Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (61 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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The Banshee
Nobody seems to have laid eyes on this ’woman of the fairies’. She is less a shape than a mournful screaming that haunts the Irish night and (according to Sir Walter Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft) the Scottish highlands. Beneath the windows of the visited house, she foretells the death of one of the family. She is held to be a token of pure Celtic blood, with no mixture of Latin, Saxon, or Danish. The Banshee has also been heard in Wales and in Brittany. Her wail is called keening.
The Barometz
The vegetable Lamb of Tartary, also named Barometz and Lycopodium barometz and Chinese lycopodium, is a plant whose shape is that of a lamb bearing a golden fleece. It stands on four or five root stalks. Sir Thomas Browne gives this description of it in his
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
(1646):
Much wonder is made of the Boramez, that strange plant-animal or vegetable Lamb of Tartary, which Wolves delight to feed on, which hath the shape of a Lamb, affordeth a bloody juyce upon breaking, and liveth while the plants be consumed about it.
Other monsters are made up by combining various kinds of animals; the Barometz is a union of animal and vegetable kingdoms.
This brings to mind the mandrake, which cries out like a man when it is ripped from the earth; and in one of the circles of the Inferno, the sad forest of the suicides, from whose torn limbs blood and words drip at the same time; and that tree dreamed by Chesterton, which devoured the birds nesting in its branches, and when spring came put out feathers instead of leaves.
The Basilisk
Down through the ages, the Basilisk (also known as the Cockatrice) grows increasingly ugly and horrendous until today it is forgotten. Its name comes from the Greek and means ‘little king’; to the Elder Pliny (VIII, 333), it was a serpent bearing a bright spot in the shape of a crown on its head. Dating from the Middle Ages, it becomes a four-legged cock with a crown, yellow feathers, wide thorny wings, and a serpent’s tail ending either in a hook or in another cock’s head. The change in its image is reflected in a change in its name; Chaucer in
The Persone’s Tale
speaks of the ‘basilicok’ (‘the basilicok sleeth folk by the venim of his sighte’). One of the plates illustrating Aldrovandi’s
Natural History of Serpents and Dragons
gives the Basilisk scales instead of feathers, and the use of eight legs. (According to the
Younger Edda
, Odin’s horse Sleipnir also had eight legs.)
What remains constant about the Basilisk is the deadly effect of its stare and its venom. The Gorgons’ eyes turned living beings into stone; Lucan tells us that from the blood of one of them all the serpents of Libya sprang the asp, the amphisbaena, the ammodyte, and the Basilisk. We give the following passages, in a literal translation, from Book IX of
Pharsalia
:
In this body [Medusa’s] first did noxious nature produce deadly plagues; from those jaws snakes poured forth whizzing hisses with vibrating tongues, which, after the manner of a woman’s hair flowing along the back, flapped about the very neck of the delighted Medusa. Upon her forehead turned towards you erect did serpents rise, and viper’s venom flowed from her combed locks.
What avails a Basilisk being pierced by the spear of the wretched Murrus? Swift flies the poison along the weapon, and fastens upon the hand; which, instantly, with sword unsheathed, he smites, and at the same moment severs it entirely from the arm; and, looking upon the dreadful warning of a death his own, he stands in safety, his hand perishing.
The Basilisk dwelled in the desert; or, more accurately, it made the desert. Birds fell dead at its feet and the earth’s fruits blackened and rotted; the water of the streams where it quenched its thirst remained poisoned for centuries. That its mere glance split rocks and burned grass has been attested by Pliny. Of all animals, the weasel alone was unaffected by the monster and could be counted on to attack it on sight; it was also believed that the crowing of a rooster sent the Basilisk scurrying. The seasoned traveler was careful to provide himself with either a caged rooster or a weasel before venturing into unknown territory. Another weapon was the mirror, its own image would strike the Basilisk dead.
Isidore of Seville and the compilers of the
Speculum Triplex
(Threefold Mirror) rejected Lucan’s fables and sought a rational explanation for the Basilisk’s origin. (They could not deny its existence, since the Vulgate translates the Hebrew word Tsepha, the name of a poisonous reptile, as ‘cockatrice’.) The theory that gained most favour was that of a misshapen egg laid by a cock and hatched by a snake or a toad. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne found this explanation as farfetched as the monster itself. At much the same time, Quevedo wrote his romance ’The Basilisk’, in which we read:
Si está vivo quien te vio, Toda su historia es mentira, Pues si no murió, te ignora, Y si murió no lo afirma.
[If the man who saw you is still alive, your whole story is a lie, since if he has not died he cannot have seen you, and if he has died, he cannot tell what he saw.]
Behemoth
Four centuries before the Christian era, Behemoth was a magnification of the elephant or of the hippopotamus, or a mistaken and alarmist version of these animals; it is now precisely the ten famous verses describing it in Job (XL: 15-24) and the huge being which these lines evoke. The rest is wrangling and philology.
The word ‘Behemoth’ is plural; scholars tell us it is the intensive plural form of the Hebrew
b’hemah
, which means ‘beast’. As Fray Luis de León wrote in his
Exposición del Libro de Job
: ‘Behemoth is a Hebrew word that stands for “beasts”; according to the received judgement of learned men, it means the elephant, so called because of its inordinate size; and being but a single animal it counts for many.’
We are also reminded of the fact that in the first verse of Genesis in the original text, the Hebrew name for God, Elohím, is plural, though the form of the verb it takes is singular.
Bereshit bará Elohím et hashamáim veet haáretz
. Trinitarians, by the way, have used this incongruity as an argument for the concept of the godhead being Three-in-One.
We give the ten verses in the translation from the Latin Vulgate by Father Knox (XL: 10-19):
Here is Behemoth, my creature as thou art, fed on the same grass the oxen eat; yet what strength in his loins, what lustihood in the navel of his belly! Stiff as cedarwood his tail, close-knit the sinews of his groin, bones like pipes of bronze, gristle like plates of steel! None of God’s works can vie with him, no weapon so strong in the hands of its maker; whole mountainsides, the playground of his fellow beasts, he will lay under tribute, as he lies there under the close covert of the marsh-reeds, thick boughs for his shadow, among the willows by the stream. The flooded river he drinks unconcerned; Jordan itself would have no terrors for that gaping mouth. Like a lure it would charm his eye, though it should pierce his nostrils with sharp stakes.
T
he Brownies
Brownies are helpful little men of a brownish hue, which gives them their name. It is their habit to visit Scottish farms and, while the household sleeps, to perform domestic chores. One of the tales by the Grimms deals with the same subject.
The famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson said he had trained his Brownies in the craft of literature. Brownies visited him in his dreams and told him wondrous tales; for instance, the strange transformation of Dr Jekyll into the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode of Olalla, in which the scion of an old Spanish family bites his sister’s hand.
Burak
In George Sale’s translation (1734), the opening verse of Chapter XVII of the Koran consists of these words: ‘Praise be unto him, who transported his servant by night, from the sacred temple of Mecca to his farther temple of Jerusalem, the circuit of which we have blessed, that we might show him some of our signs . . .’ Commentators say that the one praised is God, that his servant is Mohammed, that the sacred temple is that of Mecca, that the distant temple is that of Jerusalem, and that from Jerusalem the Prophet was transported to the seventh heaven. In the oldest versions of the legend, Mohammed is guided by a man or an angel; in those of a later date he is furnished with a heavenly steed, larger than an ass and smaller than a mule. This steed is Burak, whose name means ‘shining’. According to Richard Burton, translator of
The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night
, Moslems in India usually picture Burak with a man’s face, the ears of an ass, a horse’s body, and the wings and tail of a peacock.
One of the Islamic legends tells that Burak, on leaving the ground, tipped a jar of water. The Prophet was taken up to the seventh heaven, along the way speaking in each of the heavens with the patriarchs and angels living there, and he crossed the Unity and felt a coldness that chilled his heart when the Lord laid a hand on his shoulder. Man’s time is not commensurate with God’s time; on his return the Prophet raised the jar, out of which not a single drop had yet been spilled.
Miguel Asm Palacios, the twentieth-century Spanish Orientalist, speaks of a mystic from Murcia of the 1200s who, in an allegory entitled the Book of the Night Journey to the Majesty of the All-Generous, has seen in Burak, a symbol of divine love. In another text he speaks of the ‘Burak of the pureness of heart’.