Rhinoceros books
“Collecting live exotic animals was becoming a sign of distinction,” Pimentel writes, “the expression of symbolic power over distant territories and over nature itself.” A gift like Ganda was “more valuable than the most valuable work of art because of its ephemeral nature,” keeping such an animal in one’s royal stables was “beyond the ambitions of all but a very few.” In addition to symbolizing wealth, the rhinoceros satisfied an exotic fetish for all things “Oriental,” for “the sensuality of the East in opposition to the rationality of the West.” Among these gifts was a captive rhinoceros, who was given the name “Ganda” (the Gujarati word for the animal). In the early 16th century, Portuguese merchants attempted to build an outpost in India, and during the negotiations diplomatic gifts were exchanged between Sultan Muzaffar II of Gujarat and Portugal’s Manuel I. Through the unwieldy grafting of these two narratives, The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium becomes as much an interrogation of history and science as it is a chronicle of these two animals’ stories.
Pimentel takes this creative writing prompt to a fantastic extreme, crafting a dazzlingly strange and resolutely readable dual biography. The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium, he writes in the book’s opening pages, “proceeds rather like one of those experiments of old in which assayers exposed materials to strange conditions simply to see what happened.” In structuring an entire book around a seemingly random comparison, Pimentel takes his inspiration from the Italian children’s writer Gianni Rodari’s concept of “the fantastic binominal”: a process for generating stories and ideas by the random juxtaposition of unlikely words or concepts. Pimentel is a historian, not a biologist, and his methodology is not taxonomic but essayistic. The Megatherium, despite its 20-foot length, is most closely related to tree sloths, anteaters, and armadillos. The rhinoceros is a Perissodactyla (an odd-toed ungulate): it’s related to the horse, the zebra, and the tapir, and like them it’s distinguished by the fact that it digests plant material through its intestine (rather than through multiple stomach chambers, like a cow). What do these two creatures have in common? Morphologically, they’re not terribly similar, other than both being large, exotic mammals. The book follows the lives of its two titular animals: the first rhinoceros brought to Europe in captivity and the first discovered bones of the Megatherium, a massive sloth-like beast that went extinct around 8,000 years ago. This is the duality that the Spanish historian Juan Pimentel explores in his 2010 book, The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History, now translated into English for the first time by Peter Mason.
There is perhaps no better word than “counterfeit” to describe cultural representations of the natural world.
RHINOCEROS BOOKS FULL
The phrase is often translated as “Here is an accurate representation,” or “It is here shown in its full stature,” but the German word Abcondertfet is more properly translated as “counterfeit,” and a more literal, if less idiomatic, translation might read “It is here counterfeited.” As with its English counterpart, Abcondertfet has a dual meaning: it denotes both a faithful, exact reproduction and a forgery or fraud. IN ALBRECHT DÜRER’S famous - and famously inaccurate - engraving of a rhinoceros from 1515, there is a caption above the animal that reads, in part, Das ist hie mit aller seiner gestalt Abcondertfet.