French Sources of Mystery

One reason I haven't been posting much lately is that I've been combing through a bunch of old French books. Particularly, the Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses to which Borges refers in "Fauna of Mirrors."

Let's review: The "Fauna of Mirrors" story opens as follows:

In one of the volumes of the Lettres edifiantes et curieuses that appeared in Paris during the first half of the eighteenth century, Father Fontecchio of the Society of Jesus planned a study of the superstitions and misinformation of the common people of Canton; in the preliminary outline he noted that the Fish was a shifting and shining creature that nobody had ever caught but that manysaid they had glimpsed in the depths of mirrors. Father Fontecchio died in 1736, and the work begun by his pen remained unfinished; some 150 years later Herbert Allen Giles took up the interrupted task. According to Giles, belief in the Fish is part of a larger myth that goes back to the legendary times of the Yellow Emperor.

I've gone through most of Giles's work (already mentioned here) and now I've gone through all but one volume of the Lettres. In the thirty-some I've gotten access to, there is no mention of a Father Fontecchio, or of fish being in mirrors and attacking our world.

I say all but one volume: I haven't been able to get number 31 yet.

Keep in mind a few things. First, my French is pretty rusty. Second, this is eighteenth-century French. Still, I think I've been pretty thorough. All the volumes of the Lettres are available on-line in searchable formats. I used the same terms for each volume search: miroir, Fontecchio, Zallinger, poisson, superstition.

I used to be certain that Fontecchio was a real guy, though I can't recall why and have no source for that. Zallinger is equally obscure. Let's see, there's reference to Zallinger (as Zallinger, P.) on the University of Pittsburgh's Borges Center site, but nothing on Fontecchio. They publish a journal devoted to Borges.

So what's the next step? I dunno.  

Mystery: Norman Thomas di Giovanni

I don't have a lot of time to dig into the mystery--which is what I have been calling the origin and authenticity of the story called, variously, "The Fauna of Mirrors," "Animals in the Mirror," and "Animales del Mirro" by Jorge Luis Borges...and maybe Margarita Guerrero. Less than an hour per week, maybe. Not much time, really.

So today I wanted to devote my few minutes to Norman Thomas di Giovanni. I found this. di Giovanni worked directly with Borges on translations of Borges's work into English. As things progressed, after Borges passed away, di Giovanni found himself being deprived of the results of that work. Publishers and Borges's widow had begun releasing newly translated versions of Borges's Spanish editions, without di Giovanni's contributions at all. He writes:

Behind my back, I was being ushered out of the door (if such a mixed metaphor is permissable) and at the same time was being airbrushed out of history, out of Borges's existence. All of my volumes of his work - work to which he contributed and gave a unique voice - were deliberately allowed to go out of print. No publisher, no editor, no agent, no executor of any estate ever wrote to me to explain any of this. New translations appeared. Viking-Penguin had bought up E.P. Dutton, and unilaterally, without a single word to me, they nullified my contracts, an act which experts in the law have told me was illegal. So ruthless was Viking that they even commissioned a new edition of Borges's poems, stealing from my edition, without permission, without payment, a considerable body of my work.

This is all very depressing.

I learned all this when I was looking up di Giovanni with the hopes of contacting him about the mystery. He passed away in February of 2017.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni will be remembered by friends in Buenos Aires for his wit and for his brash manner in all that he set out to do. He must also be remembered for his brilliant literary training, his high quality as a translator and his capacity to move from his hard-knocks managerial style to his kindness as a friend to all of his friends and for his often excessive generosity. Di Giovanni wanted to help the whole world. He was a sponge for attention and affection from all those he befriended or was close to at any one time.
However, Di Giovanni would probably want to be remembered simply as the best translator that Jorge Luis Borges ever had.

The plot thinnens

So there's this weird thing with the name of the writer who first introduced the Mirror Fish to the western world. di Giovanni uses Fontecchio. Hurley uses Zallinger. So I dug up a pdf of the Spanish publication of Book of Imaginary Beings. El Libros de los Seres Imaginarios. "Animales de los Espejos" is the title of the chapter in question. The original text uses the name Zallinger. So where did Fontecchio come from?

Both Zallinger and Fontecchio were part of the La Compañía de Jesús, which is...okay, I'm just going to admit that I don't know Spanish. Anyway, La Compañía de Jesús, is Society of Jesus in English.

Updates as they arise.

Mystery Plot thickening

Back go Borges and the mirror fish. Well, not exactly the mirror fish, but on a related note...

Page 134 of the Hurley translation of Imaginary Beings contains the following:

The Ink Monkey
This animal is common in the northern regions and is about four or five inches long; it is endowed with an unusual instinct; its eyes are like carnelian stones, and its hair is jet black, sleek and flexible, as soft as a pillow. It is very fond of eating thick China ink, and whenever people write, it sits with folded hands and crossed legs, waiting till the writing is finished, when it drinks up the remainder of the ink; which done, it squats down as before, and does not frisk about unnecessarily. 

This entry is attributed to Wang Tai-hai in 1791. In the accompanying end note, Hurley refers us to a book called The Chinaman Abroad: An Account of the Malayan Archipelago, particularly of Java, written by Ong-Tae-Hae and translated by W.H. Medhurst in 1850.

That book exists, and can be accessed here. On pages 46-47 we find this:

The Ink Monkey

(46) Is common in the northern regions and is about four of five inches long; it is endowed with an unusual instinct; its (47) eyes are like carnelian stones, and its hair is jet black, sleek and flexible, as soft as a pillow. It is very fond of eating thick Chinese ink, and whenever people write, it sits with folded hands and crossed legs, waiting till the writing is finished, when it drinks up the remainder of the kink; which done, it squats down as before; and does not frisk about unnecessarily. Ong-te-hoe used to keep one at the head of his ink-stone, or in the middle of his seal-box.

The author hedges his accuracy a bit when, in his preface, he writes, "Although far from being intelligent, I dare not refuse carefully to record the things which I have seen and heard, together with some references to the country and its inhabitants, in shirt every individual word and action worthy of being noted down; thus publishing the whole, in order to render some small assistance toward correcting men's minds, and sustaining right principles in the world!" 

Here's the other translation of the story, by di Giovanni:

The Monkey of the Inkpot

This animal, common in the north, is four of five inches long; its eyes are scarlet and its fur is jet black, silky, and soft as a pillow. It is marked by a curious instinct--the taste for India ink. When a person sits down to write, the monkey squats cross-legged near by with one forepaw folded over the other, waiting until the task is over. Then it drinks what is left of the ink, and afterwards sits back on its haunches, quiet and satisfied. 

Same attribution.

In an essay on Borges titled "Repetition, Museums, Libraries," Alicia Borinsky opens with Norman Thomas Di Giovanni's translation of the Ink Monkey story. Then uses that image, of the satisfied monkey, to get to this point: "The position of the monkey regarding the writer is the double nature of authorship; no text is ever complete and finished; the author are always two, one who writes the texts and another one--at least--who profits from its excess."

I bring up these things precisely because it's important to see that at least some of Borges's sources in The Book of Imaginary Beings are genuine. Interestingly, Borinsky lets us know that the Wang Thai Hai's ontological status is irrelevant. It's pretty much a straight translation, although the entry in the original does refer to the author, Ong-te-hoe, in the third person.

(a couple of translation notes: Giovanni uses "scarlet" for the eyes, but the Spanish uses "cornalinas," so I assume Hunley's is more strictly accurate; carnelian stones don't exactly look red to me; also, Giovanni's use of India ink isn't in the Spanish: "la tinta china")

Clues to the Mystery

So, Borges and the mirror animals...

I've gone through thirteen of the twenty-three books written by Herbert Allen Giles. So far, no mention of animals in mirrors. The other ten don't look promising.

I've gone through one of the Fontecchio books, and nothing.

Andrew Hurley, who translated the edition of The Book of Imaginary Beings I've got, provides notes on the sources Borges (and co-author Margarita Guerrero) used for his creatures. Those notes conveniently skip the mirror beasts.

Sorry about the misleading title to the post. No clues yet.

A mystery

Anybody ever read The Book of Imaginary Beings by Borges? So there's this chapter called sometimes "The Fauna of Mirrors" and sometimes "Animals that Live in the Mirror," depending on which version you're reading. This story tells us how mirrors are actually windows into another world, and there are fish there that are one day going to come and kill us all, or something like that. Only the magic of the Yellow Emperor of China has kept us safe...for now. One day the mirror animals will become different from us; "gradually they will no longer imitate us; they will break through the barriers of glass or metal, and this time they will not be conquered."

I came across this story long ago, and some consulting work I recently conducted brought this story to my attention again. I hadn't thought much of it, but encountering it again made me want to dig through the history books to see what I could find. Borges references a certain Father Fontecchio (sometimes spelled Zallinger, depending on the edition), a Jesuit who recorded the story from Canton in the 18th century. He also mentions Herbert Allen Giles telling the same story 150 years later. Fontecchio and Giles are real people, so are the mirror fish an authentic Cantonese legend? This is Borges we're talking about, after all.

I intend to learn the truth.