What Kafka said in his diaries is telling in this respect: “Usually the one whom you are looking for lives next door.” Trying to explain this odd phenomenon, he writes: “The reason is that you know nothing of this neighbour whom you are looking for.” This is understandable, but the issue assumes more complexity when he adds: “you know neither that you are looking for him nor that he lives next door, in which case he certainly lives next door.” We notice in this statement a blatant contradiction, which is undoubtedly intentional: on one side, we do not know that we are looking for the neighbour nor do we realize that he lives next door; on the other, and precisely because of our ignorance, we are certain that he lives next door.
This paradox must have certainly occurred to Borges when he was writing his well-known story “Averroës’ Search.” The title in Arabic, one must remark, conceals what is suggested in the original Spanish, La busca de Averroës—or in its French rendition—where it means, at one and the same time, both searching for Averroës and the search that Averroës is conducting in his attempt to comprehend two Greek words. Thus Arabic translators find themselves bound to decide on one version of the title, either “Searching for Averroës” or “Averroës’ Search.” I do not see that it is possible to combine these two meanings in one Arabic phrase.
At any rate, the story is amongst Borges’s finest. It reveals his thorough knowledge of Arabic literature, which he had read in multiple translations and to which he remained loyal his entire life, such that one may, to some extent, consider him a meeting point between Arabic literature and Western literature—despite his lack of access to the Arabic language. We may say the same about Ibn Rushd, or Averroës, who was interested in Greek thought without knowing the Greek language. What we are concerned with here is his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, which he had probably read in Matta ibn Yunus’ translation. This begs the question of the hypothetical reader for whom Borges’s short story is intended. What kind of reader, one wonders, did he write it for?
Not the Arabic reader, for sure. But for the Western reader who, let’s say, is deeply knowledgeable about European culture, with an implied or rather explicit interest in Arabists, which is evinced in Borges’s reference to four of them in the text. Western researchers, to the best of my knowledge, have not paid much attention to this story, and Borges himself rarely referred to it when interviewed. Even its status is somewhat marginal in The Aleph. This would mean that, Arabists aside, the Western reader, or at least the non-Arab, will be oblivious to most references to Arabic literature in the text, if not to all of them without exception. For this reader must have never heard of al-Mu’allaqat, the famous hanging poems of pre-Islamic Mecca, of Ibn Qutaybah, Matta ibn Yunus, and Khalil al-Farahidi, the author of كتاب العين (kitab al-ayn), a title that Borges mentioned without offering a translation—indeed how could we render al-ain, which is a letter in Arabic, in any other language that does not have it as a letter?
I do not mean that the above-mentioned ignorance would undermine the manner in which this unknowing reader would receive these names and titles, which, because they do not refer to an identifiable or specific meaning, could create an atmosphere of ambiguity tinged with a vague poetic quality. His reading of the story would never be inferior to that of an Arab reader; it would just be, from a variety of perspectives, different. Generally speaking, this reader—the non-Arab—would gloss over the Arabic literary references, telling himself: these are matters that concern them—knowing them is neither necessary nor urgent. This was, as it is known, the case of Averroës when he was commenting on Aristotle’s Poetics: he did not fathom most of the Greek elements mentioned in it, so he discarded them by pointing out that “most of what is mentioned in it or the entirety of it concerns their poetry and customs.” The Western reader would thus approach Borges’s story in the same manner in which Averroës approached Poetics—Averroës, who knew almost nothing about Greek literature.
Without proper explanation, the non-Arab reader would not discern the connotation of the Arabic references and allusions in “Averroës’ Search.” One is curious, in this context, about Borges’s relationship with languages, and namely with the Arabic language. He knew, of course, Spanish and English (his grandmother was English) and was proficient in French and German. He lived in four languages, but what about Arabic? In one of his poems, a rare and equivocal verse attracted my attention: “What language / am I doomed to die in?!” This could mean in what language will death strike me, or in what language am I to die, what is the language in which it is my duty to die? Borges partly made up his mind when, wondering, he added: “The Spanish my ancestors used / to call for the charge, or to play truco / The English of the Bible / my grandmother read from / at the edges of the desert?” He mentioned the two languages closest to his heart. What is rather strange, however, is that he would die in neither of them, let alone in French or German. He would die in a fifth language he had not expected or intuited to die in, a new language he was indeed able to acquire. Which language? The Arabic language, which he had started to learn during the last year of his life. Borges learned Arabic and died or, and perhaps more precisely, he learned Arabic and thus died.
Death overtook him when he was almost able to read Arabic classics in their original language. When Arabic was available, death, merciless, did not permit him a surplus of life to attain his goal. It would be interesting to note, in this respect, a similar experience he had undergone before, after being appointed the head of the national library in Buenos Aires in 1955. This was a great achievement for him, an embodiment of a wish that was, without a doubt, so dear to him (remember what he wrote regarding the library of Babel and his passion for libraries). As soon as his dream was realized, however, he lost his sight. There he is, the head of a library in charge of a countless number of books, none of which he will ever be able to read. To be granted, along with blindness, nine hundred thousand books is indeed an extraordinary and tragic situation. In his poem “The Gifts,” he wrote that fate, “with magnificent irony / gave [him] at once books and the night.”
This irony of fate reoccurs in “Averroës’ Search,” wherein Borges depicts our philosopher looking, assiduously, for Arabic equivalents to tragodía and komodía. He will not fathom their connotation. He will not see it—and I insist on seeing because the problem of the eye is of paramount importance in the story. I wish to raise a question in this regard, one to which Borges’s experts were perhaps blinded: Is it by coincidence that some of the authors he mentioned in the story, namely al-Jahiz (the remarkable ninth-century prose writer), Ibn Sharaf of Berja (writer of Masa’il al-intiqad), and Ibn Sidah or Abensida as Borges spells his name (writer of Al-Mohkam), suffered from a defect or weakness in eyesight, or was Borges entirely cognizant of this fact and took it into account as he was writing the story? I reckon that, because he had lost his sight, or because of its weakness, he paid particular attention to the above-mentioned writers; that he chose them because their condition is congruent with the overall meaning intended in the story, that is, the blindness that befell Averroës whilst reading Poetics, on account of which he was unable to determine the meaning of tragodía and komodía—two words that recur quite frequently in Aristotle’s book.
Borges portrayed Averroës as preoccupied in his search for their meaning whilst being oblivious to drama, that is to say, to drama as a literary genre, as an embodied text which could also be written and read, drama such as Aristotle described it. He portrayed him in his personal library trying hard to figure out the meaning of those two words, and “tell[ing] himself (without excessive faith) that what we seek is often nearby” (Borges did not mention the Kafkian source of this statement). Then he portrayed him looking out of his balcony at a group of children playing in the streets and mimicking the Islamic act of praying. Why did Borges opt to depict those children acting the prayer out? He could have depicted them acting out something else, so what is the profound necessity that compelled him to focus on prayer? The answer lies in a short expression that ends another story by Borges, one that also has an Arabic character, “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths” (in The Aleph). In it, Borges relates the story of a person who dies of thirst in the heart of the desert, which he concludes with the words: “Glory to Him who does not die.” A simple, ordinary expression, it seems, but Borges felt the need to add the following in a footnote: “I wrote the last line because it goes without saying that an Islamic text must always refer to Allah.” Borges says what goes without saying to distance himself from what he said, the purpose behind what he said being: it’s their custom, it’s their business.
Averroës did not see the connection between the children’s acting and what Aristotle talked about. He did not realize that his sight was impaired, as it were, so he joined the aforementioned blind or quasi-blind authors. I, or perhaps the Arab reader in general, would expect Borges to mention, not necessarily Bachar Ibn Burd—the great classical poet, who was blind—but Abu-l-‘ala al-Maʿarri, the closest of Arab adab authors to Borges. And I say so because both al-Maʿarri and Borges share a number of things such as blindness, extreme attachment to the mother, a loathing of procreation, satirical scepticism, and the dedication of one’s life entirely and only to literature. Furthermore, or not further from it, was al-Maʿarri himself not Kafkian in some sense? He was so, at least, when he declared in one of his poems:
And I have a secret which cannot be told
Hidden, albeit a daylight, to the sighted
al-Maʿarri shall not disclose his secret, which perhaps explains the attachment of some readers to the poet of al-Ma’arra. The paradox is that it is as clear a secret as daylight, and no one, in spite of that, sees it. If this makes sense at all, then al-Maʿarri, despite his blindness, is the only one who can see here, whilst his readers are decidedly blind and cannot catch a glimpse of his secret, thereby reflecting Averroës, who lost his sight when he was grappling with the Greek references in Poetics.
Borges’s silence on al-Maʿarri was not specific to “Averroës’ Search.” In Borges’s lecture on “Blindness,” there was no mention of him alongside Homer, Democritus and Milton, neither was there an allusion to him in anything Borges wrote. It is unlikely that he hadn’t heard of him, since he must have read La Escatologia musulmana en la “Divina Comedia” (Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy, 1919) by Spanish Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios, who devoted a whole chapter to the relationship between Dante’s Divine Comedy and al-Maʿarri’s Risalat al-ghufran [Epistle of Forgiveness]. Borges certainly read this book and, moreover, he referenced it as a source in “Averroës’ Search.” What, then, is the secret behind his silence on al-Maʿarri? Perhaps it’s better for the matter to remain nothing more than a question.
