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.
