Mohammed's Jug: Arabic Motifs in Borges's Texts (UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT (original) (raw)
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, 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.
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Related papers
Gamāl al-Ghīt ̣ānī's Pyramid Texts and the Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges: A Comparative Study
The Egyptian author Gamāl al-Ghīṭ ānī (b. 1945) published Pyramid Texts in 1994; nevertheless, the present scholarship on al-Ghīṭ ānī overlooks Pyramid Texts. In the absence of studies on Pyramid Texts, this article approaches the text from two vantage points. First it asserts that it is a metafictional text. The assertion is based on its attributes as a parataxical, non-representational, and self-referential text that belongs to the " anti-novel " and deals with metafictional themes. Secondly, it contends that formal attributes of Pyramid Texts derive from the fiction of the Argen-tine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The justification for such a contention emanates from their mutual use of geometric forms in the form of pyramids and labyrinths as metaphors. In this respect, the labyrinthine setting in Borges' fiction gives the text its form, and functions simultaneously as a metaphor for the narrative's ontological and metafictional concerns. Al-Ghīṭānī substituted the pyramid for the labyrinth; in the fiction of Borges his images remain horizontal, whereas al-Ghīṭ ānī gave Pyramid Texts the vertical form of a pyramid. The intertextuality between Pyramid Texts and the work of Borges centers on the use of geometric images of infinity in the form of pyramids and labyrinths as metaphors for fictional concerns.
Arabic: Oxford Handbook of Literatures of the Roman Empire
This article offers an overview of Arabic literature of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods. Although a wide range of examples and genres-proverbs, maxims, etiological tales, folk and religious lore-is discussed, the chapter focuses on the preeminent early Arabic literary genre, the originally orally composed and transmitted ode (s. qaṣīdah, pl. qaṣāʾid) of the mostly Bedouin Arab tribes, prior to the coming of Islam. Through its elegiac nasīb depicting the abandoned campsite and lost beloved; the raḥīl, desert journey by she-camel; and its compelling madīḥ, praise of the patron's virtues, the qaṣīdah encoded and preserved the ethos of the warrior aristocacry of the pre-Islamic period and together with the Qurʾān formed the literary-cultural foundation for the most extensive of the Semitic literatures, that of Arab-Islamic civilization.
Ilahiyat Studies, 2010
In this paper, we try to understand Jorge Luis Borges' references to the East, especially Islamic thought, by analyzing his short stories, including Averroes' Search and The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald. This paper also attempts to conceptualize Borges' philosophical gesture. It seems that we could reconstruct his deep epistemological insights through the metaphor of palimpsest writing. In this way, it is supposed to answer the question of orientalism in Borges' work and clarify the difference between to be an orientalist and re-appropriating the orient. Finally, this paper critiques the "native orientalism" of Muslim thinkers in the Islamic philosophical context through the case of Borges.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.