FANTASTIC ZOOLOGY The chasm between our idea of a being and the being itself—between noumenon and phenomenon, that is—regardless of whether or not the being in question belongs in the world of fantasy, is a recurrent trope in Borges’s poetry and prose. To reduce this ontological problem to the dichotomy between sign and signified would be denying Borges’s fascination with the palpable effects of fiction on what we have conveniently decided to call “reality.” It would also underestimate how innately generative such chasm can prove in the realms of verbal and visual representation. According to Borges’s logic, only fools would insist on the nonexistence of dragons. If there is a word for such a creature, then there exists a definition for such a word, and if a dragon can be distinguished from, say, a salamander, then this provides ample proof of the existence of both beings. And nothing is truer than all cultures’ propensity to dream up such fabulous faunas, as Borges makes palpably clear in the Handbook of Fantastic Zoology (of which The Book of Imaginary Beings is a subsequent, augmented edition). In the handbook the Behemoth, for instance, in Andrew Hurley’s translation, is described as follows: “Four hundred years before the Christian era, Behemoth was a magnification of the elephant or the hippopotamus, or an erroneous and frightened version of both animals; now, it is neither more nor less than those ten famous Biblical verses that describe the creature (Job 40: 1524) and the vast form that they evoke. The rest is exegesis, or philology.” An exegesis or, more accurately, a discussion (as in the Spanish original) in which Borges was always interested, to be sure, and which, in turn, engendered imaginary beings like the one in the poem “The Other Tiger”: “Let us look for a third tiger. / This one will be a form in my dream like all the others, / a system and arrangement of human language, / and not the flesh-and-bone tiger / which, out of reach of all mythology, / paces the earth.” Borges’s tiger, and in this case also that of Alistair Reid, translator of his poetry, is the result of their highly singular way of combining diverse elements: words. The same could be said of Kafka’s cross breed between
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