Muḥammad’s Jug

In this study I discuss twenty-three Arabic motifs in Borges’s texts and trace them back to their most likely sources. Borges did not know Arabic and gained his knowledge of the Orient from secondary sources, books by Burton, Lane, Asín Palacios, and others. In many cases Borges playfully changed these Arabic motifs, or invented new ones. In the rare occasions when he gave his sources, these were as fantastic as the stories themselves: references to non-existing tomes by non-existing scholars, to an odd book of Burton (instead of the correct one by Lane), or to an out-of-context citation from Gibbon. I succeeded in locating the sources of most of these motifs and proved for a few others that they are inventions of Borges. I could not find the source of one poem. For one motif (“Iskander’s mirror”) I could only show that it is well-documented in Oriental literature, but I could not find any likely source where Borges could have learned about it

Aesthetics · Arabic · Archaeology · Art · Citation · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · World Wide Web · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Computer Science · History · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez · Philosophy

• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

  Open Access•Edward Gibbon, J B Bury•History of the Decline and Fall…•2013

  Incluir item

• Mahomet and his successors

  Washington Irving•1868

  Incluir item

• The Thousand and One Nights

  Muhsin S Mahdi•The Thousand and One Nights•1995

  Incluir item

• The Signs of Prophecy

  Open Access•Sarah Stroumsa•Harvard Theological Review•1985

  Incluir item

• Manners and Customs of Literary Appropriation

  David Ling, David J Ling•Arabica•2012

  Incluir item

• The Subtleties of the Ascension

  FREDERICK S COLBY•Studia Islamica•2002

  Incluir item

• In Search of Arabic Influences on Borges

  Erika Spivakovsky•Hispania•1968

  Incluir item

• Reading with Discrepant Engagement

  Ronald A T Judy, R A Judy•boundary 2•2010

  Incluir item

• Hobson-Jobson

  Michael C Shapiro, Henry Yule et al.•Journal of the American Oriental…•1989

  Incluir item

• The narreme in the medieval Romance epic. An introduction to narrative structures

  Open Access•James M Anderson•Lingua•1970

  Incluir item

• The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic

  Alan S Kaye, Jonathan Cowan et al.•Journal of the American Oriental…•1977

  Incluir item

• Semitic Mysteries, Universal Truths

  Erin Graff Zivin•Latin American and Caribbean…•2011

  Incluir item