Borges Prose Poem: Dreamtigers

Dreamtigers

In my infancy I adored tigers with fervor: not the egg-coloured tigers of the floating-islands of Paraná, or the Amazonian confusion, but the royal Asiatic tiger, with stripes, which can only be confronted by men of war, on a tower mounted on an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages in the Zoological gardens; I appreciated the vast encyclopedias and the books of natural history, for the splendour of their tigers. (I have total recall of these figures: I who cannot recall, without error, the face or smile of a woman.) Infancy passed, and the tigers, and my passion for them faded, but they are always still in my dreams. In subconscious sleep, or the chaos which generally follows, it's like this: I sleep, and am distracted by some sort of dream, and immediately I know that it is a dream. At such times I think: This is a dream, a purely voluntary diversion, and now that I have unlimited power I am going to evoke a tiger.

O, incompetence! My dreams are never able to engender the fierce things longed for. The tiger appears, indeed, but desiccated, or enfeebled, or with irregular variations of form, or of an inadmissible size, or completely fugitive, or similar to a dog or bird.



Translated by James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone University
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.
12 Oct 2010.
From the prose poem by Jorge Luis Borges, "Dreamtigers" Poems of the Night (Penguin, 2010), p. 34.
The intention of this translation is to emphasize cognate words in Spanish and English. The original title is English: "Dreamtigers", not "Tigres de Sueño".