Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (78 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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Scylla
Before becoming a monster and then turned into rocks, Scylla was a nymph with whom Glaucus, one of the sea gods, had fallen in love. In order to win her, Glaucus sought the help of Circe whose knowledge of herbs and incantations was well known. But Circe became attached to Glaucus on sight, only she was unable to get him to forget Scylla, and so to punish her rival she poured the juice of poisonous herbs into the fountain where the nymph bathed. At this point, according to Ovid (
Metamorphoses
, XIV, 59-67):
Scylla comes and wades waist-deep into the water; when all at once she sees her loins disfigured with barking monster-shapes. And at the first, not believing that these are parts of her own body, she flees in fear and tries to drive away the boisterous, barking things. But what she flees she takes along with her; and, feeling for her thighs, her legs, her feet, she finds in place of these only gaping dogs’ heads, such as a Cerberus might have. She stands on ravening dogs, and her docked loins and her belly are enclosed in a circle of beastly forms.
She then found herself supported by twelve feet, and she had six heads, each with three rows of teeth. This metamorphosis so terrified her that she threw herself into the strait separating Italy and Sicily, where the gods changed her into rocks. During storms, sailors speak of the dreadful roaring of the breakers when driven into the uneven cavities of the rock.
This legend is also found in the pages of Homer and Pausanias.
The Sea Horse
Unlike most other imaginary animals, the Sea Horse is not a composite creature; it is no more than a wild horse whose dwelling place is the sea and who comes ashore only on moonless nights when the breezes bring him the smell of mares. On some undetermined island maybe Borneo the herders hobble the king’s finest mares along the coast and hide themselves underground. Here Sindbad saw the stallion that rose from the sea, watched it leap on to the female, and heard its cry.
The definitive edition of the
Book of a Thousand and One Nights
dates, according to Burton, from the thirteenth century; in this same century lived the cosmographer Zakariyya al-Qaswini who in his treatise
Wonders of Creation
wrote these words: ‘The sea horse is like the horse of dry land, but its mane and tail grow longer; its colour is more lustrous and its hooves are cleft like those of wild oxen, while its height is no less than the land horse’s and slightly larger than the ass’s.’ He remarks that a cross between the sea and land species produces a very beautiful breed, and singles out a certain dark pony ‘with white spots like pieces of silver’.
An eighteenth-century Chinese traveler, Wang Tai-hai, writes:
The sea horse usually appears along the coast in search of a mare; sometimes he is caught. His coat is black and shining, his tail is long and sweeps the ground. On dry land he goes like any other horse, is very tame, and in a day can travel hundreds of miles. But it is well not to bathe him in the river, for as soon as he sees water he recovers his ancient nature and swims off.
Ethnologists have looked for the origin of this Islamic fiction in the Greco-Roman fiction of the wind that makes mares fertile. In the third book of the Georgics, Virgil has set this belief to verse. Pliny’s explanation (VIII, 67) is more rigorous:
It is known that in Lusitania in the neighbourhood of Lisbon and along the Tagus, mares, when a west wind is blowing, stand facing towards it and conceive the breath of life; this produces a foal, and this is the way to breed a very swift colt, but it does not live more than three years. The historian Justinus ventures the guess that the hyperbole ‘sons of the wind’, applied to very fast horses, gave rise to this fable.
The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard
Along the banks of the Huisne, an otherwise peaceful stream, there roamed during the Middle Ages a creature that became known as the Shaggy Beast (
La velue
). This animal had somehow managed to survive the Flood despite its exclusion from the Ark. It was the size of a bull, and it had a snake’s head and a round body buried under long green fur. The fur was armed with stingers whose wound was deadly.
The creatures also had very broad hooves that were similar to the feet of the tortoise, and its tail, shaped like a serpent, could kill men and cattle alike. When its anger was aroused, the Shaggy Beast shot out flames that withered crops. At night it raided stables. Whenever the farmers attempted to hunt it down, it hid in the waters of the Huisne, causing the river to flood its banks and drown the valley for miles.
The Shaggy Beast had a taste for innocent creatures, and devoured maidens and children. It would choose the purest of young womanhood, some Little Lamb (
L’agnelle
). One day, it waylaid one such Little Lamb and dragged her, mauled and bloody, to its lair in the riverbed. The victim’s sweetheart tracked the monster, and with a sword sliced into the Shaggy Beast’s tail, its only vulnerable spot, and cut it in two. The creature died at once. It was embalmed and its death was celebrated with fifes and drums and dancing.
The Simurgh
The Simurgh is an immortal bird that nests in the branches of the Tree of Knowledge; Burton compares it with the eagle which, according to the Younger Edda, has knowledge of many things and makes its nest in the branches of the World Tree, Yggdrasil.
Both Southey’s Thalaba (1801) and Flaubert’s
Temptation of Saint Anthony
(1874) speak of the Simorg Anka; Flaubert reduces the bird’s status to that of an attendant to the Queen of Sheba, and describes it as having orange-coloured feathers like metallic scales, a small silver-coloured head with a human face, four wings, a vulture’s talons, and a long, long peacock’s tail. In the original sources the Simurgh is a far more important being. Firdausi in the
Book of Kings
, which compiles and sets to verse ancient Iranian legends, makes the bird the foster father of Zal, father of the poem’s hero; Farid al-Din Attar, in the twelfth century, makes it a symbol of the godhead. This takes place in the
Mantiq al-Tayr
(Parliament of Birds). The plot of this allegory, made up of some 4,500 couplets, is striking. The distant king of birds, the Simurgh, drops one of his splendid feathers somewhere in the middle of China; on learning of this, the other birds, tired of their present anarchy, decide to seek him. They know that the king’s name means ‘thirty birds’; they know that his castle lies in the Kaf, the mountain or range of mountains that ring the earth. At the outset, some of the birds lose heart: the nightingale pleads his love for the rose; the parrot pleads his beauty, for which he lives caged; the partridge cannot do without his home in the hills, nor the heron without his marsh, nor the owl without his ruins. But finally, certain of them set out on the perilous venture; they cross seven valleys or seas, the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last the name Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; the journey takes its toll among the rest. Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh, and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them.
Edward Fitzgerald translated portions of the poem under the playful title The Bird-parliament; A bird’s-eye view of Faríd-Uddín Attar’s Bird-parliament.
The cosmographer al-Qaswini, in his
Wonders of Creation
, states that the Simorg Anka lives for seventeen hundred years and that, upon the coming of age of its son, the father burns himself on a funeral pyre. ‘This,’ observes Lane, ‘reminds us of the phoenix.’