Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (73 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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The Mermecolion
The Mermecolion is an inconceivable animal defined by Flaubert in this way: ‘lion in its foreparts, ant in its hindparts, with the organs of its sex the wrong way’. The history of this monster is also strange. In the Scriptures (Job IV: II) we read: ‘The old lion perisheth for lack of prey.’ The Hebrew text has layish for lion; this word, an uncommon one for the lion, seems to have produced an equally uncommon translation. The Septuagint version, harking back to an Arabian lion that Aelian and Strabo call myrmex, forged the word Mermecolion. After centuries, the origin of this was forgotten. Myrmex, in Greek, means ant; out of the puzzling words The ant-lion perisheth for lack of prey’ grew a fantasy (translated below by T. H. White) that medieval bestiaries succeeded in multiplying:
The Physiologus said: It had the face (or fore-part) of a lion and the hinder parts of an ant. Its father eats flesh, but its mother grains. If then they engender the ant-lion, they engender a thing of two natures, such that it cannot eat flesh because of the nature of its mother, nor grains because of the nature of its father. It perishes, therefore, because it has no nutriment.
The Minotaur
The idea of a house built so that people could become lost in it is perhaps more unusual than that of a man with a bull’s head, but both ideas go well together and the image of the labyrinth fits with the image of the Minotaur. It is equally fitting that in the centre of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant.
The Minotaur, half bull and half man, was born of the furious passion of Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, for a white bull that Neptune brought out of the sea. Daedalus, who invented the artifice that carried the Queen’s unnatural desires to gratification, built the labyrinth destined to confine and keep hidden her monstrous son. The Minotaur fed on human flesh and for its nourishment the King of Crete imposed on the city of Athens a yearly tribute of seven young men and seven maidens. Theseus resolved to deliver his country from this burden when it fell to his lot to be sacrificed to the Minotaur’s hunger. Ariadne, the King’s daughter, gave him a thread so that he could trace his way out of the windings of the labyrinth’s corridors; the hero killed the Minotaur and was able to escape from the maze.
Ovid in a line that is meant to be clever speaks of the Semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem (‘the man half bull, the bull half man’). Dante, who was familiar with the writings of the ancients but not with their coins or monuments, imagined the Minotaur with a man’s head and a bull’s body (Inferno, XII, 1-30).
The worship of the bull and of the two-headed axe (whose name was labrys and may have been at the root of the word labyrinth) was typical of pre-Hellenic religions, which held sacred bullfights. Human forms with bull heads figured, to judge by wall paintings, in the demonology of Crete. Most likely the Greek fable of the Minotaur is a late and clumsy version of far older myths, the shadow of other dreams still more full of horror.
The Monkey of the Inkpot
This animal, common in the north, is four or five inches long; its eyes are scarlet and its fur is jet black, silky, and soft as a pillow. It is marked by a curious instinct the taste for India ink. When a person sits down to write, the monkey squats cross-legged near by with one forepaw folded over the other, waiting until the task is over. Then it drinks what is left of the ink, and afterwards sits back on its haunches, quiet and satisfied.
W
ang
T
ai
-
hai
(1791)
The Monster Acheron
Only one person, one time, ever saw the monster Acheron; this took place in the twelfth century in the Irish town of Cork. The original version of the story, written in Gaelic, is now lost, but a Benedictine monk from Regensburg (Ratisbon) translated it into Latin, and from this translation the tale passed into a number of languages, among them Swedish and Spanish. Of the Latin version there are some fifty-odd manuscripts extant, agreeing in all the essentials. Visio Tundali (Tundal’s Vision) is the story’s name, and it has been considered one of the sources of Dante’s poem. Let us begin with the word ‘Acheron’. In the tenth book of the
Odyssey
it is one of the rivers of hell, flowing somewhere on the western borders of the inhabited world. Its name is reechoed in the
Aeneid
, in Lucan’s
Pharsalia
, and in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
. Dante engraves it in a line:
Su la trista riviera d’Acheronte
(‘On the sad shores of the Acheron’).
In one myth, Acheron is a Titan suffering punishment; in another, dating earlier, he is placed close to the South Pole, below the constellations of the antipodes. The Etruscans had ‘books of fate’ that taught divination and ‘books of Acheron’ that taught the ways of the soul after bodily death. In time, Acheron came to stand for hell.
Tundal was an Irish gentleman, well-mannered and brave, but of hardly irreproachable habits. He once fell ill while at the home of a lady friend, and for three days and nights was taken for dead, except for a bit of warmth in his heart. When he recovered his senses, he told that his guardian angel had shown him the lands beyond this world. Of the many wonders he saw, the one which interests us here is the monster Acheron. He is bigger than any mountain. His eyes flame and his mouth is so large that nine thousand persons could fit in it. Two damned men, like pillars or atlantes, prop it open; one stands on his feet, the other on his head. Three throats lead inside and belch undying fire. From deep in the beast’s belly comes the continuous wailing of the countless lost souls who are being devoured. Devils tell Tundal that the monster is called Acheron. His guardian angel deserts him, and Tundal is swept inside with the others. There he finds himself in the midst of tears, darkness, gnashing teeth, fire, unbearable burning, icy cold, dogs, bears, lions, and snakes. In this legend, hell is a beast with other beasts inside it.
In 1758, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote: ‘It has not been granted me to perceive Hell’s general shape, but I have been told that in the same way that Heaven has a human shape. Hell has the shape of a devil.’
The Mother of Tortoises
Twenty-two centuries before the Christian era, the good emperor Yü the Great travelled and measured with his steps the Nine Mountains, the Nine Rivers, and the Nine Marshes, and divided the land into Nine Provinces fit for virtue and agriculture. In this way he held back the Waters that threatened to flood Heaven and Earth, and left us this account of his
Public Works
(Legge’s translation):
I mounted my four conveyances (carts, boats, sledges, and spiked shoes), and all along the hills hewed down the woods, at the same time, along with Yi, showing the multitudes how to get flesh to eat. I opened passages for the streams throughout the nine provinces, and conducted them to the sea. I deepened the channels and canals, and conducted them to the streams, at the same time, along with Chi, sowing grain, and showing the multitudes how to procure the food of toil in addition to flesh meat.
Historians tell that the manner in which he divided his territory was revealed to him by a supernatural or sacred Tortoise that arose from the bed of a river. There are those who claim that this amphibious creature, the mother of all Tortoises, was made of water and fire; others attribute a less common substance to it: starlight of the constellation Sagittarius. On the Tortoise’s shell could be read a cosmic treatise called the Hong Fan (Universal Rule), or a diagram made of black and white dots of the Nine Subdivisions of that treatise.
To the Chinese, the heavens are hemispherical and the earth quadrangular, and so, in the Tortoise with its curved upper shell and flat lower shell, they find an image or model of the world. Moreover, Tortoises share in cosmic longevity; it is therefore fitting that they should be included among the spiritually endowed creatures (together with the unicorn, the dragon, the phoenix, and the tiger) and that soothsayers read the future in the pattern of their shells.
Than-Qui (Tortoise-Spirit) is the name of the creature that revealed the Hong Fan to the emperor.