Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (71 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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The Kraken
The Kraken is a Scandinavian version of the zaratan and of the sea dragon, or sea snake of the Arabs.
In 1752-54, the Dane Erik Pontoppidan, Bihsop of Bergen, published a Natural History of Norway, a work famous for its hospitality or gullibility. In its pages we read that the Kraken’s back is a mile and a half wide and that its tentacles are capable of encompassing the largest of ships. The huge back protrudes from the sea like an island. The Bishop formulates this rule: ‘Floating islands are invariably Krakens.’ He also writes that the Kraken is in the habit of turning the sea murky with a discharge of liquid. This statement has inspired the hypothesis that the Kraken is an enlargement of the octopus.
Among Tennyson’s juvenilia we find this poem to the curious creature:
The Kraken
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Kujata
In Moslem cosmology, Kujata is a huge bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, and feet. To get from one ear to another or from one eye to another, no more than five hundred years are required. Kujata stands on the back of the fish Bahamut; on the bull’s back is a great rock of ruby, on the rock an angel, and on the angel rests our earth. Under the fish is a mighty sea, under the sea a vast abyss of air, under the air fire, and under the fire a serpent so great that were it not for fear of Allah, this creature might swallow up all creation.
The Lamed Wufniks
There are on earth, and always were, thirty-six righteous men whose mission is to justify the world before God. They are the Lamed Wufniks. They do not know each other and are very poor. If a man comes to the knowledge that he is a Lamed Wufnik, he immediately dies and somebody else, perhaps in another part of the world, takes his place. Lamed Wufniks are, without knowing it, the secret pillars of the universe. Were it not for them, God would annihilate the whole of mankind. Unawares, they are our saviours.
This mystical belief of the Jews can be found in the works of Max Brod. Its remote origin may be the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, where we read this verse: ‘And the Lord said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.’
The Moslems have an analogous personage in the Kutb.
The Lamias
According to the Greeks and Romans, Lamias lived in Africa. From the waist up their form was that of a beautiful woman; from the waist down they were serpents. Many authorities thought of them as witches; others as evil monsters. They lacked the ability to speak, but they made a whistling sound which was musical, and in the spaces of the desert beguiled travelers in order to devour them. Their remote origin was divine, having sprung from one of the many loves of Zeus. In that section of his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that deals with the power of love, Robert Burton writes:
Philostratus, in his Fourth Book de vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius a young man 25 years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreoe and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she being fair and lovely would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a Philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, among other guests, came Apollonius, who by some probable conjectures found her out to be a serpent, a Lamia, and that all her furniture was like Tantalus’ gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusions. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece.
Shortly before his death, John Keats was moved by this reading of Burton to compose his extensive poem ’Lamia’.
Laudatores Temporis Acti
The seventeenth-century Portuguese sea captain, Luiz da Silveira, in his
De Gentibus et Moribus Asiae
(Lisbon, 1669) refers somewhat obliquely to an Eastern sect whether Indian or Chinese we are not told which he calls, using a Latin tag, Laudatories Temporis Acti. The good captain is no metaphysician or theologian, but he none the less makes clear the nature of time past as conceived by the Worshippers. The past to us is merely a section of time, or a series of sections that were once the present and that may now be approximately recalled by memory or by history. Both memory and history make these sections, of course, part of the present. To the Worshippers, the past is absolute; it never had a present, nor can it be remembered or even guessed at. Neither unity nor plurality can be ascribed to it, since these are attributes of the present. The same may be said of its denizens if the plural be allowed with respect to their colour, size, weight, shape, and so on. Nothing about the beings of this Once That Never Was can be either affirmed or denied.
Silveira remarks on the utter hopelessness of the sect; the Past, as such, could have no inkling of its being worshipped and could afford no help or comfort to its votaries. Had the captain given us the native name or some other clue about this curious community, further investigation would be easier. We know they had neither temples nor sacred books. Are there still any Worshippers or do they now, together with their dim belief, belong to the past?
The Lemures
The ancients supposed that men’s souls after death wandered all over the world and disturbed the peace of its inhabitants. The good spirits were called
Lares familiares
, and the evil ones were known by the name of Larvae, or Lemures. They terrified the good, and continually haunted the wicked and impious; and the Romans had the custom of celebrating festivals in their honour, called Lemuria, or Lemuralia, in the month of May. They were first instituted by Romulus to appease the ghost of his brother Remus, from whom they were called Remuria, and, by corruption, Lemuria. These solemnities continued three nights, during which the temples of the gods were shut and marriages were prohibited. It was usual for the people to throw black beans on the graves of the deceased, or to burn them, as the smell was supposed to be insupportable to them. They also muttered magical words, and, by beating kettles and drums, they believed that the ghosts would depart and no longer come to terrify their relations upon earth.
L
emprière
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Classical Dictionary