1. Introduction

While reading the Complete Works of Jorge Luis Borges[1], the unsuspecting reader may sense some estrangements that, at first, almost pass by unnoticed, but that gradually become so frequent and uncomfortable that they force their way into a conscious elaboration in the mind of the reader.

The estrangement may start with the seemingly chaotic order of dates of prologues, book publications and epilogues. Consulting the first volume of the Complete Works, in an attempt to discover exactly when Borges wrote what, you perceive that the notes by editors and the writer do little to clarify the question. Furthermore, it becomes clear that the books received additions and modifications much later than the dates of their first edition.   Evaristo Carriego, for example, from 1930, contains a citation of the book  L´empire des steppes, by the orientalist Grousset, from 1939, and a chapter – not the final one – dated from 1950, with a reference to the short story El Hombre de la Esquina Rosada, supposedly written five years after Evaristo Carriego. These are only some of the numerous anachronisms of an edition whose last phrase of the prologue seems to contain, in view of the chaotic order of the anthology, some insinuation from the author: “Puede consultarse sus Obras Completas, Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires, que siguen con suficiente rigor el orden cronológico”.

Afterwards, follow the incessant repetitions of themes, certain figures of speech, certain metaphors continuously repeated, that accentuate themselves excessively at the end of the third volume. Their excessive frequencies dismiss a mere carelessness by the author, and leaves to guessing some intentional purpose. Like musical phrases throughout a symphony, the repetitions seem to want to refer to readings of other passages from other stories or pieces of the ‘anthology’. These force a mnemonic game on the reader, that feels obligated to seek in other volumes some name or reference that his/her memory captures from some previous moment. Among these ‘musical themes’ we can cite “Heraclito, el Obscuro and his river that is time”; “ese jardín que fue tu paraíso”; the morning, the afternoon and the night; the streets of Buenos Aires; Alonso Quijano; the last wolf in England; a circular building whose immense wall does not allow the outside observer to perceive any curvature; los ojos de los ciegos; el color amarillo, among many others. “Para no ver no es imprescindible estar ciego o cerrar los ojos; vemos las cosas de memoria, como pensamos de memoria repitiendo idénticas formas o idénticas ideas.”[2]

What could all this mean? It is as if suddenly the reader suspects he/she stands in front of a puzzle. But is it really a puzzle? Starting at the second half of the book, Borges insinuates and warns in numerous ways that, yes, really, his book is a sort of puzzle: “No hay una sola cosa en el mundo que no sea misteriosa, pero ese misterio es más evidente en determinadas cosas que en otras. En el mar, en el color amarillo, en los ojos de los ancianos y en la música.”[3]. “Descubrir lo desconocido no es una especialidad de Simbad, de Erico el Rojo o de Copérnico. No hay un solo hombre que no sea un descubridor.”[4] Que misterio es una dedicatoria, una entrega de símbolos!”[5]

In the story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Albert, in search of the labyrinth book by Ts´ui Pen, imagines, in principle, a cyclical book, circular, where the first page is identical to the last. One could also begin with the example of Albert, to investigate the Complete Works by Borges as if they were this labyrinth.

In Nueve ensayos dantescos and La memoria de Shakespeare, the author presents the reader with what could be the solution to a brilliant enigma: yes, we are facing a puzzle, or better yet, a highly logical, highly ordered labyrinth, “in which the collaboration of chance is calculable at zero”[6]. The book is a great labyrinth, an expression of the universe, and the author is a fictitious god. “La noción panteísta de un Dios que también es el universo, de un Dios que es cada una de sus criaturas y el destino de esas criaturas, es quizá una herejía y un error si la aplicamos a la realidad, pero es indiscutible en su aplicación al poeta y a su obra. El poeta es cada uno de los hombres de su mundo ficticio, es cada soplo y cada pormenor. Una de sus tareas, no la más fácil, es ocultar o disimular esa omnipresencia.”[7]. And, to capture the work, the reader should adopt a platonic mode of perceiving reality, abolishing the individual, what he has that is irreducible and odd, and adopt the orders, the genres, the classifications, as the true reality.

As Williamson puts it, regarding the short story The Congress, “as conexões não são feitas pelas ligações causais de um romance realista, mas pelo tipo de “magia contagiosa” que Borges recomendara em “A arte da narrative e a magia”, em um ensaio de 1932.”[8]

The depth of dramatic action of his characters is given by the infinite repetition that, when superimposed, acquire weight, a concreteness, a reality that they did not have individually. It is a platonic work in which the individual are only prefigurations and little imperfect fragments of great archetypes, that we can only see per speculum, in aenigmate. One good example is what happens to the heroine that sometimes is called Beatriz. This heroine gains concreteness and deepness through its various appearance throughout the book – as in the short story Aleph, or metamorphosed in Ulrikke or in Nora Erfjord and the red haired Beatriz Frost, in the short novel The Congress, but, above all, in the very personal description of Dante´s forever lost love for his beloved Beatriz in Nueve Ensayos Dantescos.  

As Davi Arriguci Jr. asserts, “it became commonplace among critics to see him as author of a hallucinated vision of the universe, artist of language centered on himself and always isolated from the real, placed beyond immediate circumstances, hovering over an abstract universalism, rather phantasmal (…) In Borges, on the contrary, the difficulty lies in critically comprehending the particular ballast of ostensible universalism. (…) A fictional universe whose concrete moorings exist, but are hidden or stripped in imaginary situations and specific positions in the work, diagrammatic and abstract.”[9]

Reading the novel as a whole, this particular ballast whose absence every reader of Borges miss becomes evident if we perceive that, for example, each one of the authors that he considers, each one of the small biographical notes on Keats, Hawthorne, Cervantes, Wells, Edward Fitzgerald, Whitman, Dante and many others is in reality the biography of one unique author, that is, ultimately, Borges himself. Likewise all Borges´ writings in the Complete Works belong to a single novel.

To Borges, the reader and the writer are also one person, the reader and the writer are characters or dreams in the mind of the pantheistic God, and Borges brought this identification between writer and reader to the ultimate consequences, doing so that his novel could only effectively exist, become real, after having been read and comprehended by the reader. “A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”

Besides Borges leaves all dramatic actions to be perceived throughout the novel without effectively narrating them, but just insinuating them – a guilt, a fear of not having courage or value, a love forever lost, – all ‘ce que dit la bouche d´ombre’ is part of this plot, though mostly still hidden from the eyes of the reader, but that, nevertheless, is found there, encrypted.

2. The threads of Ariadne

“El hilo se ha perdido; el laberinto se ha perdido también. Ahora ni siquiera sabemos si nos rodea un laberinto, un secreto cosmos, o un caos azaroso. Nuestro hermoso deber es imaginar que hay un laberinto y un hilo.”

El hilo de la fábula, pg. 477, v. III

As inextricable as it may seem, the narrative in Borges’ book is a formal one – there is a narrator, a protagonist, a heroine and primitive core narrative, that multiply and morph into a ‘vertiginous pullulation of dramatis personae’, in an ‘almost inextricable corpus poeticum’ that is more resemblant to a ‘juego con espejos que se desplazan[10]The duty of the reader is to discover who these characters are, their narrative cores and the possible forms of reading, that may be, apparently, infinite. “The work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is everything for everyone, like the Apostle; it is a mirror that reveals the traits of the reader and is also a map of the world. Furthermore, all should take place in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author” [11] Thus, Borges makes available to the reader a series of threads of Ariadne that permit the various possible meanings of the reading to be explored without getting irremediably lost in the narrative labyrinth. Now I will comment of some of these.


a.  repetitions

Throughout his book, Borges interspersed a series of repetitions (of phrases, metaphors, names and themes) that, disguised as possible obsessions of the author, were nothing more than guiding threads that permit the reader to wander through his labyrinth. “Mis aparentes negligencias, como la repetición de les absences dans l´infini de que apologéticamente habla Hugo fueron deliberadas. Las toleré, o intercalé, para que mi discurso no estubiera claro.

The reader that takes the time to carry out an assessment of these ‘archeological pieces’ may unearth true subterranean columns of words that are supporting a hidden cathedral. As we already affirmed above, the repetitions are dramatically accentuated at the end of the volume, when Borges seems to force a mnemonic game on his readers. Here, we limit ourselves to pointing out only a few examples:

The poem Haydée Lange (pg. 484), and 1983 (pg. 436), that also tells of the meeting with the ghost of Haydée, in a restaurant, where on the table there were “trozos de pan”. The poems Un sueño en Alemanha (pg. 416) and Sueño soñado en Edinburgo (pg. 480), with small variations, are practically identical, and begin in the same way: “Tus mayores te engendran. En la otra frontera de los desiertos hay unas aulas polvorientas…”. The poem Un lobo, repeated entirely on pages 407 and 472 of volume III, are references to the story Ulrica, on page 17. The poem El 22 de agosto de 1983 (pg. 444) – “sea lo que fuere, las vísperas y la cargada memoria son más reales que el presente intangible” – is an obvious reference to the story Veinticinco de agosto, 1983 (pg. 375).

Some verses in a foreign language are cited frequently, and Borges repeated them with insistence because he knew this would provoke a strong impression on the reader. “Por eso los versos en un idioma extranjero tienen un prestigio que no tienen en el idioma propio, porque se oye, porque se ve cada una de las palabras: pensamos en la belleza, en la fuerza, o simplemente en lo extraño de ellas” (pg. 280, v. III). Some examples include “Ce que dit la bouche d´ombre” (pg. 275, pg. 406 e pg. 343), “Alles Nahe werde fern” (todo cercano se aleja), by Goethe (pg. 285 e pg. 460), “l´hydre-Univers tordant son corps écaillé d´astres (pg. 15 e pg. 264), “dolce color d´oriental zaffiro” (pg. 211 e pg. 362), “the thing I am” (pg. 196).

In relation to the poets, thinkers, literary characters and books, that abundantly frequented the entire work, Alonso Quijano is among the most omnipresent (pages  94, 202, 213, 215 and 469), as were Dante, Francesca and Paolo, Shakespeare, Macbeth and a Thousand and one nights.

Instigated by the repetitions at the end of the third volume, the reader is brought to seek other repetitions that his/her more distant memory recaptures from pages read longer ago, and discovers numerous correspondences between the poems and texts written at the end of the third volume, the poems and texts at the beginning of the first volume and, subsequently, in all three volumes of the Complete Works.

For example, Recoleta is the title of the poem on page 18 of volume I and the poem in prose on page 447 of volume III. Recoleta, the famous cemetery in Buenos Aires where Borges expected to be buried, is the title of both the poems whose topic is death – “el espacio y el tiempo son formas suyas, son instrumentos mágicos del alma, y cuando ésta se apague, se apagarán con ella el espacio, el tiempo y la muerte, como al cesar la luz caduca el simulacro de los espejos que ya la tarde fue apagando”(pg. 18, v. I), and “Aquí bajo los epitafios y las cruces no hay casi nada. Aquí no estaré yo. Estarán mi pelo y mis uñas, que no sabrán que lo demás ha muerto, y seguirán creciendo y serán polvo. Aquí no estaré yo, que seré parte del olvido que es la tenue sustancia de que está hecho el universo.” (pg. 447, v. III).

Los ojos de los ciegos” are present at various instances of the third volume and on page 39 of volume I. The “trozos de pan”, present on the table at which Borges meets the ghost of Haydée Lange (pg. 436, v. III), are also present in the poem Singladura (pg. 65, v. I): “En la cubierta, quietamente, yo comparto la tarde con mi hermana, cómo un trozo de pan”.

From words, names and metaphors, we can move to themes. Entire narratives are repeated throughout the three volumes of the Complete Works of Jorge Luis Borges. The story of Simurgh, king of the birds, is told on page 418 in volume I, in Enigma de Edward Fitzgerald, on pg. Xx, v. II, and on page 364 of volume III[12]. El truco, a poem on page 22 of Fervor de Buenos Aires, begins with the same phrase as the fourth chapter of Evaristo Carriego, El Truco: “Cuarenta naipes han desplazado la vida/ cuarenta naipes quieren desplazar la vida” (pg. 145, v. I). Una vindicación de la cábala (pg. 209, v. I) and Una vindicación del falso Basílides (pg. 213, v. I) repeat the same themes of La cábala (pg. 267, v. III).

It is fitting to also cite the themes of the hero and the traitor, the defiant that always dies in the end, the duel, the sudden revelation and the discovery of something that is beyond the comprehension of human logic, whose last example of the book is in the story Tigres azules: “El mismo anhelo de orden que en el principio creó las matemáticas hizo que yo buscara un orden en esa aberración de las matemáticas que son las insensatas piedras que engendran” (pg. 385, v. III).

The examples could be multiplied indefinitely. However, those already cited are sufficient to demonstrate that, beyond the threads of Ariadne, these repetitions are also threads of Ariacne that construct a narrative web, so that the apparently scattered and disparate sections of an anthology are joined in a whole narrative with a beginning, middle and end and whose overlap gives unprecedented depth to the characters and the drama that unfolds.

Thus, the numerous stories whose theme is the traitor and the hero, the brave and the coward or the man dreaming of another man and is dreamed up by another, are all variations of the same story that, contrary to what happens in the majority of narratives, covers all possible alternatives. The characters of this book, beyond living numerous destinies, assume infinite personalities and are, ultimately, always the same. “So complex is reality, so fragmented and so simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an undefined and almost infinite number of biographies about a man, highlighting independent facts, so that we would have to read many of them before realizing that the protagonist is the same”[13].  

3. Possible summary

 “Ts´ui Pên diría una vez: Me retiro a escribir un libro. Y otra: Me retiro a construir un laberinto. Todos imaginaron dos obras; nadie pensó que libro y laberinto eran un solo objeto…Se enclaustró durante trece años en el Pabellón de la Límpida Soledad. A su muerte, los herederos no encontraron sino manuscritos caóticos.”

El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, pg. 476, v. I


Nueve ensayos dantescos, pg. 344, v. III

When did Jorge Luis Borges begin to write his great book? When did he have the intuition of his great work?  According to Edwin Williamson (Borges, a Life), there are innumerable times when Borges mentioned the desire or the project to write “a single page, a single poem, a single book – an authentic masterpiece – that would be enough to justify the life of a writer”[14] and a book “where all my previous books would be involved, a new book, but that would summarize and be, beyond this, the conciliation of all I have written up to now….”[15]

As Williamson points it, “in my view, around 1940, Borges had the idea of a new Beatriz that would give him what Norah promised but never fulfilled: a love that would inspire him to write the autobiographic masterpiece to justify his life as man and writer.”[16]

Or in Borges´ character voice: “Escribirás el libro con el que hemos soñado tanto tiempo. Hacia 1979 comprenderás que tu supuesta obra no es otra cosa que una serie de borradores, de borradores misceláneos, y cederás a la vana y supersticiosa tentación de escribir tu gran libro. La superstición que nos ha infligido el Fausto de Goethe, Salammbô, el Ulysses.”[17]

In 1974, the first complete version of what Borges considered his masterpiece was published, the first Spanish language publication of his Complete Works, in only one volume, by the editor Emecé, in Barcelona. As the raw material for his drama was his life, two new expanded and revised versions followed in 1984 and 1989, including the events that took place during the last decade of the author’s life. Borges postponed the conclusion of his drama to after his death, for when his labyrinth book would (if it would) be discovered.

All these events are commented upon by the actual author in his vast work, a novel that covers sections of epics, poetry, philosophical and literary discussions, that begins at the start of the first volume of his Complete Works, and ends at the conclusion of the third volume, over a total of more than a thousand pages. Written in first person, the hidden narrator is Borges, that proposes to tell the story of his life and work – from childhood to death, passing through a bildungsroman during the formative years of the young poet, that dreamed about creating a mythology of the city of Buenos Aires and about writing a great literary work, but feared not having the talent to accomplish his aspirations.

The narrator Borges (one of them) also dreams or suspects being the simulacrum dreamed up by another Borges, who dreams of being a simulacrum dreamed up by another Borges, and so on in an infinite numerical sequence, and thus turning the novel into an almost inextricable web of parallel, convergent and divergent narratives.

One of the roles of the reader is to try to separate this intricacy of threads and distinguish the possible narrative axes: one biographic axis, one mythical axis, one metalinguistic axis, one literal axis, one literary axis etc. However, this allocation of meanings will always be ambiguous – the author does not offer only one key to his symbols, but insinuates various possible keys and makes clear that all are true.

To the ‘Mayores’, for example, a biographic meaning can be assigned that, in this case, is the literal one (Borges’ ancestors), a literary meaning (Borges’ precursory authors) or a metalinguistic meaning (the author that engendered the narrator that engendered his characters etc.).

In Nueve ensayos dantescos, Dante, for example, could be Dante Alighieri, the florentine writer, or the narrating character of the Divine Comedy, or it could be Borges narrating some autobiographical experiences of his life in an encrypted manner. In reality, Dante (the symbol) is each one of these characters and all them at the same time.

And this happens not only with Dante, but also in every single piece of  biographic essays written by Borges on a great variety of authors. We should keep in mind that, when Borges is speaking about Hawthorne, Coleridge, Keats, Kafka and Shakespeare he is also referring to Borges, because, to the pantheistic god that created that Universe (the Complete Works) all authors are the same person, and Borges is also each one of them. If we pay close attention, each one of the small biographies included in his vast book, necessarily deal with the same man. As Borges puts it, “Virgilio, Homero, Horacio, Ovidio and Lucano are projections or figurations of Dante nella Commedia, y hablan de letras, que otro podrían hacer, y están en el infierno porque los olvida Beatriz.[18]

In this sense, the ambiguity of meanings plays a fundamental role in Borges’ work. The important part is not what the author wanted to say, but what he wanted to insinuate, as Borges demonstrates brilliantly on the pages about the false problem of Ugolino, in Nueve ensayos dantescos.“The work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is everything for everyone, like the Apostle”[19]

Borges’ work has another fundamental characteristic: the mixture of literary genres. A critical essay can be a biographic short story, a short story of magical realism can be a disguised reference to Borges’ work and so on.

And, finally, the novel can also be read as Jorge Luis Borges, the author, speaking of himself, confusing his life with his work and writing his biographic novel in an encrypted manner – beginning with his childhood described  in poems with abundant references to gardens, mornings, his sister and other places he used to visit during his childhood, like in the poem Singladura: “En la cubierta, quietamente, yo comparto la tarde con mi hermana, como un trozo de pan[20]

Then the book passes to his formative years (which narrative core is the novel Evaristo Carriego, a biography of the Argentinean poet that could also be understood as the young Borges bildungsroman, the formative years of our young hero that has finally set himself free from the verja con lanzas were he has been kept confined during his childhood. “¿Que había, mientras tanto, del otro lado de la verja con lanzas? ¿Qué destinos vernáculos y violentos fueron cumpliéndose a unos pasos de mí, en el turbio almacén o en el azaroso baldío?[21]

Evaristo Carriego is just the first of numerous literary metamorphoses through which the narrator Borges passes within the book, which is made from a succession of individual short stories that, throughout the novel, draw an inconceivable figure, an inconceivable being whose existence can be perceived only by the ‘divine intelligence of a pantheistic God – the author.

Borges, the character, who lives in a time poorly understood by the hodiern construction of time to which we are accustomed, has two encounters with his double. In both meetings, the narrative theme is Borges’ life – the past, the future and the present life of the narrator. In the second meeting, in the story Veinticinco de agosto, 1983, the narrator is the younger Borges, who is only 61 years old, and goes to the hotel Las Delicias in Adrogué, where he intends to commit suicide. There he encounters his older double, the 84 year old Borges, who just took a fatal dose of some poison and was preparing himself to die in his room in the house on calle Maipú, on the 25 of August 1983.

The narrative is infinite, since at the end of his life the old Borges reveals to the younger one his tragic destiny – leaving it up to the young Borges to write yet again his grand work and tragically lose it, referring the end of the reading to its beginnings, infinitely. As Irala points out in The Congress: “Every few centuries,” he said, “the Library of Alexandria must be burned down.”[22]

Borges imagined and constructed a book that would represent the universe, a highly ordered microcosm without any randomly placed words, where everything corresponded to a conscious design established by the author, but unknown to readers and seemingly unfathomable. This pantheistic vision is brought to all dimensions of his work. Each character is also the author and the author is each one of the characters, a writer is all writers and each writer is a receptacle that merges the collective memory of the literary culture of humanity, as expressed in La Memoria de Shakespeare. Borges is all men and each man is Borges.

Like his protagonist, Borges imposed on himself an extremely tragic destiny. He dedicated a large part of his life to writing his great work and hid it within an impalpable labyrinth, made of time and symbols, to later sacrificing it to the inscrutable designs of an inhumane god – or chance – leaving him with only the dream of an eventual discovery, by some eventual reader, of the ultimate order of this labyrinth, the logic of this apparent chaos.

Also in some of his last writings, especially La Rosa de Paracelso and La Memoria de Shakespeare it is clear his longing for a forthcoming disciple, someone that could decipher his labyrinth. Estoy seguro que el señor Fulano de Tal, de cuyo nombre no puedo acordarme, vio de golpe algo que ningún hombre, desde el principio de la historia, había visto”. [23]

Or , in La Rosa de Paracelso,


“Paracelso pidió a su Dios, a su indeterminado Dios, a cualquier Dios, que le enviara un discípulo


Paracelso dijo con lentitud:

– El camino es la Piedra. El punto de partida es la Piedra. Si no entiendes estas palabras, no has empezado aún a entender. Cada paso que darás es la meta.

El otro lo miró con recelo. Dijo con voz distinta:

– Pero, ¿hay una meta?

Paracelso se rió.

– Mis detractores, que no son menos numerosos que estúpidos, dicen que no y me llaman un impostor. No les doy la razón, pero no es imposible que sea un iluso. Sé que ‘hay’ un Camino.”[24]


Paracelso se quedó solo. Antes de apagar la lámpara y de sentarse en el fatigado sillón, volcó el tenue puñado de ceniza en la mano cóncava y dijo una palabra en voz baja. La rosa resurgió.

 Many times throughout the book Borges defines his task as atrocious.  “El ejecutor de una empresa atroz debe imaginar que ya la ha cumplido, debe imponerse un porvenir que sea irrevocable como el pasado.” (pg. 474, v. I). His death, in 1986, forever sealed his ignorance with respect to the future destiny of his labyrinthine book.

[1] Starting here, all references to the Complete Works by Jorge Luis Borges refer to the edition published in Spanish by Emecé Editores, Barcelona, 2nd edition, 1996.

[2] Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. Emecé Editores, Barcelona, 2nd edition, 1996, pg. 421, v. III.

[3] Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. Emecé Editores, Barcelona, 2nd edition, 1996, pg. 412, v. III

[4] Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. Emecé Editores, Barcelona, 2nd edition, 1996, pg. 401, v. III

[5] Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. Emecé Editores, Barcelona, 2nd edition, 1996, pg. 451, v. III

[6] Outras Inquisições, which refers to the Brazilian edition, Companhia das Letras, 2007.

pg. 146.

[7] Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. Emecé Editores, Barcelona, 2nd edition, 1996, pg. 344, v. III

[8] Williamson, Edwin. Borges, uma Vida. Cia. Das Letras, 2011, pg. 306. Free translation: “Connections are not made by a causal links typical from a realist novel, but by the kind of “contagious magic”  that Borges recommended in “The art of narrative and magic” in an essay from 1932”.

[9] Outras Inquisições, which refers to the Brazilian edition, Companhia das Letras, 2007.

pg. 23.

[10] Obras Completas, editora Emecé, Barcelona, 1996, pg. 163, v. I).

[11] Free translation from the Portuguese edition of  Outras Inquisições, Cia. Das Letras, pg. 110).

[12] For an extensive analysis of the meaning of the Simurgh tale in Borges work, see Williamson, Edwin. Borges, uma Vida. Cia. Das Letras, 201, pgs. 221, 224-226, 232, 362, 465, 486, 500-504, 520 and 527.

[13] Free translation from the Portuguese edition of  Outras Inquisições, Cia. Das Letras, 2011, pg. 156.

[14]Free translation from the Portuguese edition of Borges, a Life, Cia das Letras, pg 183, 2011.

[15]Free translation from Noticias graficas, 6 de setembro de 1955, p. 5. Included in Textos recobrados, 1931-1955, pg. 371 ´19 July 19th, 1955. In Borges, a Life, Cia das Letras, 2011.

[16] Williamson, Edwin. Borges: A Life. Companhia das Letras, 2011, pg. 287

[17] Obras Completas, editora Emecé, Barcelona, 1996, pg. 377, v. III

[18] Borges, J. L. Obras Completas, pg. 344, v. III, Emecé Editores. Barcelona, 1996.

[19] Outras Inquisições, pg. 110, which refers to the Brazilian edition, Companhia das Letras, 2011.

[20] Borges, J. L. Obras Completas, pg. 65, v. I, Emecé Editores. Barcelona, 1996.

[21] Borges, J. L. Obras Completas, Evaristo Carriego, v. I, Emecé Editores. Barcelona, 1996.

[23]  Obras Completas (The Complete Works) by Jorge Luis Borges, Emecé Editores, Barcelona, 2ª edição, 1996, pg. 421, v. III.

[24] Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. Emecé Editores, Barcelona, 2nd edition, pgs. 387, 388, v. III

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