Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (65 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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The Eastern Dragon
The Dragon has the ability to assume many shapes, but these are inscrutable. Generally, it is imagined with a head something like a horse’s, with a snake’s tail, with wings on its sides (if at all), and with four claws, each furnished with four curved nails. We read also of its nine resemblances: its horns are not unlike those of a stag, its head that of a camel, its eyes those of a devil, its neck that of a snake, its belly that of a clam, its scales those of a fish, its talons those of an eagle, its footprints those of a tiger, and its ears those of an ox. There are specimens of the Dragon that lack ears and hear with their horns. It is customary to picture them with a pearl, which dangles from their necks and is a symbol of the sun. Within this pearl lies the Dragon’s power. The beast is rendered helpless if its pearl is stolen from it.
History traces the earliest emperors back to Dragons. Their teeth, bones, and saliva all possess medicinal qualities. According to its will, the Dragon can become visible or invisible. In springtime it ascends into the skies; in the fall it dives down into the depths of the seas. Some Dragons lack wings yet fly under their own impetus. Science distinguishes several kinds. The Celestial Dragon carries on its back the palaces of the gods that otherwise might fall to earth, destroying the cities of men; the Divine Dragon makes the winds and rains for the benefit of mankind; the Terrestrial Dragon determines the course of streams and rivers; the Subterranean Dragon stands watch over treasures forbidden to men. The Buddhists affirm that Dragons are no fewer in number than the fishes of their many concentric seas; somewhere in the universe a sacred cipher exists to express their exact number. The Chinese believe in Dragons more than in any other deities because Dragons are frequently seen in the changing formations of clouds. Similarly, Shakespeare has observed, ‘Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish.’
The Dragon rules over mountains, is linked to geomancy, dwells near tombs, is connected with the cult of Confucius is the Neptune of the seas and appears also on terra firma.
The Sea-Dragon Kings live in resplendent underwater palaces and feed on opals and pearls. Of these Kings there are five: the chief is in the middle, the other four correspond to the cardinal points. Each stretches some three or four miles in length; on changing position, they cause mountains to tumble. They are sheathed in an armour of yellow scales, and their muzzles are whiskered. Their legs and tail are shaggy, their forehead juts over their flaming eyes, their ears are small and thick, their mouths gape open, their tongues are long, and teeth sharp. Their breath boils up and roasts whole shoals of fishes. When these Sea Dragons rise to the ocean surface, they cause whirlpools and typhoons; when they take to the air they blow up storms that rip the roofs off the houses of entire cities and flood the countryside. The Dragon Kings are immortal and can communicate among themselves, without recourse to words, in spite of any distance that separates them. It is during the third month that they make their annual report to the upper heavens.
The Eater of the Dead
There is a strange literary genre which, spontaneously, has sprung up in various lands and at various times. This is the manual for the guidance of the dead through the Other World.
Heaven and Hell
by Swedenborg, the writings of the Gnostics, the Tibetan
Bardo Thödol
(which, according to Evans-Wentz, should be translated as ‘Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane’), and the Egyptian
Book of the Dead
do not exhaust the possible examples. The similarities and differences of the latter two books have attracted the attention of esoteric scholarship; for us, let it be enough to recall that in the Tibetan manual the Other World is as illusory as this one, while to the Egyptians it has a real and objective existence.
In both texts there is a Judgment Scene before a jury of deities, some with the heads of apes; in both, a symbolical weighing of evil and good deeds. In the Book of the Dead, a heart and a feather are weighed against each other, ‘the heart representing the conduct or conscience of the deceased and the feather righteousness or truth’. In the
Bardo Thödol
, white pebbles and black pebbles are placed on either side of the balance. The Tibetans have demons or devils who lead the condemned to the place of purgation in a hell-world; the Egyptians have a grim monster attending their wicked, an Eater of the Dead.
The dead man swears not to have caused hunger or sorrow, not to have killed or to have made others kill for him, not to have stolen the food set aside for the dead, not to have used false weights, not to have taken the milk from a baby’s mouth, not to have driven livestock from their pasturage, not to have netted the birds of the gods.
If he lies, the forty-two judges deliver him to the Eater, ‘who has the head of a crocodile, the trunk of a lion, and the hinder parts of a hippopotamus’. The Eater is assisted by another animal Babaí, of whom we know only that he is frightening and that Plutarch identifies him with the Titan who fathered the Chimera.
The Eight-Forked Serpent
The Eight-Forked Serpent of Koshi is prominent in the mythical cosmogony of Japan. It was eight-headed and eight-tailed; its eyes were red as the winter cherry, and pine trees and mosses grew on its back, while firs sprouted on each of its heads. As it crawled, it stretched over eight valleys and eight hills, and its belly was always flecked with blood. In seven years this beast had devoured seven maidens, the daughters of a king, and in the eighth year was about to eat up the youngest daughter, named Princess Comb-Ricefield. The Princess was saved by a god who bore the name of Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male. This knight built a circular enclosure of wood with eight gates and eight platforms at each gate. On the platforms he set tubs of rice beer. The Eight-Forked Serpent came and, dipping a head into each of the tubs, gulped down the beer and was soon fast asleep. Then Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male lopped the heads. A river of blood sprang from the necks. In the Serpent’s tail a sword was found that to this day commands veneration in the Great Shrine of Atsuta. These events took place on the mountain formerly named Serpent-Mountain and now called Eight-Cloud Mountain. The number eight in Japan is a magic number and stands for many, just as forty (‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’) did in Elizabethan England. Japanese paper currency still commemorates the killing of the Serpent. It is superfluous to point out that the redeemer married the redeemed, as in Hellenic myth Perseus married Andromeda.
In his English rendering of the cosmogonies and theogonies of old Japan (The Sacred Scriptures of the Japanese), Post Wheeler also records analogous legends of the Hydra of Greek myth, of Fafnir from the Germanic, and of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, whom a god made drunk with blood-red beer so that mankind would be saved from annihilation.
The Elephant That Foretold
the birth of the Buddha
Five centuries before the Christian era, Queen Maya, in Nepal, had a dream that a white Elephant, which dwelled on the Golden Mountain, had entered her body. This visionary beast was furnished with six tusks. The King’s soothsayers predicted that the Queen would bear a son who would become either ruler of the world or the saviour of mankind. As is common knowledge, the latter came true.
In India the Elephant is a domestic animal. White stands for humility and the number six is sacred, corresponding to the six dimensions of space: upward, downward, forward, back, left, and right.
The Eloi and the Morlocks
The hero of the novel
The Time Machine
, which a young writer Herbert George Wells published in 1895, travels on a mechanical device into an unfathomable future. There he finds that mankind has split into two species: the Eloi, who are frail and defenseless aristocrats living in idle gardens and feeding on the fruits of the trees; and the Morlocks, a race of underground proletarians who, after ages of labouring in darkness, have gone blind, but driven by the force of the past, go on working at their rusted intricate machinery that produces nothing. Shafts with winding staircases unite the two worlds. On moonless nights, the Morlocks climb up out of their caverns and feed on the Eloi.
The nameless hero, pursued by Morlocks, escapes back into the present. He brings with him as a solitary token of his adventure an unknown flower that falls into dust and that will not blossom on earth until thousands and thousands of years are over.
The Elves
The Elves are of Nordic origin. Little is known about what they look like, except that they are tiny and sinister. They steal cattle and children and also take pleasure in minor acts of devilry. In England, the world ‘elflock’ was given to a tangle of hair because it was supposed to be a trick of the Elves. An Anglo-Saxon charm, which for all we know may go back to heathen times, credits them with the mischievous habit of shooting, from afar, miniature arrows of iron that break the surface of the skin without a trace and are at the root of sudden painful stitches. In the
Younger Edda
, a distinction is noted between Light Elves and Dark: ‘The Light Elves are fairer than a glance of the sun, the Dark Elves blacker than pitch.’ The German for nightmare is Alp; etymology traces the word back to ‘elf’, since it was commonly believed in the Middle Ages that Elves weighed heavily upon the breast of sleepers, giving them bad dreams.