Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (67 page)
Read Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Online
Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
Tags: #Short stories
Fauna of China
The following list of strange animals is taken from the T’ai P’ing Kuang Chi (
Extensive Records Made in the Period of Peace and Prosperity
), completed in the year 978 and published in 981:
The Celestial Horse is like a white dog with a black head. It has fleshy wings and can fly.
The Chiang-liang has a tiger’s head, a man’s face, long limbs, four hooves, and a snake between its teeth.
In the region to the west of the Red Water dwells the beast known as the Ch’ou-t’i, which has a head both front and back.
The denizens of Ch’uan-T’ou have human heads, the wings of a bat, and a bird’s beak. They feed exclusively on raw fish.
In the Country of Long Arms, the hands of the inhabitants dangle to the ground. They live by catching fish at the edge of the sea.
The Hsiao is similar to the owl but has a man’s face, an ape’s body, and a dog’s tail. Its presence foretells prolonged drought.
The Hsing-hsing are like apes. They have white faces and pointed ears. They walk upright, like men, and climb trees.
The Hsing-t’ien is a being that was decapitated for having fought against the gods, and so it has remained forever headless. Its eyes are in its chest and its navel is its mouth. It hops up and down and jumps about in clearings and other open places, and brandishes a shield and axe.
The Hua-fish, or flying snakefish, appears to be a fish but has the wings of a bird. Its appearance forebodes a period of drought.
The mountain Hui looks like a dog with a human head. It is a fine jumper and moves with the swiftness of an arrow; this is why its appearance is held to foretell the coming of typhoons. On beholding a man, the Hui laughs mockingly.
The Musical Serpent has a serpent’s head and four wings. It makes sounds like those of the Musical Stone.
The Ocean Men have human heads and arms, and the body and tail of a fish. They come to the surface in stormy weather.
The Ping-feng, which lives in the country of Magical Water, resembles a black pig with a head at each end.
In the region of the Queer Arm, people have a single arm and three eyes. They are exceptionally skilful and build flying chariots in which they travel on the winds.
The Ti-chiang is a supernatural bird dwelling in the Mountains of the Sky. Its colour is bright red, it has six feet and four wings, but has neither face nor eyes.
Fauna of Mirrors
In one of the volumes of the
Lettres édifiantes et curieuses
that appeared in Paris during the first half of the eighteenth century, Father Fontecchio of the Society of Jesus planned a study of the superstitions and misinformation of the common people of Canton; in the preliminary outline he noted that the Fish was a shifting and shining creature that nobody had ever caught but that many said they had glimpsed in the depths of mirrors. Father Fontecchio died in 1736, and the work begun by his pen remained unfinished; some 150 years later Herbert Allen Giles took up the interrupted task. According to Giles, belief in the Fish is part of a larger myth that goes back to the legendary times of the Yellow Emperor.
In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off.
The first to awaken will be the Fish. Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the colour of this line will be like no other colour. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. Side by side with these mirror creatures, the creatures of water will join the battle. In Yunnan they do not speak of the Fish but of the Tiger of the Mirror. Others believe that in advance of the invasion we will hear from the depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons.
Fauna of the United States
The yarns and tall tales of the lumber camps of Wisconsin and Minnesota include some singular creatures, in which, surely, no one ever believed.
There is the Hidebehind, which is always hiding behind something. No matter how many times or whichever way a man turns, it is always behind him, and that’s why nobody has been able to describe it, even though it is credited with having killed and devoured many a lumberjack. Then there is the Roperite. This animal is about the size of a pony. It has a ropelike beak which it uses to snare even the fleetest of rabbits. The Teakettler owes its name to the noises it makes, much like those of a boiling teakettle. Vaporous clouds fume from its mouth and it walks backward. It has been seen very few times.
The Axehandle Hound has a hatchet-shaped head, a handle-shaped body, and stumpy legs. This North Woods dachshund eats only the handles of axes.
Among the fish of this region we find the Upland Trout. They nest in trees and are good fliers but are scared of water.
There’s another fish, the Goofang, that swims backward to keep the water out of its eyes. It’s described as ‘about the size of a sunfish, only much bigger’.
We shouldn’t forget the Goofus Bird that builds its nest upside down and flies backward, not caring where it’s going, only where it’s been.
The Gillygaloo nested on the slopes of Paul Bunyan’s famed Pyramid Forty, laying square eggs to keep them from rolling down the steep incline and breaking. These eggs were coveted by lumberjacks, who hard-boiled them and used them as dice.
And finally there’s the Pinnacle Grouse, which had a single wing. This enabled it to fly in one direction only, circling the top of a conical hill. The colour of its plumage varied according to the season and according to the condition of the observer.
Garuda
Vishnu, second god of the triad that rules over the Hindu pantheon, rides either on the serpent that fills the seas or on the back of Garuda. Pictorially, Vishnu is represented as blue and with four arms, holding in each hand the club, the shell, the sphere, and the lotus. Garuda is half vulture and half man, with the wings, beak, and talons of the one and body and legs of the other. His face is white, his wings of a bright scarlet, and his body golden. Figures of Garuda, worked in bronze or stone, are worshipped in the temples of India. One is found in Gwalior, erected more than a hundred years before the Christian era by a Greek, Heliodorus, who became a follower of Vishnu.
In the Garuda Purana one of the many Puranas, or traditions, of Hindu lore Garuda expounds at length on the beginnings of the universe, the solar essence of Vishnu, the rites of his cult, the genealogies of the kings descended from the sun and the moon, the plot of the Ramayana, and various minor topics, such as the craft of verse, grammar, and medicine.
In a seventh-century drama called the Mirth of the Snakes and held to be the work of a king, Garuda kills and each day devours a snake (probably the hooded cobra) until a Buddhist prince teaches him the value of abstinence. In the last act, the penitent Garuda brings back to life the bones of the many generations of serpents he has fed upon. Eggeling holds that this work may be a Brahman satire on Buddhism. Nimbarka, a mystic whose date is uncertain, has written that Garuda is a soul saved forever, as are his crown, his earrings, and his flute.
The Gnomes
The Gnomes are older than their name, which is Greek but which was unknown to the ancients, since it dates from the sixteenth century, Etymologists attribute it to the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in whose writings it appears for the first time.
They are sprites of the earth and hills. Popular imagination pictures them as bearded dwarfs of rough and grotesque features; they wear tight-fitting brown clothes with monastic hoods. Like the griffons of Greece and of the East and the dragons of Germanic lore, the Gnomes watch over hidden treasure.
Gnosis, in Greek, means knowledge; and Paracelsus may have called them Gnomes because they know the exact places where precious metals are to be found.