Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (70 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
The Hydra of Lerna
Typhon (the misshapen son of Tartarus and Terra) and Echidna, who was half beautiful woman and half serpent, gave birth to the Hydra of Lerna. Lemprière tells us that ‘It had 100 heads, according to Diodorus; fifty according to Simonides; and nine according to the more received opinion of Apollodorus, Hyginus &c.’ But what made the creature still more awful was that as soon as one of its heads was cut off, two more sprouted up in their place. It was said that the heads were human and that the middle one was everlasting. The Hydra’s breath poisoned the waters and turned the fields brown. Even when it slept, the pollution in the air surrounding it could cause a man’s death. Juno fostered the Hydra in her efforts to lessen Hercules’ fame.
This monster appears to have been destined for eternity. Its den lay among the marshes near the lake of Lerna. Hercules and Iolaus went in search of it; Hercules lopped its heads and Iolaus applied a burning iron to the bleeding wounds, for only fire would stop the growth of the new heads. The last head, which was deathless, Hercules buried under a great boulder, and where it was buried it remains to this day, hating and dreaming.
In succeeding tasks with other beasts, Hercules inflicted deadly wounds with arrows dipped in the gall of the Hydra.
A sea crab friendly to the Hydra nipped Hercules’ heel when he stepped on it during his struggle with the many-headed monster. Juno placed the crab in the heavens where it is now a constellation and the sign of Cancer.
Ichthyocentaurs
Lycophron, Claudian, and the Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes have each at some time referred to the Ichthyocentaur; there are no other allusions to it in classical writings. Ichthyocentaur may be translated as ‘Centaur-Fish’. The word is applied to beings that mythologists have also called Centaur-Tritons. The image abounds in Greek and Roman sculpture. They are human down to their waist, with the tail of a dolphin, and have the forelegs of a horse or a lion. Their place is among the gods of the ocean, close to the sea horses.
Jewish Demons
Between the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit, Jewish superstition imagined a middle ground inhabited by angels devils. A census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind. Throughout the centuries, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia all enriched this teeming middle world. Maybe because of Christian influence (suggests Trachtenberg), demonology, or the lore of devils, became of less account than angelology, or the lore of angels.
Let us, however, single out Keteb Mereri, Lord of the Noontide and of Scorching Summers. Some children on their way to school once met up with him; all but two died. During the thirteenth century Jewish demonology swelled its ranks with Latin, French, and German intruders who ended up becoming thoroughly integrated with the natives recorded in the Talmud.
The Jinn
According to Moslem tradition, Allah created three different species of intelligent beings: Angels, who are made of light; Jinn (‘Jinnee’ or ‘Genie’ in the singular), who are made of fire; and Men, who are made of earth. The Jinn were created of a black smokeless fire some thousands of years before Adam, and consist of five orders. Among these orders we find good Jinn and evil, male Jinn and female. The cosmographer al-Qaswini says that ‘the Jinn are aerial animals, with transparent bodies, which can assume various forms’. At first they may show themselves as clouds or as huge undefined pillars; when their form becomes condensed, they become visible, perhaps in the bulk of a man, a jackal, a wolf, a lion, a scorpion, or a snake. Some are true believers; others, heretics or atheists. The English Orientalist Edward William Lane writes that when Jinn take the shape of human beings they are sometimes of an enormously gigantic size and ‘if good, they are generally resplendently handsome: if evil, horribly hideous.’ They are also said to become invisible at pleasure ‘by a rapid extension or rarefaction of the particles which compose them’, when they may disappear into the air or earth or through a solid wall.
The Jinn often attain the lower heavens, where they overhear the conversations of angels about future events. This enables them to help wizards and soothsayers. Certain scholars attribute to them the building of the Pyramids or, under the orders of Solomon, the great Temple of Jerusalem. The usual dwelling-places of Jinn are ruined houses, water cisterns, rivers, wells, crossroads, and markets. The Egyptians say that the pillar-like whirlwinds of sand raised in the desert are caused by the flight of an evil Jinnee. They also say that shooting stars are arrows hurled by Allah against evil Jinn. Among the acts perpetrated by these evil-doers against human beings, the following are traditional: the throwing of bricks and stones at passers-by from roofs and windows, the abduction of beautiful women, the persecution of anyone who tries to live in an uninhabited house, and the pilfering of provisions. Invoking the name of Allah the All Merciful, the Compassionate, is usually enough to secure one against such depredations, however.
The ghoul, which haunts burial grounds and feeds upon dead human bodies, is thought to be an inferior order of the Jinn. Iblis is the father of the Jinn and their chief.
In 1828, young Victor Hugo wrote a tumultuous fifteen stanza poem ‘Les Djinns’ about a gathering of these beings. With each stanza, as the Jinn cluster together, the lines grow longer and longer, until the eighth, when they reach their fullness. From this point on they dwindle to the close of the poem, when the Jinn vanish.
Burton and Noah Webster link the word ‘Jinn’ and the Latin ‘genius’, which is from the verb ‘beget’. Skeat contradicts this.
The Kami
In a passage from Seneca, we read that Thales of Miletus taught that the earth floats in a surrounding sea, like a ship, and that these waters when tossed and driven by the tempests are the cause of earthquakes. Historians or mythologists of eighth-century Japan offer us a rather different seismological system. In the Sacred Scriptures it is written:
Now beneath the Fertile-Land-of-Reed-Plains lay a Kami in the form of a great cat-fish, and by its movement it caused the earth to quake, till the Great Deity of Deer Island thrust his sword deep into the earth and transfixed the Kami’s head. So, now, when the evil Kami is violent, he puts forth his hand and lays it upon the sword till the Kami becomes quiet.
The hilt of this sword, carved in granite projects some three feet out of the ground near the shrine of Kashima. In the seventeenth century, a feudal lord dug for six days without reaching the tip of the blade.
In popular belief, the Jinshin-Uwo, or Earthquake-Fish, is an eel seven hundred miles long that holds Japan on its back. It runs from north to south, its head lying beneath Kyoto and its tail beneath Awomori. Some logical thinkers have argued for the reverse of this order, for it is in the south of Japan that earthquakes are more frequent, and it is easier to equate this with the lashing of the eel’s tail. This animal is not unlike the Bahamut of Moslem tradition or the Miõgarõsormr of the Eddas.
In certain regions the Earthquake-Fish is replaced, with little apparent advantage, by the Earthquake-Beetle (Jinshin Mushi). It has a dragon’s head, ten spider legs, and a scaly body. It is an underground, not an undersea, creature.
A King of Fire and His Steed
Heraclitus taught us that the primal element, or root, is fire, but this hardly means that there are beings made of fire, carved of the shifting substance of flames. This almost unimaginable fancy was attempted by William Morris in the tale ‘The Ring Given to Venus’ from his cycle The Earthly Paradise (1868-70). It runs as follows:
Most like a mighty king was he, And crowned and sceptred royally;
As a white flame his visage shone, Sharp, clear-cut as a face of stone;
But flickering flame, not flesh, it was;
And over it such looks did pass
Of wild desire, and pain, and fear,
As in his people’s faces were,
But tenfold fiercer: furthermore,
A wondrous steed the master bore,
Unnameable of kind or make,
Not horse, nor hippogriff, nor drake.
Like and unlike to all of these,
And flickering like the semblances
Of an ill dream . . .
Perhaps in the above lines there is an echo of the deliberately ambiguous personification of Death in Paradise Lost (II, 666-73):
The other shape,
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb.
Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,
For each seem’d either; black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful Dart; what seem’d his head
The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on.