The Centaur

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A centaur, who is the lone survivor of the mythical species, roams the Earth evading capture and persecution by human beings. As he travels toward his home country, which he has avoided returning to for millennia, he struggles to reconcile the opposite needs of his two halves: he possesses the mind and upper body of a man and the lower body of a horse. In this tale, Saramago explores the universal themes of alienation, loneliness, dualism, and the human fear and hatred of the unknown.

The short story was first published in Portuguese in José Saramago's short story collection Objecto Quase published by Editorial Caminho of Lisbon in 1978 and 1984. An English edition, The Lives of Things, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, was first published in 2012 by Verso. The short story previously appeared in English in 2004 by Picador in the anthology Telling Tales, edited by Nadine Gordimer.

It is in many ways a unique story. Here is a creature imagined, something that is higher and better and different from a man. Here is the dream of a creature that is half horse, half man, who has the physical fitness of a horse and the mental complexity of a man. This extraordinary fable shows the depths of the human confusion that the creature faces. It is a wonderful way of looking into the conflict between what one's body desires or dictates – sexual desire as part of our power; it's through sexual desire that you take possession, after all – and many of one's other ideals about how we ought to approach another being. There's as much in this little story as in 20 novels and 20 poems. -- Nadine Gordimer