Averroës spends the day struggling to translate Aristotle into Arabic, before going to a dinner with tiresome, poetry-spouting intellectuals. One guest, a traveller from an antic land, confuses the others with his reportage: there are foreigners who, instead of telling a story in a civilized manner, do a bewildering activity of many people pretending (like little kids) to be the different characters who feature in that story. They’re actors, in China, but the whole concept of what they’re doing is inconceivable to the scholars in Córdoba.
That’s what this main story is about: the incommunicability of ideas, over time, through languages, and into different cultures. But, suggests the narrator, “History will record few things lovelier and more moving than this Arab physician’s devotion to the thoughts of a man separated from him by a gulf of fourteen centuries.”
This understanding of another is what the narrator, too, is attempting, as he explains when he pops up, Beatrix Potter-like, at the end. But as in all of Borges, there are mirrors and stage-sets, perspective changes and reverse shots everywhere: he feels that “my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story.”
Originally published in Spanish as ‘La busca de Averroes’ in Sur, 1947. First collected in El Aleph, Editorial Losada, 1949. First published in English trs by Norman Thomas de Giovanni in The Aleph and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1971. This edition, Penguin, 2000
A Personal Anthology 