Jorge Luis Borges
With Magarita Guerrero
The Book of Imaginary Beings
Revised, enlarged and translated by
Norman Thomas di Giovanni
in collaboration with the author
Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia
El libro de los seres imaginarios
First published in Buenos Aires 1967
Translation published in the U.S.A. 1969
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1970
Published in Penguin Books 1974
Copyright © Editorial Kier, S.A., Buenos Aires, 1967
Translation copyright © Jorge Luis Borges and
Norman Thomas di Giovanni, 1969
Assistance for the translation was given by the Center
for Inter-American Relations
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd, London, Reading and Fakenham
Set in Linotype Pilgrim
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following material:
‘An Animal Imagined by Kafka’, reprinted by permission of Schocken Books Inc., from Dearest Father by Franz Kafka, © 1954 by Schocken Books Inc.
‘An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis’ and ‘A Creature Imagined by C. S. Lewis’, reprinted by permission of C. S. Lewis, from Perelandra, © 1947 by C. S. Lewis. Published by The Macmillan Company, New York, and The Bodley Head, London.
‘A Crossbreed’, reprinted by permission of Shocken Books Inc., from Description of a Struggle by Franz Kafka, © 1946, 1958 by Schocken Books Inc.
‘The Odradek’, reprinted by permission of Schocken Books Inc., from The Penal Colony by Franz Kafka,
© 1948 by Schocken Books Inc.
The following pieces first appeared in the New Yorker, October 4th, 1969: ‘A Bao A Qu’, ‘The Barometz’, ‘The Celestial Stag’, ‘The Chinese Dragon’, ‘The Elves’, ‘Fauna of Mirrors’, ‘Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel’, ‘The Hundred-Heads’, ‘The Leveler’, ‘The Lunar Hare.’ ‘The Nymphs’, ‘The Pygmies’, ‘The Rain Bird’, ‘The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard’, ‘The Sphinx’, ‘Swedenborg’s Angels’, ‘Swedenborg’s Devils’, ‘Thermal Beings’, ‘Two Metaphysical Beings’, ‘The Western Dragon’.
Contents
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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
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 edi
tion, 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.
j. l. b. n. t. di g.
Buenos Aires, 23 May 1969
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 the godhead. In brief, the sum of all things—the universe. We have limited ourselves, however, to what is immediately suggested by the words ‘imaginary beings’; we have compiled a handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination.
We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.
A book of this kind is unavoidably incomplete; each new edition forms the basis of future editions, which themselves may grow on endlessly.
We invite the eventual reader in Colombia or Paraguay to send us the names, accurate description, and most conspicuous traits of their local monsters.
As with all miscellanies, as with the inexhaustible volumes of Robert Burton, of Frazer, or of Pliny, The Book of Imaginary Beings is not meant to be read straight through; rather, we should like the reader to dip into these pages at random, just as one plays with the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope.
The sources of this collection are manifold; they are re-corded in each piece. May we be forgiven any accidental omission.
j. l. b. m.g.
Martínez, September 1967
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?
We can, of course, deny it. We can suppose that children suddenly rushed off to the zoo will become, in due time, neurotic, and the truth is there can hardly be a child who has not visited the zoo and there is hardly a grown-up who is not a neurotic. It may be stated that all children, by definition, are explorers, and that to discover the camel is in itself no stranger than to discover a mirror or water or a staircase. It can also be stated that the child trusts his parents, who take him to this place full of animals. Besides, his toy tiger and the pictures of tigers in the encyclopedia have somehow taught him to look at the flesh-and-bone tiger without fear. Plato (if he were invited to join in this discussion) would tell us that the child had already seen the tiger in a primal world of archetypes, and that now on seeing the tiger he recognizes it. Schopenhauer (even more wondrously) would tell us that the child looks at the tigers without fear because he is aware that he is the tigers and the tigers are him or, more accurately, that both he and the tigers are but forms of that single essence, the Will.
Let us pass now from the zoo of reality to the zoo of mythologies, to the zoo whose denizens are not lions but sphinxes and griffons and centaurs. The population of this second zoo should exceed by far the population of the first, since a monster is no more than a combination of parts of real beings, and the possibilities of permutation border on the infinite. In the centaur, the horse and man are blended; in the Minotaur, the bull and man (Dante imagined it as having the face of a man and the body of a bull); and in this way it seems we could evolve an endless variety of monsters—combinations of fishes, birds, and reptiles, limited only by our own boredom or disgust. This, however, does not happen; our monsters would be stillborn, thank God. Flaubert had rounded up, in the last pages of his Temptation of Saint Anthony, a number of medieval and classical monsters and has tried so say his commentators to concoct a few new ones; his sum total is hardly impressive, and but few of them really stir our imaginations. Anyone looking into the pages of the present handbook will soon find out that the zoology of dreams is far poorer than the zoology of the Maker.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distinct places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one, such as the three-headed chimera or the catoblepas. Of course, we are fully aware that this book, perhaps the first of its kind, does not exhaust the sum total of imaginary animals. We have delved into classical and Oriental literatures, but we feel that our subject goes on for ever.
We have deliberately excluded the many legends of men taking the shapes of animals: the lobisón, the werewolf, and so on.
We wish to acknowledge the help given us by Leonor Guerrero de Coppola, Alberto D’Aversa, and Rafael López Pellegri.
j.l.b. m.g.
Martínez, 29 January 1957
A Bao A Qu
If you want to look out over the loveliest landscape in the world, you must climb to the top of the Tower of Victory in Chitor. There, standing on a circular terrace, one has a sweep of the whole horizon. A winding stairway gives access to this terrace, but only those who do not believe in the legend dare climb up. The tale runs:
On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow. At the same time, its body and almost translucent skin begin to stir. But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor’s heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most worn by the generations of pilgrims. At each level the creature’s colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralysed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant. The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk. Its span of life is brief, since as soon as the traveler climbs down, the A Bao A Qu wheels and tumbles to the first steps, where, worn out and almost shapeless, it waits for the next visitor. People say that its tentacles are visible only when it reaches the middle of the staircase. It is also said that it can see with its whole body and that to the touch it is like the skin of a peach.
In the course of centuries, the A Bao A Qu has reached the terrace only once.
This legend is recorded by C. C. Iturvuru in an appendix to his now classic treatise On Malay Witchcraft (1937).
Abtu and Anet
As all Egyptians knew, Abtu and Anet were two life-sized fishes, identical and holy, that swam on the lookout for danger before the prow of the sun god’s ship. Their course was endless; by day the craft sailed the sky from east to west, from dawn to dusk, and by night made its way underground in the opposite direction.
The Amphisbaena
The Pharsalia (IX, 701-28) catalogues the real or imaginary
reptiles that Cato’s soldiers met up with on their scorching march across the African desert. Among them are the Pareas, ‘content with its tail to cleave its track’ (or as a seventeenth-century Spanish poet has it, ‘which makes its way, erect as a staff’), and the Jaculi, which darts from trees like javelins, and ‘the dangerous Amphisbaena, also, that moves on at both of its heads.’ Pliny uses nearly the same words to describe the Amphisbaena, adding: ‘as though one mouth were not enough for the discharge of all its venom.’
Brunetto Latini’s Tesoro—the encyclopedia which Latini recommended to his old disciple in the seventh circle of Hell—is less terse and clearer: ‘The Amphisbaena is a serpent having two heads, the one in its proper place and the other in its tail; and it can bite with both, and run with agility, and its eyes glare like candles.’ Sir Thomas Browne in his Vulgar Errors (1646) wrote that there is no species without a bottom, top, front, back, left, and right, and he denied the existence of the Amphisbaena, ‘for the senses being placed at both extreams, doth make both ends anterior, which is impossible . . . And therefore this duplicity was ill contrived to place one head at both extreams . . .’ Amphisbaena, in Greek means ‘goes both ways.’ In the Antilles and in certain parts of America, the name is given to a reptile commonly known as the doble andadora (Both ways goer), the ‘two-headed snake,’ and ‘mother of ants.’ It is said that ants nourish it. Also that if it is chopped in half, its two parts will join again.
The Amphisbaena’s medicinal properties were celebrated by Pliny.