Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (76 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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The Phoenix
In monumental effigies, in pyramids of stone, and in treasured mummies, the Egyptians sought eternity. It is therefore appropriate that their country should have given rise to the myth of a cyclical and deathless bird, though its subsequent elaboration is the work of Greece and of Rome. Adolf Erman writes that in the mythology of Heliopolis, the Phoenix (
benu
) is the lord of jubilees or of long cycles of time. Herodotus, in a famous passage (II, 73), tells with insistent scepticism an early form of the legend:
Another bird also is sacred; it is called the phoenix. I myself have never seen it, but only pictures of it; for the bird comes but seldom into Egypt, once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and bigness. The Egyptians tell a tale of this bird’s devices which I do not believe. He comes, they say, from Arabia bringing his father to the Sun’s temple enclosed in myrrh, and there buries him. His manner of bringing is this: first he moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, and when he has proved its weight by lifting it he then hollows out the egg and puts his father in it, covering over with more myrrh the hollow in which the body lies; so the egg being with his father in it of the same weight as before, the phoenix, after enclosing him, carries him to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. Such is the tale of what is done by this bird.
Some five hundred years later, Tacitus and Pliny took up the wondrous tale; the former justly observed that all antiquity is obscure, but that a tradition has fixed the intervals of the Phoenix’s visits at 1,461 years (Annals, VI, 28). The latter also looked into the Phoenix’s chronology; Pliny records (X, 2) that, according to Manilius, the bird’s life coincides with the period of the Platonic year, or Great Year. A Platonic year is the time required by the sun, the moon, and the five planets to return to their initial position; Tacitus in his
Dialogus de Oratoribus
gives this as 12,994 common years. The ancients believed that, upon fulfilment of this vast astronomical cycle, the history of the world would repeat itself in all its details under the repeated influence of the planets; the Phoenix would be a mirror or an image of this process. For a closer analogy between the cosmos and the Phoenix, it should be recalled that, according to the Stoics, the universe dies in fire and is reborn in fire and that the cycle had no beginning and will have no end.
Time simplified the method of the Phoenix’s generation.
Herodotus speaks of an egg and Pliny of a maggot, but the poet Claudian at the end of the fourth century already celebrates an immortal bird that rises out of its own ashes, an heir to itself and a witness of the ages.
Few myths have been as widespread as that of the Phoenix. In addition to the authors already cited, we may add: Ovid (
Metamorphoses
, XV), Dante (
Inferno
, XXIV), Pellicer (
The Phoenix and its Natural History
), Quevedo (
Spanish Parnassus
, VI), and Milton (
Samson Agonistes
, in fine). Shakespeare at the close of
Henry VIII
(V, iv) wrote these fine verses:
But as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir,
As great in admiration as herself . . .
We may also mention the Latin poem ‘De Arte Phoenice’, which has been attributed to Lactantius, and an Anglo-Saxon imitation of it dating from the eighth century. Tertulius, St Ambrose, and Cyrillus of Jerusalem have used the Phoenix as a proof of the resurrection of the flesh. Pliny pokes fun at the physicians who prescribe pills compounded of the nest and ashes of the Phoenix.
The Pygmies
In the knowledge of the ancients, this nation of dwarfs measuring twenty-seven inches in height dwelled in the mountains beyond the utmost limits of India or of Ethiopia. Pliny states that they built their cabins of mud mixed with feathers and eggshells. Aristotle allots them underground dens. For the harvest of wheat they wielded axes, as though they were out to chop down a forest. Each year they were attacked by flocks of cranes whose home lay on the Russian steppe. Riding rams and goats, the Pygmies retaliated by destroying the eggs and nests of their foes. These expeditions of war kept them busy for the space of three months out of every twelve.
Pygmy was also the name of a Carthaginian god whose face was carved as a figurehead on warships in order to spread terror among the enemy.
The Rain Bird
When rain is needed, Chinese farmers have at their disposal besides the dragon the bird called the shang yang. It has only one leg. Long ago, children hopped up and down on one foot, wrinkling their brows and repeating: ‘It will thunder, it will rain, ’cause the shang yang’s here again!’ The tradition runs that the bird drew water from the rivers with its beak and blew it out as rain on the thirsting fields.
An ancient wizard had tamed it and used to carry it perched on his sleeve. Historians tell us that it once paraded back and forth before the throne of the Prince of Ch’i, hopping about and flapping its wings. The Prince, greatly taken aback, sent his chief minister to the Court of Lu to consult Confucius. The Sage foretold that the shang yang would cause the whole countryside and near-by regions to be flooded unless dikes and channels were built at once. The Prince was not deaf to the Sage’s warning, and so in his domain countless damage and disaster were avoided.
The Remora
Remora, in Latin, means ‘delay’ or ‘hindrance’. This is the strict meaning of the word which was figuratively applied to the Echeneis, a genus of sucking fishes credited with the power of holding a ship fast by clinging to it. The Remora is a fish of an ashen hue; on the top of its head it has a cartilaginous disc with which it creates a vacuum that enables it to cling to other underwater creatures. Here is Pliny’s acclamation of its powers (IX, 41):
There is a quite small fish that frequents rocks, called the sucking-fish. This is believed to make ships go more slowly by sticking to their hulls, from which it has received its name; and for this reason it also has an evil reputation for supplying a love-charm and for acting as a spell to hinder litigation in the courts, which accusations it counterbalances only by its laudable property of stopping fluxes of the womb in pregnant women and holding back the offspring till the time of birth. It is not included however among articles of diet. It is thought by some to have feet, but Aristotle denies this, adding that its limbs resemble wings.
(Pliny then goes on to describe the murex, a variety of purple fish also credited with bringing ships under full sail to a standstill: ‘. . . it is a foot long and four inches wide, and hinders ships, and moreover . . . when preserved in salt it has the power of drawing out gold that has fallen into the deepest wells when it is brought near them.’)
It is remarkable how from the idea of delaying ships the Remora came to be associated with delays in lawsuits and later with delayed births. Elsewhere, Pliny tells that a Remora decided the fate of the Roman Empire in the Battle of Actium, detaining the galley in which Mark Antony was reviewing his fleet, and that another Remora stopped Caligula’s ship despite the efforts of its four hundred oarsmen.
‘Winds blow and storms rage,’ exclaims Pliny, ‘but the Remora overmasters their fury and holds ships fast, achieving what the heaviest of anchors and the thickest of hawsers could never achieve.’
‘The mightiest power does not always prevail. A ship may be detained by a small remora,’ repeats the fine Spanish writer Diego de Saavedra Fajardo in his
Political Emblems
(1640).