Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - the Giovanni Translations (And Others) by Jorge Luis Borges
Reality favors symmetries and slight anachronisms: Dahlmann had arrived at the sanitarium in a hackney coach and now a hackney coach was to take him to the Constitucion station. The first fresh tang of autumn, after the summer's oppressiveness, seemed like a symbol in nature of his rescue and release from fever and death. The city, at seven in the morning, had not lost that air of an old house lent it by the night; the streets seemed like long vestibules, the plazas were like patios. Dahlrnann recognized the city with joy on the edge of vertigo: a second before his eyes registered the phenomena themselves, he recalled the corners, the billboards, the modest variety of Buenos Aires. In the yellow light of the new day, all things returned to him.
Every Argentine knows that the South begins at the other side of Rivadavia. Dahlmann was in the habit of saying that this was no mere convention, that whoever crosses this street enters a more ancient and sterner world. From inside the carriage he sought out, among the new buildings, the iron grill window, the brass knocker, the arched door, the entrance way, the intimate patio.
At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.
Along the next to the last platform the train lay waiting. Dahlmann walked through the coaches until he found one almost empty. He arranged his baggage in the network rack. When the train started off, he took down his valise and extracted, after some hesitation, the first volume of The Thousand and One Nights. To travel with this book, which was so much a part of the history of his ill-fortune, was a kind of affirmation that his ill-fortune had been annulled; it was a joyous and secret defiance of the frustrated forces of evil.
Along both sides of the train the city dissipated into suburbs; this sight, and then a view of the gardens and villas, delayed the beginning of his reading. The truth was that Dahlmann read very little. The magnetized mountain and the genie who swore to kill his benefactor are — who would deny it? — marvelous, but not so much more than the morning itself and the mere fact of being. The joy of life distracted him from paying attention to Scheherezade and her superfluous miracles. Dahlmann closed his book and allowed himself to live.
Lunch — the bouillon served in shining metal bowls, as in the remote summers of childhood — was one more peaceful and rewarding delight.
Tomorrow I'll wake up at the ranch, he thought, and it was as if he was two men at a time: the man who traveled through the autumn day and across the geography of the fatherland, and the other one, locked up in a sanitarium and subject to methodical servitude. He saw unplastered brick houses, long and angled, timelessly watching the trains go by; he saw horsemen along the dirt roads; he saw gullies and lagoons and ranches; he saw great luminous clouds that resembled marble; and all these things were accidental, casual, like dreams of the plain. He also thought he recognized trees and crop fields; but he would not have been able to name them, for his actual knowledge of the countryside was quite inferior to his nostalgic and literary knowledge.
From time to time he slept, and his dreams were animated by the impetus of the train. The intolerable white sun of high noon had already become the yellow sun which precedes nightfall, and it would not be long before it would turn red. The railroad car was now also different; it was not the same as the one which had quit the station siding at Constitucion; the plain and the hours had transfigured it. Outside, the moving shadow of the railroad car stretched toward the horizon. The elemental earth was not perturbed either by settlements or other signs of humanity. The country was vast but at the same time intimate and, in some measure, secret. The limitless country sometimes contained only a solitary bull. The solitude was perfect, perhaps hostile, and it might have occurred to Dahlmann that he was traveling into the past and not merely south. He was distracted from these considerations by the railroad inspector who, on reading his ticket, advised him that the train would not let him off at the regular station but at another: an earlier stop, one scarcely known to Dahlmann. (The man added as explanation which Dahlmann did not attempt to understand, and which he hardly heard, for the mechanism of events did not concern him.)
The train laboriously ground to a halt, practically in the middle of the plain. The station lay on the other side of the tracks; it was not much more than a siding and a shed. There was no means of conveyance to be seen, but the station chief supposed that the traveler might secure a vehicle from a general store and inn to be found some ten or twelve blocks away.
Dahlmann accepted the walk as a small adventure. The sun had already disappeared from view, but a final splendor exalted the vivid and silent plain, before the night erased its color. Less to avoid fatigue than to draw out his enjoy meat of these sights, Dahlmann walked slowly, breathing in the odor of clover with sumptuous joy.
The general store at one time had been painted a deep scarlet, but the years had tempered this violent color for its own good. Something in its poor architecture recalled a steel engraving, perhaps one from an old edition of Paul et Virginie. A number of horses were hitched up to the paling. Once inside, Dahlmann thought he recognized the shopkeeper. Then he realized that he had been deceived by the man's resemblance to one of the male nurses in the sanitarium. When the shopkeeper heard Dahlmann's request, he said he would have the shay made up. In order to add one more event to that day and to kill time, Dahlmann decided to eat at the general store.
Some country louts, to whom Dahlmann did not at first pay any attention, were eating and drinking at one of the tables. On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence. He was dark, dried up, diminutive, and seemed outside time, situated in eternity. Dahlmann noted with satisfaction the kerchief, the thick poncho, the long chiripa, and the colt boots, and told himself, as he recalled futile discussions with people from the Northern counties or from the province of Entre Rios, that gauchos like this no longer existed outside the South.
Dahlmann sat down next to the window. The darkness began overcoming the plain, but the odor and sound of the earth penetrated the iron bars of the window. The shop owner brought him sardines, followed by some roast meat. Dahlmann washed the meal down with several glasses of red wine. Idling, he relished the tart savor of the wine, and let his gaze, now grown somewhat drowsy, wander over the shop. A kerosene lamp hung from a beam. There were three customers at the other table: two of them appeared to be farm workers; the third man, whose features hinted at Chinese blood, was drinking with his hat on. Of a sudden, Dahlmann felt something brush lightly against his face. Next to the heavy glass of turbid wine, upon one of the stripes in the table cloth, lay a spit ball of breadcrumb. That was all: but someone had thrown it there.
The men at the other table seemed totally cut off from him. Perplexed, Dahlmann decided that nothing had happened, and he opened the volume of The Thousand and One Nights, by way of suppressing reality. After a few moments another little ball landed on his table, and now the peones laughed outright. Dahlmann said to himself that he was not frightened, but he reasoned that it would be a major blunder if he, a convalescent, were to allow himself to be dragged by strangers into some chaotic quarrel. He determined to leave, and had already gotten to his feet when the owner came up and exhorted him in an alarmed voice:
"Senor Dahlmann, don't pay any attention to those lads; they're half high."
Dahlmann was not surprised to learn that the other man, now, knew his na
The tough with a Chinese look staggered heavily to his feet. Almost in Juan Dahlmann's face he shouted insults, as if he had been a long way off. His game was to exaggerate his drunkenness, and this extravagance constituted a ferocious mockery. Between curses and obscenities, he threw a long knife into the air, followed it with his eyes, caught and juggled it, and challenged Dahlmann to a knife fight. The owner objected in a tremulous voice, pointing out that Dahlmann was unarmed. At this point, something unforeseeable occurred.
From a corner of the room, the old ecstatic gaucho — in whom Dahlmann saw a summary and cipher of the South (his South) — threw him a naked dagger, which landed at his feet. It was as if the South had resolved that Dahlmann should accept the duel. Dahlmann bent over to pick up the dagger, and felt two things. The first, that this almost instinctive act bound him to fight. The second, that the weapon, in his torpid hand, was no defense at all, but would merely serve to justify his murder. He had once played with a poniard, like all men, but his idea of fencing and knife-play did not go further than the notion that all strokes should be directed upwards, with the cutting edge held inwards. They would not have allowed such things to happen to me in the sanitarium, he thought.
"Let's get on our way," said the other man.
They went out and if Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt.
Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann went out into the plain.
- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN
* * *
The Book of Imaginary Beings
Preface
Preface to the 1967 edition
Preface to the 1957 edition
A Bao A Qu
Abtu and Anet
The Amphisbaena
An Animal Imagined by Kafka
An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis
The Animal Imagined by Poe
Animals in the Form of Spheres
Antelopes with Six Legs
The Ass with Three Legs
Bahamut
Baldanders
The Banshee
The Barometz
The Basilisk
Behemoth
The Brownies
Burak
The Carbuncle
The Catoblepas
The Celestial Stag
The Centaur
Cerberus
The Cheshire Cat and the Kilkenny Cats
The Chimera
The Chinese Dragon
The Chinese Fox
The Chinese Phoenix
Chronos or Hercules
A Creature Imagined by C. S. Lewis
The Crocotta and the Leucrocotta
A Crossbreed
The Double
The Eastern Dragon
The Eater of the Dead
The Eight-Forked Serpent
The Elephant That Foretold the Birth of the Buddha
The Eloi and the Morlocks
The Elves
An Experimental Account of What Was Known, Seen, and Met by Mrs. Jane Lead in London in 1694
The Fairies
Fastitocalon
Fauna of Chile
Fauna of China
Fauna of Mirrors
Fauna of the United States
Garuda
The Gnomes
The Golem
The Griffon
Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel
Haokah, the Thunder God
Harpies
The Heavenly Cock
The Hippogriff
Hochigan
Humbaba
The Hundred-Heads
The Hydra of Lerna
Ichthyocentaurs
Jewish Demons
The Jinn
The Kami
A King of Fire and His Steed
The Kraken
Kujata
The Lamed Wufniks
The Lamias
Laudatores Temporis Acti
The Lemures
The Leveller
Lilith
The Lunar Hare
The Mandrake
The Manticore
The Mermecolion
The Minotaur
The Monkey of the Inkpot
The Monster Acheron
The Mother of Tortoises
The Nagas
The Nasnas
The Norns
The Nymphs
The Odradek
An Offspring of Leviathan
One-Eyed Beings
The Panther
The Pelican
The Peryton
The Phoenix
The Pygmies
The Rain Bird
The Remora
The Rukh
The Salamander
The Satyrs
Scylla
The Sea Horse
The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard
The Simurgh
Sirens
The Sow Harnessed with Chains and Other Argentine Fauna
The Sphinx
The Squonk
Swedenborg’s Angels
Swedenborg’s Devils
The Sylphs
Talos
The T’ao T’ieh
Thermal Beings
The Tigers of Annam
The Trolls
Two Metaphysical Beings
The Unicorn
The Unicorn of China
The Uroboros
The Valkyries
The Western Dragon
Youwarkee
The Zaratan
Preface
As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition. The compilation and translation of this volume have given us a great deal of such pleasure; we hope the reader will share something of the fun we felt when ransacking the bookshelves of our friends and the mazelike vaults of the Biblioteca Nacional in search of old authors and abstruse references. We have done our best to trace all our quoted material back to original sources and to translate it from the original tongues medieval Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Lemprière and the Loeb and Bohn collections have, as is their wont, proved most helpful with the classics. As for our invincible ignorance of Eastern languages, it enables us to be grateful for the labours of such men as Giles, Burton, Lane, Waley, and Scholem. The first edition of this book, containing eighty-two pieces, was published in Mexico in 1957. It was called then Manual de zoología fantástica (Handbook of Fantastic Zoology). In 1967, a second edition El libro de los seres imaginarios was published in Buenos Aires with thirty-four additional articles. Now, for this English-language edition, we have altered a good number of the original articles, correcting, adding, or revising material, and we have also compiled a few brand-new ones. This latest edition contains 120 pieces. We extend warm thanks for their help to Marian Skedgell, of E. P. Dutton, and to José Edmundo Clemente, Assistant Director of the Argentine National Library.
Buenos Aires, 23 May 1969
j. l. b.
n. t. di g.
Preface to the 1967 Edition
The title of this book would justify the inclusion of Prince Hamlet, of the point, of the line, of the surface, of n-dimensional hyperplanes and hypervolumes, of all generic terms, and perhaps of each one of us and of t
Martínez, September 1967
j.l.b.
m.g.
Preface to the 1957 Edition
A small child is taken to the zoo for the first time. This child may be any one of us or, to put it another way, we have been this child and have forgotten about it. In these grounds these terrible grounds the child sees living animals he has never before glimpsed; he sees jaguars, vultures, bison, and what is still stranger giraffes. He sees for the first time the bewildering variety of the animal kingdom, and this spectacle, which might alarm or frighten him, he enjoys. He enjoys it so much that going to the zoo is one of the pleasures of childhood, or is thought to be such. How can we explain this everyday and yet mysterious event?