Jorge Luis Borges

The Rain Bird

When rain is needed, Chinese farmers have at their disposal — besides the dragon — the bird called the shang yang. It has only one leg. Long ago, children hopped up and down on one foot, wrinkling their brows and repeating: ‘It will thunder, it will rain, ’cause the shang yang’s here again!’ The tradition runs that the bird drew water from the rivers with its beak and blew it out as rain on the thirsting fields.

An ancient wizard had tamed it and used to carry it perched on his sleeve. Historians tell us that it once paraded back and forth before the throne of the Prince of Ch’i, hopping about and flapping its wings. The Prince, greatly taken aback, sent his chief minister to the Court of Lu to consult Confucius. The Sage foretold that the shang yang would cause the whole countryside and near-by regions to be flooded unless dikes and channels were built at once. The Prince was not deaf to the Sage’s warning, and so in his domain countless damage and disaster were avoided.

SOURCE: Borges, Jorge Luis; with Margarita Guerrero. The Book of Imaginary Beings [1967], revised, enlarged and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 119-120.

Note: When I read this in 1972, I wrote a poem based on this legend.

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