Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (79 page)

Sirens

Through the course of time the image of the Sirens has changed. Their first historian, Homer, in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, does not tell us what they were like; to Ovid, they are birds of reddish plumage with the faces of young girls; to Apollonius of Rhodes, in the upper part of the body they are women and in the lower part seabirds; to the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina (and to heraldry), ‘half woman, half fish’. No less debatable is their nature. In his classical dictionary Lemprière calls them nymphs; in Quicherat’s they are monsters, and in Grimal’s they are demons. They inhabit a western island, close to Circe’s, but the dead body of one of them, Parthenope, was found washed ashore in Campania and gave her name to the famed city now called Naples. Strabo, the geographer, saw her grave and witnessed the games held periodically in her memory.

The Odyssey tells that the Sirens attract and shipwreck seamen, and that Ulysses, in order to hear their song and yet remain alive, plugged the ears of his oarsmen with wax and had himself lashed to the mast. The Sirens, tempting him, promised him knowledge of all the things of this world:

For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth. 

A legend recorded by the mythologist Apollodorus in his Bibliotheca, tells that Orpheus, aboard the Argonauts’ ship, sang more sweetly than the Sirens and that because of this these creatures threw themselves into the sea and were changed into rocks, for their fate was to die whenever their spell went unheeded. The sphinx, also, threw herself from a precipice when her riddle was solved.

In the sixth century, a Siren was caught and baptized in northern Wales, and in certain old calendars took her place as a saint under the name Murgen. Another, in 1403, slipped through a breach in a dike and lived in Haarlem until the day of her death. Nobody could make out her speech, but she was taught to weave and she worshipped the cross as if instinctively. A chronicler of the sixteenth century argued that she was not a fish because she knew how to weave and that she was not a woman because she was able to live in water.

The English language distinguishes between the classical Siren and the mermaid, which has the tail of a fish. The making of this later image may have been influenced by the Tritons, who were lesser divinities in the court of Poseidon.

In the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, eight Sirens rule over the revolution of the eight concentric heavens.

Siren: a supposed marine animal, we read in a brutally frank dictionary.

The Sow Harnessed with Chains and other Argentine Fauna

On page 106 of his
Dictionary of Argentine Folklore
, Felix Coluccio records:

In the northern part of Cordoba, especially around Quilinos, people speak of a sow harnessed with chains which commonly makes its presence known in the hours of night. Those living close to the railroad station maintain that the sow slides on the tracks, and others assured us that it is not unusual for the sow to run along the telegraph wires, producing a deafening racket with its ‘chains’. As yet, nobody has caught a glimpse of the animal, for as soon as you look for it, it vanishes unaccountably. 

Belief in the Sow Harnessed with Chains (
chancha con cadenas
), which also goes by the name of the Tin Pig (
chancho de lata
), is prevalent as well in the Province of Buenos Aires in slums and towns along the riverside.

There are two Argentine versions of the werewolf. One of them, common also to Uruguay and to southern Brazil, is the
lobisón
; but since no wolves inhabit these regions, men are supposed to take the shapes of swine or dogs. In certain towns of Entre Ríos, girls shun young men who live in the vicinity of stockyards because on Saturday nights they are said to turn into the aforementioned animals. In the midland provinces, we find the
tigre capiango
. This beast is not a jaguar but a man who, at will, can take the jaguar’s form. Usually his purpose is to frighten friends in a spirit of rustic jesting, but highwaymen have also availed themselves of the guise. During the civil wars of the last century, General Facundo Quiroga was popularly supposed to have under his command an entire regiment of
capiangos
.

The Sphinx

The Sphinx of Egyptian monuments (called by Herodotus androsphinx, or man-sphinx, in order to distinguish it from the Greek Sphinx) is a lion having the head of a man and lying at rest; it stood watch by temples and tombs, and is said to have represented royal authority. In the halls of Karnak, other Sphinxes have the head of a ram, the sacred animal of Amon. The Sphinx of Assyrian monuments is a winged bull with a man’s bearded and crowned head; this image is common on Persian gems. Pliny in his list of Ethiopian animals includes the Sphinx, of which he details no other features than ‘brown hair and two mammae on the breast’.

The Greek Sphinx has a woman’s head and breasts, the wings of a bird, and the body and feet of a lion. Some give it the body of a dog and a snake’s tail. It is told that it depopulated the Theban countryside asking riddles (for it had a human voice) and making a meal of any man who could not give the answer. Of Oedipus, the son of Jocasta, the Sphinx asked, ‘What has four legs, two legs, and three legs, and the more legs it has the weaker it is?’ (So runs what seems to be the oldest version. In time the metaphor was introduced which makes of man’s life a single day. Nowadays the question goes, ‘Which animal walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?’) Oedipus answered that it was a man who as an infant crawls on all fours, when he grows up walks on two legs, and in old age leans on a staff. The riddle solved, the Sphinx threw herself from a precipice.

De Quincey, around 1849, suggested a second interpretation, which complements the traditional one. The subject of the riddle according to him is not so much man in general as it is Oedipus in particular, orphaned and helpless at birth, alone in his manhood, and supported by Antigone in his blind and hopeless old age.