This essay was originally written for the course "Symbols and Conceptual Systems", with Professor Roberto Díaz at the University of Southern California. It is relevant here for its interactive format and interdisciplinary approach, and the underlying topic of abstraction in visualization.
“The Other Tiger” by Jorge Luis Borges conjures a tiger with its text. Next, Borges compares his imaginary tiger with the real, deadly tiger, before suggesting a search for a third tiger. Despite acknowledging openly that the first tiger is symbolic, constructed by his text, Borges is less direct about the fact that his “deadly” tiger is also imaginary, saying that the third tiger “will be a form in my dream like all the others, / a system and arrangement of human language, / and not the tiger of the vertebrae” (emphasis added), and suggesting that the “act” of crafting its story “creates a fiction.”
Borges’ heavily self-referential text points out a key point in its own form: his tigers are both formed by symbols that we recognize as letters being grouped into things that we recognize as words, which are further grouped into phrases, which flow together to form his poem. However, the symbols on the page are meaningless to the illiterate, and in no way represent either a symbolic or a real tiger. Borges uses self-reflection to mask the reality that his deadly tiger is equally symbolic, saying that “against the symbolic tiger, I have planted / the real one.” Through the text, Borges never actually creates any tigers, but the collective meaning of his symbols conjures meaning for the reader.
But what happens when the text is translated to a different language, say, as in our case, from Spanish to English? The same symbols form different words, creating different phrases, which have the same meaning? Achieving an equal meaning and understanding for the reader is the translator’s greatest challenge, considering the careful construction of Borges’ words (multiple translations can be located and compared online). Translations can never be perfect, by the simple fact that they attempt to duplicate meaning with an entirely different arrangement of symbols. By extension, the reader’s understanding of the translated text, where the original was already somewhat open to interpretation, can at best be approximated.
With “The Other Tiger,” a translation is an imperfect copy of a description of a tiger, where the description itself could be considered a copy, although Borges admits at least partially that his copy is only an abstraction of a true tiger. But to truly understand what Borges is trying to accomplish, it’s worth re-translating his symbolic tiger not only to another language but to an entirely different form. Let’s make it a JavaScript animation:
var canvas, ctx, width, height;
function load() {
canvas = document.getElementById('display');
ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');
resizeCanvas();
drawStripe();
var t = setInterval(drawStripe,32);
var BLOOD = setInterval(bloodstain,3210);
/* The half-light */
canvas.style.backgroundColor = '#333';
}
function drawStripe() {
var r = Math.floor(Math.random() * 255);
var w = Math.floor(Math.random() * 48);
var x = Math.floor(Math.random() * (width-w));
ctx.fillStyle = 'rgba('+r+','+r+','+r+',.4)';
ctx.fillRect (x, 0, w, height);
}
function bloodstain() {
var times = 0;
while( times < 16 ) {
drawBlood();
times++;
}
}
function drawBlood() {
var rad = Math.floor(Math.random() * 12);
var x = Math.floor(Math.random()*(width-rad))+(rad/2);
var y = Math.floor(Math.random()*(height-rad))+(rad/2);
ctx.fillStyle = 'rgba(200,0,0,.6)';
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.arc(x, y, rad, 0, Math.PI*2, true);
ctx.closePath();
ctx.fill();
}You expected to actually see the animation? Why not focus on the symbols that create it? After all, we never see Borges’ tigers, at least not objectively. We do see the text that he uses to construct them, so here you see the code that is used to construct a digital abstraction of his first tiger.
You’ll notice that it’s formed with the same set of symbols from which “The Other Tiger” draws in its textual form, but they’re arranged much differently, forming not words but variables, function names, and parameters. There is a brief comment about the half-light from which the tiger emerges, though. And some of the functions hint at their visual results; for example, drawStripe(), bloodstain(), and the wonderful drawBlood().
Unfortunately, it is necessary to be literate in the language of this form to understand what it creates, just as it is necessary to understand Spanish to understand Borges’ original work. Without the ability to understand the construction of a form, its meaning cannot be conveyed at all, leaving the reader vulnerable to misunderstand the author’s intentions. However, this digital form is not meant to be experienced in the form of its source code, but rather should be viewed as the animation that it is, allowing the viewer’s web browser to read it and present it for interpretation. For such purposes, the executed animation can be viewed alongside my other pseudo-random experiments, and below:
While the translation of “The Other Tiger” into an alternate form reveals much about the nature of the form the Borges uses, and discusses, it doesn’t offer much insight into Borges’ final goal: finding the third tiger. To find it, it is necessary to explore yet another transformation of his symbolic tiger. This time, the new language presents the additional benefit of using an entirely different set of symbols, with a non-linear organization and experienced only through the interpretations of others, slightly different each time it is performed:
You expected the musical notes to form the shape of a tiger? Borges’ text doesn’t do that. Such mechanisms tend to distract from the content of the form, which should introduce the tiger to the reader implicitly. Similarly to Borges’ text and my digital animation, it is important to understand the written form of the music to truly understand its meaning. But in this case it is designed be experienced entirely aurally, and at the mercy of the performers’ interpretation, so it’s worth listening to (a computer play it):
Perhaps this form more closely resembles the tiger that Borges describes. Beginning mystically, emulating Borges’ “half-light,” moving innocently, yet with strength, leaving tracks, but only a small tiger in the broader scope of things. Of course, describing the music with words is like Borges’ discussions of his tiger after he presents it, acknowledging its symbolic nature and the lack of a true tiger.
While the power of a work is typically its original form, expanding the form to include the author’s thoughts on his own work allows Borges to achieve greater meaning and ambiguity, introducing a real tiger that, ironically, is just as constructed as the first. The same could, theoretically, be applied to both examples of the tiger in alternate forms, through creative “easter eggs” hidden in the code and through unique stylistic suggestions in the written music. Therefore, the incorporation of self-referential text to Borges’ poem makes it considerably stronger than the poem about the single tiger would have been on its own. It also allows Borges to incorporate the third tiger, which he is unable to find.
What is the third tiger? Borges cannot find it, but claims that it “will be a form in my dream like all the others, / a system and arrangement of human language.” Perhaps the “other tiger which is not in this poem” actually is in this poem, since Borges (apparently) can’t find it. He explicitly describes two tigers, the symbolic and the (not actually) real. But the first tiger comes entirely from his head and the second is meant to be a real tiger in its physical form. While the reader cannot dispute the form of a real tiger, the tiger in Borges’ head is only specified by a few lines of text in his poem.
As the translation of this other tiger into alternate forms demonstrates, the abstraction of this tiger is open to interpretation. Most readers will thus form some image of the other tiger in their mind, based on the abstraction of the tiger that Borges can picture himself. But Borges already has a clear picture of the tiger, which he abstracted into text. Because Borges knows what the other tiger is supposed to be like, he can’t form a new interpretation of it. Therefore, the third tiger is the tiger that the reader imagines when reading Borges’ description of the first tiger, which is distinct but invisible to Borges himself.