Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (35 page)

The Mirror and the Mask

The battle of Clontarf over, in which the Norwegians met defeat, the High King of Ireland spoke to his court poet.

‘The greatest deeds lose their lustre if they are not coined in words,’ the king said. ‘I want you to sing my victory and my praise. I will be Aeneas; you will be my Virgil. Do you think yourself capable of this task, which will make us both immortal?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said the bard. ‘I am Ollan. For twelve winters I have trained in the disciplines of prosody. I know by heart the three hundred and sixty legends that form the basis of true poetry. The cycles of Ulster and Munster are in the strings of my harp. The laws authorize me to be lavish in using the oldest words of our tongue and the most complex metaphors. I have mastered the secret of writing, which protects our art from the undiscerning eyes of the common herd. I can celebrate loves, cattle thieves, voyages, and wars. I know the mythological lineages of all the royal houses of Ireland. I possess a knowledge of judicial astrology, mathematics, canon law, and the powers of plants. I have defeated my rivals in public contest. I have made myself skilled in satire, which causes infirmities of the skin, including leprosy. I know how to wield a sword, as I proved in your battle. I am ignorant of only one thing: how to thank you for the gift you make me.’

The king, who was easily tired by long speeches, especially those of others, said with relief, ‘I know these things quite well, I have been told that the nightingale recently sang in England. When the rains and snows pass, and the nightingale returns from its southern lands, you will sing your praises before the court and before the School of Bards. I grant you a whole year. You will polish each word and letter. Reward, as you know by now, will not be unworthy of my royal custom nor of the sleepless nights of your inspiration.’

‘O king, what greater reward than to see your face!’ said the poet, who was also a courtier. He bowed and withdrew, already glimpsing one or two verses.

When the year came round it had been a time of epidemics and uprisings the poet presented his panegyric.

He declaimed it slowly, confidently, without a glance at the manuscript. With his head the king showed his approval. Everyone imitated his gesture, even those thronging the doorways, who were unable to make out a single word. At the end the king spoke.

‘I accept your labour,’ he said. ‘It is another victory. You have given each word its true meaning, and each substantive the epithet given it by the poets of old. In your whole panegyric there is not a single image unknown to the classics. War is the beautiful web of men, and blood is the sword’s water. The sea has its gods and the clouds foretell the future. You have skillfully handled rhyme, alliteration, assonance, quantities, the artifices of learned rhetoric, the wise variation of metres. If all the literature of Ireland were to perish
—
absit omen
—
it could be reconstructed without loss from your classic ode. Thirty scribes shall copy it twelve times each.’

There was a silence, then he went on. ‘All is well and yet nothing has happened. In our veins the blood runs no faster. Our hands have not sought the bow. No one has turned pale. No one uttered a battle cry or set his breast against the Vikings. Before a year is out, poet, we shall applaud another ode. As a sign of our approval, take this mirror, which is of silver.’

‘I give thanks and I understand,’ said the bard. The stars in the sky went on in their bright course. Once more the nightingale sang in the Saxon forests, and the poet came back with his manuscript, which was shorter than the one before. He did not repeat it from memory but read it, obviously hesitant, omitting certain passages as if he himself did not completely understand them or did not wish to profane them. The ode was strange. It was not a description of the battle
—
it was the battle. In its warlike chaos there struggled with one another the God that is Three and is One, Ireland’s pagan deities, and those who would wage war hundreds of years later at the beginning of the Elder Edda. The form was no less odd. A singular noun governed a plural verb. The prepositions were alien to common usage. Harshness alternated with sweetness. The metaphors were arbitrary, or so they seemed.

The king exchanged a few words with the men of letters who stood around him, then spoke to the bard. ‘Your first ode I could declare was an apt compendium of all that has been sung in Ireland,’ the king said. ‘This one outdoes, and even makes as nothing, whatever came before it. It astounds, it dazzles, it causes wonderment. The ignorant will be unworthy of it, but not so the learned, the few. An ivory casket will be the resting place of its single copy. Of the pen that has produced so eminent a work we may expect one still more lofty.’ He added with a smile, ‘We are the figures of a fable, and it is good to remember that in fables the number three prevails.’

‘The wizard’s three gifts, triads, and the unquestionable Trinity,’ the bard made bold to murmur.

The king continued, ‘As a token of our approval, take this golden mask.’

‘I give thanks and I have understood,’ said the bard.

The anniversary came round again. The palace sentries noticed that the poet carried no manuscript. In amazement, the king looked at him; the bard was like another man. Something other than time had furrowed and transformed his features. His eyes seemed to stare into the distance or to be blind. The bard begged to be allowed a few words with the king. The slaves left the chamber.

‘Have you not written the ode?’ asked the king.

‘Yes,’ the bard sadly replied. ‘But would that Christ Our Lord had prevented me!’

‘Can you repeat it?’

‘I dare not.’

‘I will give you the courage you lack,’ said the king.

The bard recited the poem. It consisted of a single line.

Not venturing to repeat it aloud, the poet and his king savoured it as if it were a secret prayer or a blasphemy. The king was as awestricken and overcome as the bard. The two looked at each other, very pale.

‘In my youth,’ said the king, ‘I sailed towards the sunset. On one island I saw silver hounds that dealt death to golden boars. On another we fed ourselves on the fragrance of magic apples. On a third I saw walls of fire. On the farthest island of all an arched and hanging river cut across the sky and in its waters went fishes and boats. These are wonders, but they do not compare with your poem, which in some way encompasses them all. What bewitchery gave it to you?’

‘In the dawn I woke up speaking words I did not at first understand,’ said the bard. ‘Those words were a poem. I felt I had committed a sin, perhaps one the Holy Ghost does not forgive.’

‘The one we two now share,’ the king said in a whisper.

‘The sin of having known Beauty, which is a gift forbidden to men. Now it behooves us to expiate it. I gave you a mirror and a golden mask; here is my third present, which will be the last.’

In the bard’s right hand he placed a dagger.

Of the poet, we know that he killed himself upon leaving the palace; of the king, that he is a beggar wandering the length and breadth of Ireland which was once his kingdom, and that he has never repeated the poem.

Undr

The reader should be forewarned that the following pages will not be found in the
Libellus
(1615) of Adam of Bremen, who, as everyone knows, was born and died in the eleventh century. They were unearthed by Lappenberg in a manuscript in the Bodleian, at Oxford, and, given the wealth of circumstantial details, he judged them a late interpolation, but he published them as a curiosity in his
Analecta Germanica
(Leipzig, 1894). The opinion of a mere Argentine amateur is of little account; let the reader judge these pages for himself. My translation is faithful, but it is not literal. Adam of Bremen wrote:

. . . Of the peoples who live on the edge of the wilderness that stretches away on the other shore of the Barbarian Gulf, beyond the lands where the wild horse breeds, the worthiest of mention are the Urns. The uncertain or invented information of traders, the dangers of the route, and the plundering of nomads prevented me from reaching their territory. It is clear, however, that their rudimentary, unfrequented villages are located in the lowlands of the Vistula. Unlike the Swedes, the Urns profess the true faith of Christ, untainted by Arianism or by the bloodthirsty worship of devils, from which the royal houses of England and other northern nations trace their lineages. The Urns are herdsmen, ferrymen, shamans, forgers of swords, and harness makers. Owing to the rigours of war, they barely till the soil. One invariably comes to resemble one’s enemies, and the steppe and the tribes that roam it have made the Urns very skilled in the handling of horse and bow. Their spears, since they are used by horsemen and not foot soldiers, are longer than ours.

As may be imagined, the Urns are unfamiliar with pen, inkhorn, and parchment. They carve their characters as our ancestors carved the runes which Odin revealed to them after having hung from the ash tree Odin given to Odin through nine days and nights.

To this general information I add an account of what I was told by a traveler from Iceland, Ulf Sigurdsson, a man of grave and measured words. We met in Uppsala, near the temple. The wood fire had died, and the cold and the dawn entered through the uneven chinks in the wall. Outside, the grey wolves, which eat the flesh of the heathens sacrificed to the three gods, left their wary tracks in the snow. Our conversation began in Latin, as is usual with churchmen, but we were not long in slipping into the tongue of the north, which extends from Thule all the way to the marketplaces of Asia. The man said: 

As I am of the race of the skalds, to learn that the poetry of the Urns consists of a single word was enough for me to set out in search of them and the way that would lead to their land. Not without exhaustion and hardship did I arrive there after a year-long journey. It was night, and all those I came upon shot me odd looks, and one or two stones were hurled at me.

Seeing the light of a blacksmith’s forge, I approached it. The smith, whose name was Orm, offered me lodging for the night. His language was more or less ours. We exchanged a few words. From his lips I heard for the first time the name of the reigning king Gunnlaug. I learned that after his last war he looked with suspicion upon strangers and that it was his custom to crucify them.

To avoid that fate, which is less fitting to a man than a god, I undertook the composition of a
drápa,
or ode, that celebrated the victories, the fame, and the mercy of the king. I had barely committed it to memory when two men came searching for me. I did not want to surrender my sword to them, but I let myself be led away.

There were still stars in the sky. We crossed the first of several stretches of open ground with huts on every side. I had been led to expect pyramids, but what I saw in the middle of this square was a yellow wooden post. At the top of it I made out the black figure of a fish. Orm, who had accompanied us, said that the fish was the Word. In the next opening, I saw a red post marked with a disk. Orm said that this was the Word. I asked him to tell me it. He was a simple artisan, he said, and he did not know. In the third opening, which was the last, I saw a post painted black, with a design on it that I have forgotten. On the far side of the square was a long, straight wall whose ends I could not catch sight of. Later I found out that it was circular, that it supported a mud roof, that it enclosed a single chamber, and that it stretched around the whole city.

The horses tied to the hitching post outside were of small stature and had long manes. The blacksmith was not allowed entrance. Inside there were armed men, all standing. Gunnlaug, the king, who was ailing, lay with his eyes half shut on some camel hides on a kind of dais. He was a wasted, yellowish man, a sacred and almost forgotten thing; old scars spanned the width of his chest. One of the soldiers opened a way for me. Someone had brought a harp. Kneeling, I intoned the
drápa
in a low voice. There was no lack of the rhetorical figures, the alliterations, and the stresses that the form demands. I do not know whether the king understood it, but he gave me a silver ring, which I still preserve. Under his pillow, I glimpsed the edge of a dagger. To his right was a chessboard with a hundred squares and a handful of scattered pieces.

The guard shoved me to the rear. A man took my place before the king but did not kneel. He plucked the harp as if tuning it, and in a low voice he uttered the word that I had come in search of and had not yet fathomed.

‘It no longer means anything now,’ someone said reverently.

I saw tears. The man raised or modulated his voice, and his scarcely varying chords were monotonous or, still better, infinite. I would have liked his song to go on forever and to be my life. Abruptly, it stopped. I heard the noise the harp made when the singer, no doubt in utter exhaustion, threw it down. We all went out in disorder. I was one of the last. In astonishment I saw that the light was waning on another day. I walked a few steps, when a hand on my shoulder made me pause.

‘The king’s ring was your talisman,’ I was told, ‘but you will not be long in meeting your death, because you have heard the Word. I, Bjarni Thorkelsson, will save you. I am of the race of the skalds. In your ode you called blood the sword’s water and a battle the web of men. I remember having heard those figures from my father’s father. You and I are poets, and I will save you. Nowadays, we do not define each thing that our song quickens; we express it in a single word, which is the Word.’

‘I was unable to hear it,’ I said. ‘I beg you to tell me what it is.’

He paused for a moment or two and replied, ‘I have sworn not to divulge it. Besides, nobody can teach anything. You must find it out for yourself. But let’s hurry; your life is in danger. I’ll hide you in my house, where no one will dare look for you. If the wind is favourable, tomorrow you will sail southward on the river.’

So began the adventure that was to last so many winters.

I shall not go into all that befell me, nor shall I try to give an orderly account of my shifting fortunes. I was an oarsman, slave dealer, slave, woodcutter, highwayman, singer, and taster of deep waters and metals. I suffered captivity, and spent a year in the quicksilver mines, which loosen one’s teeth. I fought side by side with men of Sweden in the Varangian guard at Mikligarðr [Constantinople]. On the shores of the Sea of Azov I was loved by a woman whom I shall never forget; I left her or she left me, it amounts to the same thing. I betrayed and I was betrayed. More than once fate made me kill. A Greek soldier challenged me and gave me the choice between two swords. One was a hand’s breadth longer than the other. Knowing he was out to intimidate me, I chose the shorter. He asked me why. I replied that with either the distance from my hand to his heart was the same. At the edge of the Black Sea stands the runic epitaph I carved for my comrade in arms, Leif Arnarson. I have fought the Blue Men of Serkland, the Saracens. In the course of time I have been many men; it was a whirlwind, a long dream, but all the while the main thing was the Word. From time to time I disbelieved in it. I kept telling myself that to renounce the beautiful game of combining beautiful words was senseless, and that there was no reason to search for a single, and perhaps imaginary, word. Such reasoning was vain. A missionary suggested the word ‘God’, which I rejected. One early dawn, along the banks of a river that widened into a sea, I believed I had come upon the revelation.

Returning to the land of the Urns, I had some trouble finding the singer’s house. When I did, I entered and spoke my name. By that time, night had fallen. From the floor, Thorkelsson told me to light a candle in the bronze candlestick. His face had aged so much that I could not help thinking that I, too, was old. As is the custom, I asked about his king.

‘The king is no longer called Gunnlaug,’ he said. ‘His name is now another. Tell me all about your travels.’

I did so in exact order and with a great many details that I shall omit here. Before I had finished, he asked me, ‘Did you often sing in those lands?’

The question took me by surprise. ‘At first, I sang to earn my living,’ I said. ‘Later, overcome by a fear I do not understand, I was estranged from my harp and my song.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You may go on with your story now.’

I obeyed. After I had finished, a long silence followed.

‘The first woman you had, what did she give you?’ he asked.

‘Everything,’ I said. 

‘Life gave me everything as well. Life gives everything to everyone, but most men are unaware of it. My voice is tired and my fingers weak, but listen to me.’

He took up his harp and uttered the word ‘
undr
’, which means ‘wonder’. The dying man’s song held me rapt, but in it and in his chords I recognized my own verses, the slave woman who gave me my first love, the men I had killed, the chill of dawn, daybreak over the water, the oars. I took up the harp and sang to a different word.

‘All right,’ the other man said, and I had to draw close to hear him. ‘You have understood.’