Wednesday (7/13/22) - The Protean in Borges

From the Borges Center at U.Pitt we learn:

Proteus, in classical mythology, prophetic old man of the sea who tended the seals of Poseidon and could change himself into any shape.

Proteus emblem, Andrea Alciato, 1531

From The Odyssey, Book IV:

With a shout we rushed at him, and grappled him, but he forgot none of his crafty tricks. First he turned to a bearded lion, then a snake, and a leopard: then a giant boar: then he became rushing water, then a vast leafy tree: but we held tight with unyielding courage. When at last that old man, expert in magic arts, grew tired, he spoke to me, saying: “Son of Atreus, which of the gods told you to lie in wait for me, and hold me against my will? What is it you wish?”’ 

Fishburn and Hughes elaborate: "In Greek mythology a prophetic sea god, the son of Oceanus and Tethys, who had the power of assuming any shape he wished in order to avoid capture. The Zahir: Homer describes Proteus as living in a cave near the island of Pharos: 'He will seek to foil you by taking the shape of every creature that moves on earth, and of water and of portentous fire; but you must hold him unflinchingly and you must press the harder' (Odyssey 4.417-20). Because he could assume whatever shape he pleased, Proteus was regarded as typical of the ever-changing aspect of the sea and, in the Orphic tradition, as the original matter from which the world was created. The Theologians: 'protean' means having the ability to assume all kinds of appearances. The Immortal: when Ulysses and his men manage to capture Proteus, they are told by him that they must sail back to the waters of the Nile and make propitiatory sacrifices to the gods. At this point Proteus uses the name Egypt for the river Nile (Odyssey 4.355-8)." (160)

Borges references this prophetic sea-god many times.  Proteo (Sp.)

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Index:  

El Inmortal, Los teólogos. 

El Zahir, El Aleph, OC, 591. 

Ragnarök, El hacedor, OC, 803. 

Poema del cuarto elemento, OC, 869. [Poem of the Fourth Element]

Los enigmas, El otro, el mismo, OC, 916. 

A quien está leyéndome, El otro, el mismo, OC, 924.[To Whomever is Reading Me]

El alquimista, El otro, el mismo, OC, 925. 

Proteo, El oro de los tigres, OC, 1108. 

Otra versión de Proteo, El oro de los tigres, OC, 1109. 

Baldanders, El libro de los seres imaginarios, OCC, 591. 

Daniel Ibarra: En nombre de la mar y sus sirenas, CS, 246. 

Yo, La rosa profunda, OP, 421. 

Proteo, La rosa profunda, OP, 443. 

Otra versión de Proteo, La rosa profunda, OP, 444. 

Hilario Ascasubi (1807-1875), La moneda de hierro, OP, 478. 

Herman Melville, La moneda de hierro, OP, 485. 

Notas, La moneda de hierro, OP, 508. 

Himno del mar, PJ, 58.

 

Also Everything and Nothing (CF, 319, Hurley and SP 87, Kenneth Krabenhoft)

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Poem of the Fourth Element (SP, 163, A.R.) 

 

POEM OF THE FOURTH ELEMENT [GT]

The god to whom a man of the race of Atreus
captured on a beach that the embarrassment lacerates,
he became a lion, a dragon, a panther,
a tree and water. Because water is Proteus.

It is the cloud, the unforgettable cloud, it is the glory
of the sunset that deepens, red, the suburbs;
It is the Maelström that the glacial vortices weave,
and the useless tear that I give to your memory.

It was, in the cosmogonies, the secret origin
of the earth that nourishes, of the fire that devours,
of the gods that rule the west and the dawn.
(This is what Seneca and Thales of Miletus say.)

The sea and the moving mountain that destroys
to the iron ship are only your anaphoras,
and the irreversible time that hurts us and flees,
water, is nothing more than one of your metaphors. 

 

You were, under ruinous winds, the labyrinth
without walls or window, whose gray paths
They long diverted the longed-for Ulysses,
of Certain Death and indistinct Chance.

You shine like the cruel leaves of the cutlasses,
hosts, such as sleep, monsters and nightmares.
The languages ​​of man add wonders to you
and your escape is called the Euphrates or the Ganges.

(They affirm that the water of the latter is sacred,
but as the seas concoct dark exchanges
and the planet is porous, it is also true
claim that every man has bathed in the Ganges.)

De Quincey, in the tumult of dreams, has seen
stoned your ocean of faces, of nations;
you have appeased the anxiety of generations,
you have washed the flesh of my father and of Christ.

Water, I beg you. For this sleepy
knot of numerous words that I tell you,
remember Borges, your swimmer, your friend.
Do not miss my lips at the last moment.

=============================== 

THE ENIGMAS
I who am singing these lines today
Will be tomorrow the enigmatic corpse
Who dwells in a realm, magical and barren,
Without a before or an after or a when.
So say the mystics. I say I believe
Myself undeserving of Heaven or of Hell,
But make no predictions. Each man’s tale
Shifts like the watery forms of Proteus.
What errant labyrinth, what blinding flash
Of splendor and glory shall become my fate
When the end of this adventure presents me with
The curious experience of death?
I want to drink its crystal-pure oblivion,
To be forever; but never to have been.
[John Updike]

===============================

TO WHOEVER IS READING ME
You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you, 

those powers that preordain your destiny, 

the certainty of dust? Is not your time 

as irreversible as that same river 

where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol 

of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you 

which you will not read -- on it, already written, 

the date, the city, and the Epitaph. 

Other men too are only dreams of time, 

not indestructible bronze or burnished gold; 

the universe is, like you, a Proteus.

Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you, 

doomed to the limits of your traveled time. 

Know that in some sense you are already dead. [A. R.]

======================================

To the One Who is Reading Me[Translated from the Spanish by Tony Barnstone]

 

You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver
(those forces that control your destiny)
the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be
your irreversible time is that river
in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read
his brevity? A marble slab is saved
for you, one you won’t read, already graved
with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.
And other men are also dreams of time,
not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust
like you; the universe is Proteus.
Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead,
the fatal shadow waiting at the rim.
Know this: in some way you’re already dead.

====================================

I 

The skull within, the secret, shuttered heart,
the byways of the blood I never see,
the underworld of dreaming, that Proteus,
the nape, the viscera, the skeleton.
I am all those things. Amazingly,
I am to the memory of a sword
and of a solitary, falling Sun,
turning itself to Gold, then gray, then nothing.
I am the one who sees the approaching ships
from harbor. And I am the dwindled books,
the rare engravings worn away by time;
the one who envies those already dead.
Stranger to be the man who interlaces
such words as these, in some room in a house. [A. R.]
========================================

PROTEUS [GT]

Before Odysseus' rowers 

weary the wine-colored sea 

the elusive divine forms 

of that god whose name was Proteus. 

Shepherd of the flocks of the seas 

and possessor of the gift of prophecy, 

he preferred to hide what he knew 

and weave together disparate oracles. 

Urged by the people he assumed 

the form of a lion or a bonfire 

or of a tree that gives shade to the riverbank 

or of water that was lost in the water. 

Do not be amazed at Proteus the Egyptian, 

you who are one and are many men.

 =======================================

PROTEUS (translated by Stephen Kessler)

Before the oarsmen of Odysseus

have finished wearing out the wine-dark sea

I have a vision of the slippery forms

of that ungraspable god called Proteus.

Shepherd of the flocks that roam the ocean,

possessor of the gift of prophecy,

he preferred to conceal all that he knew

and weave an array of different oracles.

Pressed by so many people, he assumed

the form of a lion or a bonfire

or a tree shading a riverbank

or water getting lost in other water.

Do not be astonished at Proteus the Egyptian,

you, who are also one and many men. [S.K.]

 =======================================

ANOTHER VERSION OF PROTEUS [GT]

Inhabitant of wary sands, 

half god and half sea beast, 

he ignored memory, which leans 

on yesterday and lost things. 

Proteus suffered another torment 

no less cruel, knowing what the future 

already holds: the door that closes 

forever, the Trojan and the Achaean. 

Trapped, he assumed the elusive form 

of the hurricane or the bonfire 

or the golden tiger or the panther 

or the water that is invisible in the water. 

You too are made of fickle 

yesterdays and tomorrows. While, before...

========================================

THE ALCHEMIST (The Self and The Other ,1964, A.R. tr.)

Slow in the dawn, a young man, hollow-eyed

from lengthy thought and unrewarding vigils,

is lost in his reflections, contemplating

the sleepless braziers and the silent stills.

 

He knows that gold, that Proteus, is lurking

in all chance happenings, like destiny;

he knows it hides in the dust along the way,

in the action of the bow, the arm, the arrow.

 

His occult vision of a secret being 

hidden in the starts and in raw earth

echoes that other dream, that everything

is water, the dream of Thales of Miletus.

 

There's another vision, that of an eternal

God who appears in every single thing,

as Spinoza the geometer explains

in a book more tortuous than all of Hell.

 

In the vast blue expanses to the west,

the planets are beginning to grow pale.

The alchemist is thinking of his secrets,

the secret laws that link planet and metal.

 

And while he dreams of finding in the fire

that true gold that will put an end to dying,

God, who knows His alchemy, transforms him

to no one, nothing, dust, oblivion.

 

===================================

Baldanders (from The Book of Imaginary Beings N.T. di G. translated)

Baldanders (whose name we may translate as Soon-another or At-any

moment-something-else) was suggested to the master shoemaker Hans Sachs
(1494-1576) of Nuremburg by that passage in the Odyssey in which
Menelaus pursues the Egyptian god Proteus, who changes himself into a
lion, a serpent, a panther, a huge wild boar, a tree, and flowing water. Some
ninety years after Sachs’s death, Baldanders makes a new appearance in the
last book of the picaresque fantastic novel by Grimmelshausen, The
Adventuresome Simplicissimus (1669). In the midst of a wood, the hero
comes upon a stone statue which seems to him an idol from some old
Germanic temple. He touches it and the statue tells him he is Baldanders and
thereupon takes the forms of a man, of an oak tree, of a sow, of a fat sausage,
of a field of clover, of dung, of a flower, of a blossoming branch, of a
mulberry bush, of a silk tapestry, of many other things and beings, and then,
once more, of a man. He pretends to teach Simplicissimus the art ‘of
conversing with things, which by their nature are dumb, such as chairs and
benches, pots and pans’; he also makes himself into a secretary and writes
these words from the Revelation of St John: ‘I am the first and the last’,
which are the key to the coded document in which he leaves the hero his
instructions. Baldanders adds that his emblem (like that of the Turk, and
with more right to it than the Turk) is the inconstant moon.
Baldanders is a successive monster, a monster in time. The title page of
the first edition of Grimmelshausen’s novel takes up the joke. It bears an
engraving of a creature having a satyr’s head, a human torso, the unfolded
wings of a bird, and the tail of a fish, and which, with a goat’s leg and
vulture’s claws, tramples on a heap of masks that stand for the succession of
shapes he has taken. In his belt he carries a sword and in his hands an open
book showing pictures of a crown, a sailing boat, a goblet, a tower, a child, a
pair of dice, a fool’s cap with bells, and a piece of ordnance.