgh

  The Simurgh is an immortal bird that nests in the branches of the Tree of Knowledge; Burton compares it with the eagle which, according to the Younger Edda, has knowledge of many things and makes its nest in the branches of the World Tree, Yggdrasil.

  Both Southey’s Thalaba (1801) and Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) speak of the Simorg Anka; Flaubert reduces the bird’s status to that of an attendant to the Queen of Sheba, and describes it as having orange-coloured feathers like metallic scales, a small silver-coloured head with a human face, four wings, a vulture’s talons, and a long, long peacock’s tail. In the original sources the Simurgh is a far more important being. Firdausi in the Book of Kings, which compiles and sets to verse ancient Iranian legends, makes the bird the foster father of Zal, father of the poem’s hero; Farid al-Din Attar, in the twelfth century, makes it a symbol of the godhead. This takes place in the Mantiq al-Tayr (Parliament of Birds). The plot of this allegory, made up of some 4,500 couplets, is striking. 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 present 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 mountain or range of mountains that ring the earth. At the outset, some of the birds lose heart: the nightingale pleads his love for the rose; the parrot pleads his beauty, for which he lives caged; the partridge cannot do without his home in the hills, nor the heron without his marsh, nor the owl without his ruins. But finally, certain of them set out on the perilous venture; 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.

  Edward Fitzgerald translated portions of the poem under the playful title The Bird-parliament; A bird’s-eye view of Faríd-Uddín Attar’s Bird-parliament.

  The cosmographer al-Qaswini, in his Wonders of Creation, states that the Simorg Anka lives for seventeen hundred years and that, upon the coming of age of its son, the father burns himself on a funeral pyre. ‘This,’ observes Lane, ‘reminds us of the phoenix.’

  Sirens

  Through the course of time the image of the Sirens has changed. Their first historian, Homer, in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, does not tell us what they were like; to Ovid, they are birds of reddish plumage with the faces of young girls; to Apollonius of Rhodes, in the upper part of the body they are women and in the lower part seabirds; to the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina (and to heraldry), ‘half woman, half fish’. No less debatable is their nature. In his classical dictionary Lemprière calls them nymphs; in Quicherat’s they are monsters, and in Grimal’s they are demons. They inhabit a western island, close to Circe’s, but the dead body of one of them, Parthenope, was found washed ashore in Campania and gave her name to the famed city now called Naples. Strabo, the geographer, saw her grave and witnessed the games held periodically in her memory.

  The Odyssey tells that the Sirens attract and shipwreck seamen, and that Ulysses, in order to hear their song and yet remain alive, plugged the ears of his oarsmen with wax and had himself lashed to the mast. The Sirens, tempting him, promised him knowledge of all the things of this world:

  For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.

  A legend recorded by the mythologist Apollodorus in his Bibliotheca, tells that Orpheus, aboard the Argonauts’ ship, sang more sweetly than the Sirens and that because of this these creatures threw themselves into the sea and were changed into rocks, for their fate was to die whenever their spell went unheeded. The sphinx, also, threw herself from a precipice when her riddle was solved.

  In the sixth century, a Siren was caught and baptized in northern Wales, and in certain old calendars took her place as a saint under the name Murgen. Another, in 1403, slipped through a breach in a dike and lived in Haarlem until the day of her death. Nobody could make out her speech, but she was taught to weave and she worshipped the cross as if instinctively. A chronicler of the sixteenth century argued that she was not a fish because she knew how to weave and that she was not a woman because she was able to live in water.

  The English language distinguishes between the classical Siren and the mermaid, which has the tail of a fish. The making of this later image may have been influenced by the Tritons, who were lesser divinities in the court of Poseidon.

  In the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, eight Sirens rule over the revolution of the eight concentric heavens.

  Siren: a supposed marine animal, we read in a brutally frank dictionary.

  The Sow Harnessed with Chains and other Argentine Fauna

  On page 106 of his Dictionary of Argentine Folklore, Felix Coluccio records:

  In the northern part of Cordoba, especially around Quilinos, people speak of a sow harnessed with chains which commonly makes its presence known in the hours of night. Those living close to the railroad station maintain that the sow slides on the tracks, and others assured us that it is not unusual for the sow to run along the telegraph wires, producing a deafening racket with its ‘chains’. As yet, nobody has caught a glimpse of the animal, for as soon as you look for it, it vanishes unaccountably.

  Belief in the Sow Harnessed with Chains (chancha con cadenas), which also goes by the name of the Tin Pig (chancho de lata), is prevalent as well in the Province of Buenos Aires in slums and towns along the riverside.

  There are two Argentine versions of the werewolf. One of them, common also to Uruguay and to southern Brazil, is the lobisón; but since no wolves inhabit these regions, men are supposed to take the shapes of swine or dogs. In certain towns of Entre Ríos, girls shun young men who live in the vicinity of stockyards because on Saturday nights they are said to turn into the aforementioned animals. In the midland provinces, we find the tigre capiango. This beast is not a jaguar but a man who, at will, can take the jaguar’s form. Usually his purpose is to frighten friends in a spirit of rustic jesting, but highwaymen have also availed themselves of the guise. During the civil wars of the last century, General Facundo Quiroga was popularly supposed to have under his command an entire regiment of capiangos.

  The Sphinx

  The Sphinx of Egyptian monuments (called by Herodotus androsphinx, or man-sphinx, in order to distinguish it from the Greek Sphinx) is a lion having the head of a man and lying at rest; it stood watch by temples and tombs, and is said to have represented royal authority. In the halls of Karnak, other Sphinxes have the head of a ram, the sacred animal of Amon. The Sphinx of Assyrian monuments is a winged bull with a man’s bearded and crowned head; this image is common on Persian gems. Pliny in his list of Ethiopian animals includes the Sphinx, of which he details no other features than ‘brown hair and two mammae on the breast’.

  The Greek Sphinx has a woman’s head and breasts, the wings of a bird, and the body and feet of a lion. Some give it the body of a dog and a snake’s tail. It is told that it depopulated the Theban countryside asking riddles (for it had a human voice) and making a meal of any man who could not give the answer. Of Oedipus, the son of Jocasta, the Sphinx asked, ‘What has four legs, two legs, and three legs, and the more legs it has the weaker it is?’ (So runs what seems to be the oldest version. In time the metaphor was introduced which makes of man’s life a single day. Nowadays the question goes, ‘Which animal walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?’) Oedipus answered that it was a man who as an infant crawls on all fours, when he grows up walks on two
legs, and in old age leans on a staff. The riddle solved, the Sphinx threw herself from a precipice.

  De Quincey, around 1849, suggested a second interpretation, which complements the traditional one. The subject of the riddle according to him is not so much man in general as it is Oedipus in particular, orphaned and helpless at birth, alone in his manhood, and supported by Antigone in his blind and hopeless old age.

  The Squonk

  (Lacrimacorpus dissolvens)

  The range of the squonk is very limited. Few people outside of Pennsylvania have ever heard of the quaint beast, which is said to be fairly common in the hemlock forests of that State. The squonk is of a very retiring disposition, generally traveling about at twilight and dusk. Because of its misfitting skin, which is covered with warts and moles, it is always unhappy; in fact it is said, by people who are best able to judge, to be the most morbid of beasts. Hunters who are good at tracking are able to follow a squonk by its tear-stained trail, for the animal weeps constantly. When cornered and escape seems impossible, or when surprised and frightened, it may even dissolve itself in tears. Squonk hunters are most successful on frosty moonlight nights, when tears are shed slowly and the animal dislikes moving about; it may then be heard weeping under the boughs of dark hemlock trees. Mr. J. P. Wentling, formerly of Pennsylvania, but now at St Anthony Park, Minnesota, had a disappointing experience with a squonk near Mont Alto. He made a clever capture by mimicking the squonk and inducing it to hop into a sack, in which he was carrying it home, when suddenly the burden lightened and the weeping ceased. Wentling unslung the sack and looked in. There was nothing but tears and bubbles.

  William T. Cox: Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts

  Swedenborg’s Angels

  For the last twenty-five years of his studious life, the eminent philosopher and man of science Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) resided in London. But as the English are not very talkative, he fell into the habit of conversing with devils and Angels. God granted him the privilege of visiting the Other World and of entering into the lives of its inhabitants. Christ had said that souls, in order to be admitted into Heaven, must be righteous. Swedenborg added that they must also be intelligent; later on Blake stipulated that they should be artists and poets. Swedenborg’s Angels are those souls who have chosen Heaven. They need no words; it is enough that an Angel only think of another in order to have him at his side. Two people who have loved each other on earth become a single Angel. Their world is ruled by love; every Angel is a Heaven. Their shape is that of a perfect human being; Heaven’s shape is the same. The Angels, in whatever direction they look north, east, south, or west are always face to face with God. They are, above all, divines; their chief delight lies in prayer and in the unraveling of theological problems. Earthly things are but emblems of heavenly things. The sun stands for the godhead. In Heaven there is no time; the appearance of things changes according to moods. The Angels’ garments shine according to their intelligence. The souls of the rich are richer than the souls of the poor, since the rich are accustomed to wealth. In Heaven, all objects, furniture, and cities are more physical and more complex than those of our earth; colours are more varied and splendid. Angels of English stock show a tendency to politics; Jews to the sale of trinkets; Germans tote bulky volumes which they consult before venturing an answer. Since Moslems venerate Mohammed, God has provided them with an Angel who impersonates the Prophet. The poor in spirit and hermits are denied the pleasures of Heaven, for they would be unable to enjoy them.

  Swedenborg’s Devils

  In the works of the famous eighteenth-century Swedish visionary, we read that Devils, like angels, are not a species apart but derive from the human race. They are individuals who after death choose Hell. There, in that region of marshlands, of desert wastes, of tangled forests, of towns levelled by fire, of brothels, and of gloomy dens, they feel no special happiness, but in Heaven they would be far unhappier still. Occasionally, a ray of heavenly light falls on them from on high; the Devils feel it as a burning, a scorching, and it reaches their nostrils as a stench. Each thinks himself handsome, but many have the faces of beasts or have shapeless lumps of flesh where faces should be; others are faceless. They live in a state of mutual hatred and of armed violence, and if they come together it is for the purpose of plotting against one another or of destroying each other. God has forbidden men and angels to draw a map of Hell, but we know that its general outline follows that of a Devil, just as the outline of Heaven follows that of an angel. The most vile and loathsome Hells lie to the west.

  The Sylphs

  To each of the four roots, or elements, into which the Greeks divided all matter, a particular spirit was later made to correspond. Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician, gave them their names: the Gnomes of earth, the Nymphs of water, the Salamanders of fire, and the Sylphs, or Sylphides, of air. All of these words come from the Greek. The French philologist Littré traced the etymology of ‘sylph’ to the Celtic languages, but it seems quite unlikely that Paracelsus, who gave us the name, knew anything about those tongues.

  No one any longer believes in the Sylphs, but the word is used as a trivial compliment applied to a slender young woman. Sylphs occupy an intermediate place between supernatural and natural beings; Romantic poets and the ballet have not neglected them.

  Talos

  Living beings made of metal or stone make up some of fantastic zoology’s most alarming species. Let us recall the angry bulls with brass feet and horns that breathed flames and that Jason, helped by the magic arts of Medea, yoked to the plough; Condillac’s psychological statue of sensitive marble; the boatman in the Arabian Nights, ‘a man of brass with a tablet of lead on his breast inscribed with talismans and characts’, who rescued the third Kalandar from the Magnet Mountain; the ‘girls of mild silver, or of furious gold’, which a goddess in William Blake’s mythology caught in silken nets for the delight of her lover; and the metal birds who nursed Ares.

  To this list we may also add a draft animal, the swift wild boar Gullinbursti, whose name means ‘golden-bristled’. The mythologist Paul Herrmann writes: This living piece of metalwork came from the forge of skilful dwarfs; they threw a pigskin into the fire and drew out a golden boar with the power of traveling on land, sea, and air. However dark the night, there is always light enough in the boar’s path.’ Gullinbursti pulled the chariot of Freya, the Norse goddess of love, marriage, and fertility.

  And then there is Talos, the warden of the island of Crete.

  Some consider this giant the work of Vulcan or of Daedalus; Apollonius of Rhodes tells us about him in his Argonautica (IV, 1638-48):

  And Talos, the man of bronze, as he broke off the rocks from the hard cliff, stayed them from fastening hawsers to the shore, when they came to the roadstead of Dicte’s haven. He was of the stock of bronze, of the men sprung from ash-trees, the last left among the sons of the gods; and the son of Cronos gave him to Europa to be the warder of Crete and to stride round the island thrice a day with his feet of bronze. Now in all the rest of his body and limbs was he fashioned of bronze and invulnerable; but beneath the sinew by his ankle was a blood-red vein; and this, with its issues of life and death, was covered by a thin skin.

  It was through this vulnerable heel, of course, that Talos met his end. Medea bewitched him with a hostile glance, and when the giant again began heaving boulders from his cliff, ‘he grazed his ankle on a pointed crag, and the ichor gushed forth like melted lead; and not long thereafter did he stand towering on the jutting cliff’.

  In another version of the myth, Talos, burning red-hot, would put his arms around a man and kill him. The bronze giant this time met death at the hands of Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, who were led on by the sorceress Medea.

  The T’ao T’ieh

  Poets and mythology seem to have ignored it, but everyone at some time has discovered a T’ao T’ieh for himself at the corner of a capital or in the middle
of a frieze, and felt a slight uneasiness. The dog that guarded the flocks of the threefold Geryon had two heads and a single body, and luckily was killed by Hercules. The T’ao T’ieh inverts this order and is still more horrible: its huge head is connected to one body on the right and another on the left. Generally it has six legs since the front pair serves for both bodies. Its face may be a dragon’s, a tiger’s, or a person’s; art historians call it an ‘ogre’s mask’. It is a formal monster, inspired by the demon of symmetry for sculptors, potters, and ceramicists.

  Some fourteen hundred years b.c., under the Shang Dynasty, it already figured on ceremonial bronzes.

  T’ao T’ieh means ‘glutton’ and it embodies the vices of sensuality and avarice. The Chinese paint it on their dishes in order to warn against self-indulgence.

  Thermal Beings

  It was revealed to the visionary and theosophist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) that this planet, before it was the earth we now know, passed through a solar stage, and before that through a Saturnian stage. Man today is composed of a physical body, of an ethereal body, of an astral body, and of an ego; at the start of the Saturnian period he was a physical body only. This body was neither visible nor tangible, since at that time there were on earth neither solids nor liquids nor gases. There were only states of heat, thermal forms, defining in cosmic space regular and irregular figures; each man, each being, was an organism made of changing temperatures. According to the testimony of Steiner, mankind during the Saturnian period was a blind, deaf, and insensitive multitude of articulated states of heat and cold. ‘To the investigator, heat is but a substance still subtler than a gas,’ we read in one page of Steiner’s Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss (Outline of Occult Science). Before the solar stage, fire spirits, or archangels, animated the bodies of those ‘men’, who began to glow and shine.