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This brief epigraph contains many interrelated themes associated with the writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986): the cultic and occultic nature of literature, writing as transcription and archive, the message in cipher whose deferred meaning appears only "after the fact," and in mistranslation. In his critical writings, Borges mentions Aristotle on several occasions, frequently in opposition to Plato. But the most poignant mentioning is through another, through a man who became known as the Commentator to medieval Europe just as Aristotle was known there as the Philosopher: Ibn Rushd, aka Averroes, protagonist of the story "Averroes's Search" ("La busca de Averroës"; hereinafter AS).¹ The story first appeared in the magazine El Sur in 1947 before being collected in El Aleph (1949). AS incorporates the themes of both translation and mimesis and brings them into conjunction and conflict by making translation depend upon the translator's total conversion to the culture of the original. Failing that conversion, as happens in this story, both translation and mimesis fail, and the incomprehensible "message" is passed on wrapped in a black box.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137001016_7

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