For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a tale of another world by the Argentine writer Luciano Lamberti, thrilling and poignant in equal measure. In fragments, the land of the giants is disclosed to us: a wilderness of impenetrable jungle, cloud-topped mountains, and carnivorous titans, all hidden behind mirrored portals. But as the years wear on and human explorers venture farther and farther into this new world, the same mysterious giants that they seek are driven out, until nothing is left but their tombs. Of course, Lamberti’s explorers are as loathe to learn from their mistakes as the colonial plunderers of our own devastated world, and what follows is no mere fable of human avarice, but a much subtler examination of how we fail, even in crisis, to see ourselves clearly in the mirror. The world of the giants is vividly rendered in Jordan Landsman‘s translation, as plain-spoken as any researcher’s fieldnotes, but at the same time as powerfully strange as any dream half-remembered before dawn. Read on!
EXPLORATIONS, ORIGIN. 1926. An eight-year-old Russian boy named Irino Shava accidentally discovers the first portal while investigating the basement of an abandoned house on the outskirts of Moscow. The portal is embedded in the southern wall of the basement, and little Irino cautiously passes through its mirrored surface with his finger, then with his hand and his arm, and finally with his whole body. He sees a wide valley covered in jungle surrounded by a huge chain of mountains lost in a blue fog. A flock of black birds cross the sky. Irino hears a noise that at first he mistakes for thunder, but it is the footfalls of an approaching giant, running and squashing trees as if they were tufts of grass. Terrified, Irino takes a step back and tumbles onto the damp basement floor. The following day he returns with his school friends and shows them his discovery. The two bravest boys cross through the portal. They will never return. In 1972, a team of North American explorers finds one of them living in the jungle. He is bearded and disheveled. The explorers try to carry him back, but the man no longer remembers how to speak or use cutlery, and he dies shortly thereafter for reasons unknown. The other one is never heard from again.
EXPLORATIONS, ORIGIN II. At first, the portal Irino discovered becomes a tourist attraction for the Russian nobility. One night, Tolstoy himself visits the basement. Upon leaving, he writes to his politically-connected brother-in-law and asks him to shut it down. “The nobility’s access to that place is an aberration,” he says in one of his angry paragraphs. Later, in his diaries, there’s a reference to a prelapsarian dimension “upon which man should not trample.” But it’s too late. A special government commission has already sent the first explorers; three scientists outfitted in diving gear and wet suits. The men cross through the portal, take the first samples from the other side, and make the first “controlled” contact with a 70-ton albino. As a result of this encounter, one of the scientists dies and another goes insane. He spends the rest of his life in a padded room. When asked what he saw, he says “Отец,” which means “Father.”
PORTALS. Over the years, more portals were discovered: in Jordan (1946), in Kenya (1963), in the Sechura desert in Peru (1980). They all lead to the so-called “land of the giants,” and give rise to territorial disputes and regrettable periods of colonialism. In 1993, an Armenian shepherd follows one of his rebellious sheep into a cave, where he finds what becomes known as portal number IV. We know there are many more portals hidden inside and on the surface of the earth. In his travel logs, Ozuku Né of Japan records an encounter with a Mexican peasant who, many years prior to Irino’s discovery, had fallen into a well on the outskirts of Rancho Seco only to wake up in the middle of the jungle being observed with curiosity by a red, 130-foot-tall giant. Ozuku Né offered to bring him back, but the Mexican declined because, according to him, he had become accustomed to the place and even “liked it.” Né describes him as a man with huge muscles and rotting teeth, who lived off fish and had built a shelter to protect himself from the giants when they were in “eating mode.” He also describes him as the possessor of a rare form of peace.
SWISS ELDER SYNDROME. Explorers sent to the country of the giants come back different. Some of them desert the expedition halfway through and settle in the forests surrounding the southern mountains. There, they dedicate themselves to the buying and selling of second-hand goods. This produces a population of ragged and treacherous locals selling guided jungle tours or else violently shunning any contact with other human beings. This erratic behavior has come to be known as “Swiss Elder Syndrome,” a term coined in the 1980s by the Italian researcher Cavaltinni. In his reports, Cavaltinni tells of an old man he met on one of his trips. Shut away in a cave illuminated by kerosene lamps, the man had filled dozens of moleskin notebooks with his fundamental work: A Natural History of the Giants. To write it, the old man lived for more than thirty years with a pack of brown giants near a waterfall to the east. He claims to have gained their confidence gradually, and after many years says he could communicate with them through sign language. Within five years, he had taught them to use the following words: food, giant, night, man, cave, and me. His history consists of two hundred aphorisms that explorers swap around the campfire like mantras, illuminated by their incoherence. Number 58 reads: “At one point the giants could speak, but then they forgot.” Number 72: “The giants are the ancestors of man.” Number 3: “The giants are out-of-control machines.” Number 4: “The giants are not machines.” The book’s irrationality allowed Cavaltinni to develop his theories about the madness awakened by the land of the giants. Most of the notebooks have been lost, but some deserters living in the jungle claim to remember what they said, and will tell them to gullible visitors in exchange for fresh fruit and fish.
GIANTS, BEHAVIOR. After nearly two-hundred years of continuous exploration, not much is known. The giants are usually described as clumsy, anxious, and impulsive. “They live entirely through their emotions,” wrote a young Indian researcher. According to his account, they might run after a deer and squash one of their own offspring in the process. They are mostly carnivorous, though certain packs feed on seaweed and fruit. In Two Years in the Land of the Giants (1976), Friedrich Rutman writes “…when they eat, they take the animal between their fingers and shove the entire thing down their throats. Then they spit out the heads like an olive pit.” Their behavior is different with humans. “They like to crush their heads with their teeth and drink their brains like a precious juice,” says Rutman. He also notes that the mothers take care of their young during the first year of life. If, during this time, they are approached by a male, they reject him emphatically. This sometimes results in the male killing his own offspring in order to once again have the female at his disposal.
GIANTS, BEHAVIOR OF (II). According to reports, the giants have two basic modes: eating and not-eating. They are not-eating in winter when they seek refuge in the mountains, cover themselves with uprooted trees, and barely move. In the spring and summer, all they do is eat and mate. The mating process, described by various explorers as open-air shows, is thunderous and violent. The females feign disinterest; the males must chase and dominate them by force. By all accounts it looks like rape. A giant while eating or mating is the most dangerous thing imaginable, and explorers take many precautions during those seasons. Seeing the giants in heat and driven crazy from hunger leaves an indelible mark. The images hound the explorers once they return and they must spend months in a heavily controlled environment. They suffer from nightmares and post-traumatic stress, and any loud noise drives them insane.
GOD OF STONE. “The giants are gods,” wrote the disciples of Jorigao Anselmo, perhaps influenced by Genesis 6:18 (“There were giants on the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”). Jorigao’s story is fairly well-known: member of a North American expedition, ex-convict, sent to explore by order of Nixon’s army. In 1970 he suffers a “nervous breakdown” and abandons his observation post, along with the half a dozen soldiers who had been seduced by his oratory talents. Ten years later, the North American explorer Carl Baker meets a small number of these soldiers in the middle of the jungle. He has lost his squad during an attack of green giants. “I was captured by his acolytes and brought to Jorigao’s presence,” he writes. “As we approached, I spotted the statue. It stood approximately 130 feet high and was constructed from solid stone. It portrayed a standing giant, its body covered in hair and its spine curved. Jorigao was seated in the shade, writing on the ground with a stick. He was a tall man with tan skin, and he went around practically naked. He asked my captors to let me go and assured them he’d been waiting for me. I saw what he had written on the earth: my full name, including my mother’s maiden name (…) I spent two weeks living with them. They’d reached a peaceful coexistence, cultivating their own vegetables and sleeping in huts around the trees. At sunset, they worshiped the stone God. I couldn’t figure out how they’d built it: a few of the acolytes said that the giants themselves had carried the massive stones under Jorigao’s direction, which seemed unbelievable to me. They considered this defector their leader, an enlightened one, someone capable perhaps of performing miracles. One night I escaped and wandered lost for many days before finding a French observation post.”
THE FINAL DANCE. Testimonies describe the predators as “squirrels crossed with rats.” What’s certain is that the fifteen-foot-tall rodents work in groups, and the way they hunt suggests the possibility of a collective intelligence, “like a single being subdivided in parts.” In general, they attack while their prey is sleeping. They enter through the nostrils and ears and devour the brains. The giants stand up straight and jump: they call this movement “the final dance.” Minutes later, the giant collapses and in a few days the predators have completely devoured them from the inside out. In the middle of the last century, they were considered bad luck and men would shoot them for target practice or to survive, but this practice was outlawed decades ago. Their meat is inedible, dry, and fibrous, and eating it produces fever and delirium.
THE GIANT HUNTER. The Spanish explorer Rodrigo Sánchez claims to have met the giant hunter in the middle of one of the northern jungles. He was drinking from a stream when he saw a shadow cross his reflection. Then he felt a blow to his nape and lost consciousness. He woke up after a little while on the floor of a cabin. In front of him there was a man crouching. He had a thin mustache above his lip and a neat hairdo, which contrasted with the long off-white scar that crossed his face. According to Sánchez, the man dedicated himself exclusively to killing giants. To that end, he worked from morning till night building traps in the middle of the jungle. He dug six-foot holes and covered them in leaves and branches. The giants would stick their feet in them, fall, and break their ankles. “One morning,” wrote Sánchez, “we heard shouts and the hunter said one of them had fallen. We walked in the jungle for two miles until we came upon a dark shape: it was a giant, lying face down, with a broken ankle in an open fracture. A heavy rain had begun to fall. The hunter got closer and stabbed the giant in the neck with a long, sharp spike. He struck a particular part of the aorta and a river of blood gushed out and soaked him completely. But instead of feeling revulsion, he licked the blood off his hands and yelled something in a language I’m not familiar with, it might have been Bulgarian. Two hours later the giant had bled to death. There was a red lake around its neck. The hunter cut off a piece of its face and we brought it back to camp. We grilled it over a low fire and ate it. The hunter told me the face and the brain were the best. He usually cooked these parts, and salted pieces of muscle to eat during the rest of the year. But he didn’t hunt for survival, but rather revenge. This he didn’t tell me himself, but I understood him this way.”
EXPLORATIONS, FUTURE. In January of 1998, the eccentric North American millionaire Edwin Richards was the first civilian, surrounded by an entourage of soldiers, to explore the jungle of the land of the giants. He was able to observe them while they slept and take photos of himself with them. Upon his return, he floated the idea of returning with his nephews. This may be the future for the land of the giants: an enormous amusement park, full of tourists with colorful shirts and sunglasses. The European defense agencies are opposed to this fate, but with no budget for expeditions, and years of diminishing TV ratings, it may be the only one possible.
THE LAST ONES. At present, the remaining giants are unfriendly and difficult to find. Expeditions have spent months searching the mountains without spotting any. The most radical theories propose that a constant state of danger converted them from sedentary to nomadic, and now they live in hiding. Soon there will be none left. One of the main reasons is the explorers themselves, with their infectious diseases, their psychiatric problems, their senseless violence. Another is asphyxia. The German Klaus Von Klautwitz, who lived with a small pack of giants to the south of the mountains for more than a decade, developed this theory in 1946. After observing more than one hundred cases of scoliosis in the vertebral column of abandoned skeletons, he deduced that the weight of the giants, in addition to their bad natural posture, exerts pressure on the ribs, cutting off the circulation of oxygen to the brain. This happens when the giant reaches adulthood, at about three hundred years. Von Klautwitz returned home completely changed, irascible, paying little mind to hygiene and social conventions. He couldn’t stand the softness of a mattress and preferred to sleep on the mosaic tiles in his house. Shortly thereafter, he retired to his country estate and filled hundreds of notebooks with ideas, schematics, and graphics that would solve the asphyxia problem. In 1950, he appeared before a military tribunal and proposed taking “serious action.” He was also one of the first to promote restricting humans from the land of the giants, a cause that environmental groups later would adopt as their own. The members of the tribunal cleared their throats delicately and advised him to take an immersion bath and reflect on his projects. Von Kautwitz returned to his estate in a blind rage and mounted one of his horses. He galloped more than a hundred miles before he fell and died.
CITIES. When they disappeared, the giants left nothing behind except those strange cities constructed deep in the mountains; refuges from predators and the cold. We call them cities in order to circumscribe them within our linguistic abilities, although strictly speaking they are something else altogether. Throughout history, hundreds of fascinated explorers have traversed these massive vaults carved directly into the stone. To reach some of them requires descending the length of a soccer field. “Underground cathedrals,” wrote Horacio Bellaqcua, a Portuguese explorer in his celebrated chronicle “An Excursion to the City of the Giants.” (Bornie magazine, 1978). None of the explorers find even the most rudimentary signs of civilization: weapons, food stores, tools, religious or artistic symbols. All they find are the imposing skeletons lying where they died. It is often said that the giants never developed a language or even the slightest sense of community, and that they had no individual or collective memory. For others, though, the cities themselves are a language, a community, an individual and a collective memory. Soon the last packs of survivors will go extinct, and then there will be nothing left except those tremendous vaults, dark and deserted for eternity. Then the land of the giants will be nothing more than a children’s story.
Translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman
Luciano Lamberti was born in San Francisco (Córdoba) in 1978. He has published six books of short stories and five novels, a collection of poetry, and a compilation of his journalistic work. His most recent novel, Para hechizar a un cazador, obtained the Clarín Prize for best novel in 2023. He is currently teaching creative writing and working as a screenwriter.
Jordan Landsman is a writer and translator from New York City. His first translation, The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, was published in 2024 by Transit Books.