3.

1
Borges Translating Ibn Rushd
Translating Aristotle

The cult of Aristotle that the Arabs transmitted to Europe, perhaps without under-
standing him at all, as though they were simply transcribing a message in secret
code . . .

—J. L. Borges, “Destino escandinavo” 189

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, protago-
nist of the story “Averroes’s Search” (“La busca de Averroës”; here-
inafter 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.
AS takes place within a single day in Córdoba, al-Andalus. Averroes,
suffering writer’s block due to his being puzzled by two words of
Greek in the Poetics of Aristotle that he is translating, goes out to
visit friends. Inspired by his conversation, which includes the account
T. O. Beebee, Transmesis
© Thomas O. Beebee 2012
116 Transmesis

of a trip to a theater by someone completely puzzled as to what the

experience was, Averroes returns home and writes the following of
the Greek terms τραγωδια and κωμωδια, as they are described by
Aristotle in his Poetics: “‘Aristu (Aristotle) gives the name of tragedy
to panegyrics and that of comedy to satires and anathemas. Admirable
tragedies and comedies abound in the pages of the Koran and in the
mohalacas of the sanctuary’” (AS 155 [“La busca de Averroës” 1035]).
The reappearance of the Greek terms after apparent translation into
madih (roughly, “panegyric”) and hija’ (roughly, “satire”) undoes the
translation process and hints at its supposed failure. It is entirely pos-
sible, however, that since translation involves the finding of the best
possible rather than an exact equivalent, the equations of this sen-
tence are neither ridiculous nor a complete failure, as I will discuss
below. However, the reader needs to suppose them to be such in order
for the story’s epilogue to function, where the narrator confesses his
own failure in imagining Averroes into being.
In actuality, Averroes did not puzzle over how to translate “com-
edy” and “tragedy”: he simply continued using the terms madih
(eulogy, or praise poem) for tragedy and hija’ (satire or invective) for
comedy, as previous Arabic translators such as Abu-Bishr had done.
However, Averroes did have alternatives available to him. For his
commentary on the Poetics completed around 1020 CE, Avicenna,
perhaps working from an alternative translation since lost, had sim-
ply transliterated the Greek terms rather than finding equivalents for
them. Avicenna constantly reminds readers that Aristotle is speak-
ing of Greek poetry (Dahiyat 5). Averroes, on the other hand, makes
every effort in the Middle Commentary (hereinafter MC) to apply
Aristotle to Arabic poetry, which may explain his insistence on trans-
lation rather than transliteration.
The pseudotranslation that Borges allows his Averroes to make,
which in fact does not appear in the latter’s MC, is really the peri-
phrastic completion of a sentence that Borges had read in Ernest
Renan’s Averroès et l’averroisme (1852), the first part of which Borges
uses in its original French as an epigraph to the story: “Imagining,
for example, that tragedy is nothing other than the art of praising
[S’imaginant, par example, que la tragédie n’est autre chose que
l’art de louer], and comedy that of invective, [Averroes] endeavors
to find tragedies and comedies in the panegyrics and satires of the
Arabs, and even in the Qur’an” (Renan 55–56). I have added empha-
sis to the segment of the quote that Borges uses as an epigraph to
AS. “Averroism” refers to the European reception of the work of the