a third tiger
Against the tiger of symbols I have set
the real one, the hot-blooded one
that savages a herd of buffalo,
and today, the third of August, ’59,
its patient shadow moves across the plain.
But yet, the act of naming it, of guessing
what is its nature and its circumstance
creates a fiction, not a living creature,
Not the animal that lives wild upon the earth.
Let us look for a third tiger. This one
will be a form in my dream like all the others,
a system, an arrangement of human language,
and not the flesh-and-bone tiger
that, out of reach of all mythologies,
paces the earth.
I know all this; yet something
drives me to this ancient, perverse adventure,
foolish and vague, so that still I keep on looking
throughout the hours for the other tiger,
the other tiger, the one not found in verse.
Jorge Luis Borges, transl. Tom Davis and (mostly) Alastair Reid