a word to the poem
LEOPARD, n. This is the common name in English for Panthera pardus, a spotted, golden-furred big cat that lives in various habitats across Africa and Asia. The etymology of “leopard” is fairly straightforward: most likely, it’s “leo” for lion and “pard” from pardos, meaning “spotted.”
“Like a lion, but with spots” would get you pretty close to the concept of “leopard,” though it might point you toward cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), which also have spots. In my reading on this word’s history, there was frequent confusion of lions, leopards, cheetahs, and panthers (not a species, but a word used to refer to either melanistic [all black] leopards or jaguars).
None of this is helped by the fact that we used to have the word “pard,” meaning a leopard, or, from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, a(n imagined) big cat that is distinct from a leopard, which has “a peculiar odor” and can reproduce with a lion in order to make leopards. So Pliny the Elder thought leopards were a hybrid of lions and pards—sort of like mules or ligers—which might well have given us the leo + pard etymology.
I can’t stop wondering what a pard might smell like. I went looking in the original text and Pliny the Elder cruelly denied me an answer. Whatever the smell is, lions hate it.
A British Library bestiary from the last years of the twelfth century depicting a leopard with its tongue out. It sort of has a little mane? There is another big cat below it with no spots, which might be a female lion. You can see the word “Pardus” in the Latin text next to it, as well as the word “leopardus,” and, later, “leone,” so it’s possible that this bestiary is repeating Pliny the Elder’s notion of “lion + pard = leopard,” but I am not good enough at reading Latin or manuscripts to tell you more.
Why am I talking about leopards? Because I’ve been reading Jorge Luis Borges again. (He’s come up in this newsletter briefly here and here). It’s been many months since I’ve read or written about any Capital-R Romance literature in this newsletter. I read Borges in English translation rather than Spanish, but I’m counting him anyway.
There are a lot of big cats in Borges, but the one on my mind right now is the leopard in this piece, “Inferno, I, 32,” which is either a very short story or a prose poem. It’s inspired by line 32 of Dante’s Inferno, which is “una lonza leggera e presta molto,” in the original and “[…] a spotted Leopard, all tremor and flow” in John Ciardi’s translation (1954) and “[…] a leopard, very quick and lithe,” in Allen Mandelbaum’s (1982).
Anyway, here’s Borges (translated by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions, 1998; text in Spanish):
From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal's rude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast.
Years later, Dante was to die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, God told him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, astonished, learned at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed the bitternesses of his life. Legend has it that when he awoke, he sensed that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.
Dante, suffering in exile like the leopard, has a purpose just as the animal does, one that outlives death and cannot be fully grasped until years later.
So many of Borges’s fascinations come together here: literature, God and the infinite, the unknowable and the unspoken, prisons and death, language and art, dreams and memory, the sense of something just out of reach—a great design that can be glimpsed or felt from time to time, but never understood.
This leopard echoes another big cat in Borges’s short story “The Writing of the God,” narrated by a Mayan priest who has been tortured and imprisoned by the Spanish. The priest is kept in a cell next to a similarly imprisoned jaguar. He can only catch intermittent glimpses of the animal through a small, barred window. For generations, the priests have passed down secret knowledge of a divine message. Nobody even knows where the message is, what it is, let alone what it might say, but it has world-altering power, and some day, one of them will read it. The priest, by his status as the last in a doomed line, knows he has to be the one—but he’s alone in an empty cell, awaiting death.
Except for the jaguar.
The animal must be the message. It, too, is the product of generations of jaguars passing down their spots. The priest studies it for years, memorizing the pattern in its fur.
Understanding will free him from the Spanish, will give him the power to change the whole world. But when he comprehends it at last, the message alters him so greatly that he is no longer the man who wanted to speak it. He remains in his cell in silence, awaiting death, but fundamentally changed by his knowledge.
This is the nature of miracles in Borges—witnessed in suffering, adjacent to death, unspeakable. In “The Secret Miracle,” a Czech Jewish playwright about to be shot by a Nazi firing squad experiences time stopping so that he might compose, in his own mind, the ending to his unfinished play. When he finishes his work, the frozen bullets fly. Not even a miracle stops the Nazis, the conquistadors, the Black Guelphs who exile Dante from Florence. Miracles do not free the jaguar or the leopard. The miracles of Borges are, in one sense, desperately, tragically small: confined to the inadequate understanding of a single mind, impossible to communicate, at risk of being lost forever in death.
They are also vast—spanning generations and the complex machinery of the universe, comprehensible only to God. In “The Writing of the God” and “The Secret Miracle,” humans cannot know miracles and live. The miracle manifests only as a private peace before death.
But in “Inferno, I, 32,” there is a difference: Dante survives long enough to write the Inferno. He never gets to go home, and neither does the leopard. He dies, and the leopard dies—but the text lives. It is shared. Generations of readers know Dante and glimpse the leopard. They are remembered. Through collective reading, they escape their prisons, their deaths, and time itself.
Is this enough? Is art enough? Does it balance the weight of suffering? Does it change the world? I don’t know. I can’t know. Borges couldn’t know, either. He was writing in the 1940s, one of the bleaker moments in human history. The world is prison, isolation, torture, murder, death, violence upon violence upon violence. Maybe we all die “as unjustified and alone as any other man.”
But maybe we don’t.
Violence exists, but so do miracles: jaguars, leopards, poems, the human mind. It is not for us to know our exact place in the weft of the universe, but a fragile hope exists that we might have one. That all of this might matter. That there might be some purpose to suffering. Limited in our understanding to snatches of half-remembered dreams, we can never know for sure. But wouldn’t it be beautiful if we could? Would you bless the bitternesses of your life, the suffering and the captivity, everything that made you yearn and howl, if you could know you had given a word to the poem?
In small-r romance this issue, we’ve got kink and espionage and more on the power of language.
Salt in the Wound + Salt Kiss (m/m/f, all cis and bi, contemporary) by Sierra Simone. This series is a kinky contemporary retelling of Tristan and Isolde, and as Salt Kiss is the first novel of a planned trilogy, it doesn’t have a Happily Ever After. Indeed, the story ends at an “oh shit” moment. I knew it was going to, and I knew the next two books weren’t published yet, and still I had to read it, because Sierra Simone writing a love triangle that ends in polyamory, plus it’s scattered with fun winks at a medieval epic, like a yacht called Philtre d’Amour? Yeah, I had to.
I’ve written before about how much I love Sierra Simone’s descriptions of settings and how much they matter to her stories, particularly architecture and interiors, but also nature. Salt Kiss had a sunset scene that made me want to linger. Some context: Tristan is a skilled, deadly combat veteran with a marshmallow heart and a bad case of PTSD. He’s also the newly hired bodyguard to Mark. In classic romance-novel-career fashion, Mark is a retired (or he is?) spy/assassin who now runs an infamous kink club. Obviously. Here they both are on a rooftop, watching the sunset:
We watch, the silence easier than it should be, given how restless and strange the silence had been in the car earlier. The sun sinks in slow splendor over the flat river and the city beyond, the horizon broken by the Monument and the Capitol and the cranes against the sky like predatory birds perched in wait. Orange and pink fade into violet and blue, a few brave stars try to burn their way through the city’s glow, and all of it is rendered in duplicate by the river stretching before us. The traffic and the river make a kind of soothing symphony to it all, and the beer is good, and Mark next to me makes me feel—aware, I guess. Of the breeze tugging gently at my jacket and of the way my clothes feel on my skin. Of how often I lick my lips and swallow.
I love how neither Tristan nor Mark is actually doing anything—they’re just standing next to each other watching a sunset—and it still feels so active and tense. And horny. First, we have the lavishness of the sunset, its colors and its “slow splendor,” and for even more extravagance, it’s happening twice, reflected in the river. Everything in Mark’s world of wealth and luxury and secrets is seductively beautiful, excessive, and inextricable from the business of capital cities like Washington D.C., but set at a remove. And there Tristan is, a lonely, brave star trying to burn his way through the glow, with very little idea of what he’s getting into.
Underlying all this beauty is a sense of threat. Their earlier silence was “restless and strange,” reminding us of Tristan’s discomfort with how little he knows about Mark’s shady, dangerous work and his even shadier, more dangerous character. The distant cranes are “like predatory birds perched in wait.” You know who else is like a predatory bird perched in wait? The man right next to you, my sweet summer narrator. Tristan, of course, is a person who likes some threat/fear/danger mixed with sex, though at this point in the book he doesn’t know that about himself yet. He’s just standing next to his mysterious boss, feeling “aware” and licking his lips.
Anyway. This is a grand old time and, of course, very sexy. I read Salt Kiss before the prequel, Salt in the Wound, which is about Isolde. Either reading order would work, but the way I happened to do it was really fun for me. I knew nothing about Isolde, and she doesn’t show up in Salt Kiss until almost three-quarters of the way through, so I kept thinking “how can Sierra Simone possibly make me believe that Tristan’s relationship with Isolde (in one quarter of the book) will be as compelling as his relationship with Mark (in the other three quarters)?” But oh my God, Isolde. She’s perfect. I don’t want to say anything else about her because the surprise of what she’s like was delicious.
Bitter Medicine (bi m/het? f, both cis, fantasy) by Mia Tsai. I knew I was going to read this as soon as I found out that the heroine does magic calligraphy, and it was everything I wanted. Elle, a descendant of a Chinese medicine god, has been in hiding for years after stopping her younger brother from killing her older brother—who’s also in hiding, now living as a mortal. Elle’s working in a magic shop in the US, pretending to be far less powerful than she is, generally being lowkey miserable and punishing herself for intervening in the impossible conflict between her brothers. She also doesn’t get modern life, like using her smartphone, in a way that I found funny and cute; her older brother has no such issue and loves to tease her about it. I love that kind of detail in urban fantasy, ancient magical beings adapting (or not) to our world.
Anyway, one of Elle’s clients is the handsome and charming half-elf Luc, and she can’t seem to stop herself from making his calligraphy orders just a little more powerful. So he notices her, and that sets off both their romance and all the rest of the plot. I love the take on magic here: every culture’s folklore is true. The rules of magic operate differently from culture to culture and intersect in unexpected ways.
This multicultural world is reflected in the book’s multilingual nature. When characters speak another language, it’s printed without translation. So when Luc speaks French, there’s French on the page. When Elle and her brother speak to each other in Mandarin, or when Elle does calligraphy, the book shows us the Chinese characters. Sometimes characters’ names or other words are transliterated into Pinyin, with diacritics marking the tones, but when a character who does not speak Mandarin says a word, it’s printed without the tone diacritics, which is such a cool, nuanced way to indicate someone’s unfamiliarity with the language.
Luc and Elle are so sweet and supportive to each other, which makes a wonderful contrast to the difficult, cutthroat world of magic they live in. There are gigantic obstacles to their relationship. One of the reasons I’m drawn to fantasy and sci-fi settings in romance is that I love a good external obstacle, a “we can’t be together because my dad is evil and might magically compel me never to speak to you again” type of deal, and this book really delivers on that front—both in the problems and in their solutions. Such a fun read.
The world is infuriating and heartbreaking lately. If you’ve got money to spare, the Middle East Children’s Alliance is a good place to donate.
I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks.