Muḥammad’s Jug

Arabic Motifs in Borges’s Texts

Bibliographic Data

ID21486396
AuthorsGábor Korvin (0000-0003-2248-7684, Centro de Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume46
Pages103-147
Publication date2024-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Arabist Budapest Studies in Arabic (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0239-1619
PublisherKőrösi Csoma Társaság (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.58513/arabist.2024.46.4
OpenAlexW4398226008
LanguageEN
References cited12

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