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 Unicorn of China
The Chinese Unicorn, the
k’i-lin
, is one of the four animals of good omen; the others are the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise. The Unicorn is foremost of all the 360 creatures that live on land. It has the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and the hooves of a horse. Its short horn, which grows out of its forehead, is made of flesh; its coat, on its back, is of five mixed colours, while its belly is brown or yellow. It is so gentle that when it walks it is careful not to tread on the tiniest living creature and will not even eat live grass but only what is dead. Its appearance foretells the birth of an upright ruler. To wound the Chinese Unicorn or to come across its dead body is unlucky. The span of this animal’s natural life is a thousand years.
When Confucius’ mother bore him in her womb, the spirits of the five planets brought her an animal ‘having the shape of a cow, scales of a dragon, and a horn on its forehead’. This is the way Soothill reports the annunciation; a variant of this given by Wilhelm tells that the animal appeared on its own and spat out a jade tablet on which these words were read:
Son of mountain crystal [or of the essence of water], when the dynasty crumbles, thou shalt rule as a throneless king. Seventy years later, some hunters killed a k’i-lin which still had a bit of ribbon around its horn that Confucius’ mother had tied there. Confucius went to look at the Unicorn and wept because he felt what the death of this innocent and mysterious animal foretold, and because in that ribbon lay his past.
In the thirteenth century, a scouting expedition of the Emperor Genghis Khan, who had undertaken the invasion of India, met a creature in the desert ‘like a deer, with a head like that of a horse, one horn on its forehead, and green hair on its body’, which addressed them, saying, ‘It is time for your master to return to his own land.’ One of Genghis’ Chinese ministers, upon consultation, explained to him that the animal was a chio-tuan, a variety of the k’i-lin. ‘For four years the great army has been warring in western regions,’ he said. ‘Heaven, which has a horror of bloodshed, gives warning through the Chio-tuan. Spare the Empire for Heaven’s sake; moderation will give boundless pleasure.’ The Emperor desisted in his war plans.
Twenty-two centuries before the Christian era, one of the judges of the Emperor Shun was in possession of a ‘onehorned goat’ which refused to attack the wrongly accused but would butt the guilty.
Margoulies’
Anthologie raisonné de la littérature chinoise
(1948) includes this mysterious, soft-spoken allegory, the work of a ninth-century writer of prose:
It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable. Even village women and children know that the unicorn is a lucky sign. But this animal does not figure among the barnyard animals, it is not always easy to come across, it does not lend itself to zoological classification. Nor is it like the horse or bull, the wolf or deer. In such circumstances we may be face to face with a unicorn and not know for sure that we are. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse and that a certain animal with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn looks like.
The Uroboros
To us the ocean is a sea or a system of seas; to the Greeks it was a simple circular river that ringed the land mass. All streams flowed from it and it had neither outlets nor sources. It was also a god or a Titan, perhaps the most ancient of all Titans, since Sleep in Book XIV of the
Iliad
calls it the source from whom the gods are sprung. In Hesiod’s
Theogony
, it is the father of all the world’s rivers three thousand in number the leading of which are the Alpheus and the Nile. An old man with a flowing beard was the usual personification of the river-ocean; after centuries men found a better symbol.
Heraclitus had said that in the circumference the beginning and the end are a single point. A third-century Greek amulet, preserved in the British Museum, gives us the image which best illustrates this endlessness: the serpent that bites its own tail or, as the Argentine poet Martínez Estrada so beautifully put it, ‘that begins at the end of its tail’. A story runs that Mary Queen of Scots had engraved on a gold ring the inscription ‘In my end is my beginning,’ meaning perhaps that real life begins after death. Uroboros (Greek for ‘the one that devours its tail’) is the learned name of this creature which became the symbol adopted by alchemists in the Middle Ages. The curious may read further in Jung’s study
Psychologie und Alchemie
.
A world-circling serpent is also found in Norse cosmology; it is called the Miogarosormr literally, the middle-yard’sworm, middle-yard standing for the earth. In the Younger Edda, Snorri Sturluson recorded that Loki fathered a wolf and a serpent. An oracle warned the gods that these creatures would be the earth’s downfall. The wolf, Fenrir, was kept on a cord woven of six imaginary things: ‘the noise of a cat’s footfall, the beards of women, the roots of stones, the sinews of bears, the breath of fish, and the spittle of birds.’ The serpent, Jormungard, ‘was thrown into the sea surrounding the land and there it has grown so large that now it too surrounds the earth and bites its own tail.’
In Jotunnheim, the land of giants, Utgard-Loki challenges the god Thor to pick up a cat; Thor, using all his strength, barely manages to lift one of the cat’s paws off the ground. The cat is really the serpent. Thor has been tricked by magic.
At the Twilight of the Gods the serpent will devour the earth and the wolf the sun.
The Valkyries
Valkyrie means, in early German languages, the ‘chooser of the slain’. We do not know how the people of Germany and of Austria imagined them; in Norse mythology they are lovely maidens who bear weapons. Their usual number was three, though in the Eddas the names of more than a dozen are given.
In popular myth they took the souls of those slain in battle and brought them to Odin’s epic paradise. There, in the Hall of the Slain, Valhalla, whose ceiling was of gold and was lighted by drawn swords and not lamps, the warriors battled from daybreak to sunset. Then those of them who had been killed were brought back to life, and all shared a divine feast in which they were served the meat of an immortal wild boar and inexhaustible hornfuls of mead. This idea of an endless battle seems to be Celtic in origin.
An Anglo-Saxon charm against the pain of sudden stitches describes the Valkyries without naming them; the lines, as translated by Stopford A. Brooke, run this way:
Loud were they, lo! loud, as over the land they rode; Fierce of heart were they, as over the hill they rode! For the mighty maidens have mustered up their strength . . .
Under the spreading influence of Christianity, the name Valkyrie degenerated; in medieval England a judge had burned at the stake an unlucky woman charged with being a Valkyrie, that is to say, a witch.
The Western Dragon
A tall-standing, heavy serpent with claws and wings is perhaps the description that best fits the Dragon. It may be black, but it is essential that it also be shining; equally essential is that it belch forth fire and smoke. The above description refers, of course, to its present image; the Greeks seem to have applied the name Dragon to any considerable reptile. Pliny informs us that in summer the Dragon craves elephant blood, which is notably cool. It will make a sudden foray on the elephant, coil round it, and plunge its teeth into it. The bloodless elephant rolls on the ground and dies; so does the Dragon, crushed under the weight of its victim. We also read that Ethiopian Dragons, in search of better pasturage, regularly cross the Red Sea and migrate to Arabia. To accomplish this, four or five Dragons coil together and form a kind of craft, with their heads lifted out of the water. In Pliny there is also a chapter devoted to remedies derived from the Dragon. Here we read that its eyes, dried and then stirred with honey, make a liniment that is effective against nightmares. The fat of the Dragon’s heart stored in the hide of a gazelle and tied to the arm with the sinews of a stag assures success in litigation; Dragon teeth, also bound to the body, ensure the indulgence of masters and the mercy of kings. With some scepticism Pliny cites a preparation that renders men invincible. It is concocted of the skin of a lion, a lion’s marrow, the froth of a horse which has just won a race, the nails of a dog, and the tail and head of a Dragon.
In the eleventh book of the
Iliad
we read that there was a blue three-headed Dragon on Agamemnon’s shield; centuries later Norse pirates painted Dragons on their shields and carved Dragon heads on the prows of their long ships. Among the Romans, the Dragon was the insignia of the cohort, as the eagle was of the legion; this is the origin of present-day dragoons. On the standards of the Saxon kings of England there were Dragons; the object of such images was to impart fear to enemy ranks. In the ballad of Athis, we read:
Ce souloient Romains porter, Ce nous fait moult à redouter. [This was what the Romans used to bear, this which makes us so feared.]
In the West, the Dragon was always thought of as evil. One of the stock exploits of heroes (Hercules, Sigurd, St Michael, St George) was to overcome and slay a Dragon. In Germanic myth, the Dragon kept watch over precious objects. And so in Beowulf, written in England in the seventh or eighth century, there is a Dragon that stands guard over a treasure for some three hundred years. A runaway slave hides in its lair and steals a cup. On waking, the Dragon notices the theft and resolves to kill the thief, but every once in a while goes back inside to make sure the cup has not been merely mislaid. (How strange of the poet to attribute to his monster so human a misgiving.) The Dragon begins to ravage the kingdom; Beowulf searches it out, grapples with it, and kills it, dying himself soon after from a mortal wound inflicted by the Dragon’s tusks. People believed in the reality of the Dragon. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the Dragon is recorded in Conrad Gesner’s
Historia Animalium
, a work of a scientific nature.
Time has notably worn away the Dragon’s prestige. We believe in the lion as reality and symbol; we believe in the Minotaur as symbol but no longer as reality. The Dragon is perhaps the best known but also the least fortunate of fantastic animals. It seems childish to us and usually spoils the stories in which it appears. It is worth remembering, however, that we are dealing with a modern prejudice, due perhaps to a surfeit of Dragons in fairy tales. In the Revelations, St John speaks twice of the Dragon, ‘that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan . . .’ In the same spirit, St Augustine writes that the Devil ‘is lion and dragon; lion for its rage, dragon for its cunning’. Jung observes that in the Dragon are the reptile and the bird the elements of earth and of air.