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About this Finder's Guide

This index provides reference information to the people, places and texts mentioned in the works of Jorge Luis Borges. To find a reference, type the word into the box provided. The more specific the entry, the more likely you will be to find the information you are looking for. For example, if looking for Edgar Allan Poe, you will have better results entering "Edgar Poe" or "Allan Poe," as Poe alone will call up all entries containing the letters "poe." With each entry, you will find an abbreviated title of the work in which the reference appears, highlighted in blue. Scrolling over this title you will be provided with the complete publication information. Please refer to Abbreviations for more information.

This index is based on Daniel Balderston's The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges, published by Greenwood Press in Westport, Connecticut, in 1986, a couple of months after Borges's death in Geneva. The frontmatter for the 1986 volume is available here. Inevitably the 1986 book used the editions that were available at the time, including the single volume Obras completas of 1974. (Since then there have been three different editions of the Obras completas, first in three, then in four, volumes, the latest with different pagination.) The indications under the Type criterion correspond to: N, names; P, places; T, titles.

Since the time of The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges's publication, a number of important compilations of dispersed materials have been released, including the three volumes of Textos recobrados (1919-1929, 1930-1955 and 1956-1986), several editions of scattered articles (Textos cautivos, Borges en El Hogar and Borges en Sur), two additional collections of prologues (Biblioteca personal and El círculo secreto) , a collection of texts on Cervantes (Cervantes y el Quijote) and a collection of early letters (Cartas del fervor). In addition, the three early books of essays that Borges did not permit to be republished in his lifetime, InquisicionesEl tamaño de mi esperanza and El idioma de los argentinos) have been reissued by Seix Barral. This revised index includes all of the above materials, using the editions cited above.

Please note that the 1986 index included both explicit and implicit references: thus, a reference to a white whale was indexed under both Melville and Moby Dick. The newer parts of this index also include this sort of implicit reference to the extent possible. We welcome suggestions and corrections: please send them to borges@pitt.edu.

Borges is widely translated into many languages, and this index cannot take these many editions into account. When the table of contents of the works listed above are posted on this website our users should be able to find the texts they are searching in whatever language their editions are, using the titles of the original texts and the book in which they originally appeared.

The references provided by Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Huges: A Dictionary of Borges (London: Duckworth, 1990) have also been incorporated. This text contains references to Borges' stories. You can also find references to Cristina Parodi's Borges-Bioy in context. A guided reading by H. Bustos Domecq and B. Suárez Lynch (Borges Center / University of Pittsburgh, 2018).

For further details on the cronology and details of Borges's thousands of works, see the Time Line section of this website and Nicolás Helft's Jorge Luis Borges: bibliografia completa (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997).

Daniel Balderston has directed this project. He is grateful for the assistance of the following graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa: Leah Leone, Carlos Mario Mejía, Alfredo Duplat, María Laura Bocaz, Raphael Apter, Andrés Forero and Corey Rubin. Many thanks to Meike Botterweg who tirelessly compiled tens of thousands of references into the current online file. Gregory Johnson of the Language Media Center helped clean up the data. Andrew Rinner and Stephen Bowers of Information Technology Services succeeded in extracting the data from WordStar files on old five and a quarter inch disks. Andrew Rinner and Puja Das built the interface turning the data into a searchable database. Ken Clinkenbeard designed the Borges Center webpage, and Andrew Rinner and Puja Das modified it to provide access to this index. Randy Oest accomplished the transfer of the index to the University of Pittsburgh webpage.