Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (69 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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Harpies
In Hesiod’s
Theogony
, the Harpies are winged divinities who wear long loose hair and are swifter than the birds and winds, in the
Aeneid
(Book III), they are vultures with a woman’s face, sharp curved claws and filthy underparts, and are weak with a hunger they cannot appease. They swoop down from the mountains and plunder tables laid for feasts. They are invulnerable and emit an infectious smell; they gorge all they see, screeching the whole while and fouling everything with excrement. Servius, in his commentaries on Virgil, writes that just as Hecate is Proserpina in hell, Diana on earth, and Luna in heaven, and is called a threefold goddess, so the Harpies are Furies in hell, Harpies on earth, and Dirae (or Demons) in heaven. They are also confused with the Parcae, or Fates.
By order of the gods, the Harpies harried a Thracian king who unveiled men’s futures, or who bought a long life with the price of his eyes, for which he was punished by the sun, whose works he had insulted by choosing blindness. He had prepared a banquet for all his court and the Harpies contaminated and devoured the dishes. The Argonauts put the Harpies to flight; Apollonius of Rhodes and William Morris (
The Life and Death of Jason
) tell the fantastic story. Ariosto in Canto XXXIII of the
Furioso
transforms the Thracian king into Prester John, fabled emperor of the Abyssinians.
Harpy comes from the Greek
harpazein
to snatch or carry away. In the beginning they were wind goddesses, like the Maruts of Vedic myth, who wielded weapons of gold (the lightning) and milked the clouds.
The Heavenly Cock
According to the Chinese, the Heavenly Cock is a golden-plumed fowl that crows three times a day. The first, when the sun takes its morning bath on the horizons of the sea; the second, when the sun is at its height; the last, when it sinks in the west. The first crowing shakes the heavens and stirs mankind from sleep. Among the offspring of the Cock is the yang, the male principle of the universe. The Cock has three legs and perches in the fu-sang tree, which grows in the lands of sunrise and whose height is measured by thousands of feet. The Heavenly Cock’s crowing is very loud, and its bearing, lordly. It lays eggs out of which are hatched chicks with red combs, who answer his song every morning. All the roosters on earth are descended from the Heavenly Cock, whose other name is the Bird of Dawn.
The Hippogriff
To signify impossibility or incongruence, Virgil spoke of breeding horses with griffons. Four centuries later, his commentator Servius explained that the griffon is an animal which in the top half of its body is an eagle and in the bottom half a lion. To strengthen his text he added that they detest horses. In time, the expression
Jungentur jam grypes equis
(‘To cross griffons with horses’) came to be proverbial; at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto, remembering it, invented the Hippogriff. Eagle and lion are united in the griffon of the ancients; horse and griffon in Ariosto’s Hippogriff, which makes it a second generation monster or invention. Pietro Micheli notes that it is more harmonious than the winged horse Pegasus.
A detailed description of the Hippogriff, written as for a handbook of fantastic zoology, is given in
Orlando Furioso
(IV, 18):
The steed is not imagined but real, for it was sired by a Griffon out of a mare: like its father’s were its feathers and wings, its forelegs, head, and beak; in all its other parts it resembled its mother and was called Hippogriff; they come, though rarely, from the Rhiphaean Mountains, far beyond the icebound seas.
The first mention of the strange beast is deceptively casual (II, 37):
And by the Rhone I came upon a man in arms, reining in a great winged horse.
Other stanzas give us the wonder of this creature that flies. The following (IV, 4) is well known:
E vede l’oste e tutta la famiglia, E chi a finestre e chi fuor ne la via, Tener levati al ciel gli occhi e le ciglia, Come l’Ecclisse o la Cometa sia.Vede la Donna un’alta maraviglia,Che di leggier creduta non saria: Vede passar un gran destriero alato,Che porta in aria un cavalliero armato.
[And she saw the landlord and all his house, and some at the windows and some in the street, their eyes and brows lifted to the sky as though it were an Eclipse or Comet. The Lady saw a wonder on high not easily to be believed: she saw pass over a great winged steed, bearing through the air a knight in arms.]
Astolpho, in one of the last cantos, unsaddles and unbridles the Hippogriff and sets it free.
Hochigan
Ages ago, a certain South African bushman, Hochigan, hated animals, which at that time were endowed with speech. One day he disappeared, stealing their special gift. From then on, animals have never spoken again. Descartes tells us that monkeys could speak if they wished to, but that they prefer to keep silent so that they won’t be made to work. In 1907, the Argentine writer Lugones published a story about a chimpanzee who was taught how to speak and died under the strain of the effort.
Humbaba
What was the giant Humbaba like, who guards the mountain cedars in that pieced-together Assyrian epic Gilgamesh, which may be the world’s oldest poem? Georg Burckhardt has attempted to reconstruct it, and from his German version, published in Wiesbaden in 1952, we give this passage:
Enkidu swung his axe and cut down one of the cedars. An angry voice rang out: Who has entered my forest and cut down one of my trees?’ Then they saw Humbaba himself coming: he had the paws of a lion and a body covered with horny scales; his feet had the claws of a vulture, and on his head were the horns of a wild bull; his tail and male member each ended in a snake’s head.
In one of the later cantos of Gilgamesh, we are introduced to creatures called Men-Scorpions who stand guard at the gate of the mountain Mashu. ‘Its twin peaks [in an English version by N. K. Sandars] are as high as the wall of heaven and its paps reach down to the underworld.’ It is into this mountain that the sun goes down at night and from which it returns at dawn. The Man-Scorpion is human in the upper part of its body, while its lower part ends in a scorpion’s tail.
The Hundred-Heads
The Hundred-Heads is a fish created by a hundred ill-tempered words uttered in the course of an otherwise blameless life. A Chinese biography of the Buddha tells that he once met some fishermen who were dragging in a net. After much toil they hauled up on to the shore a huge fish with one head of an ape, another of a dog, another of a horse, another of a fox, another of a hog, another of a tiger, and so on, up to one hundred. The Buddha asked the fish:
‘Are you Kapila?’
‘Yes, I am,’ the Hundred-heads answered before dying. The Buddha explained to his disciples that in a previous incarnation Kapila was a Brahman who had become a monk and whose knowledge of the holy texts was unrivalled. Upon occasion, when his fellow students misread a word, Kapila would call them ape-head, dog-head, horse-head, and so forth. After his death, the karma of those many insults caused him to be reborn as a sea monster, weighed down by all the heads he had bestowed upon his companions.