Like “Astronomers Who Never Looked at the Stars.” The Poetic and Poetics in “La Busca de Averroes” and Jorge Luis Borges’ Imagery of Islam

Abstract In “La Busca de Averroes,” Jorge Luis Borges reimagines the attempt of Muslim philosopher Ibn Rušd (known in the West as Averroes) to interpret Aristotle’s Poetics , and to draw a parallel between Greek tragedy and comedy and Arabic praise poetry and satire. Averroes’ struggle to grasp the essence of theatre – rooted in his lack of direct experience – becomes, for Borges, a symbol of his own difficulty in reconstructing a distant event in intellectual history without unconsciously domesticating it. The Averroes of the story, distinct from the historical Ibn Rušd, is set in an al-Andalus reinvented from Borges’ imagery of Islam and shaped by Western sources, such as Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacios. Yet, in both his and Averroes’ epistemological failure and creative recreation, Borges discerns a poetic quality. This article examines how Borges embeds reflections on poetry within fiction, unmasking the divide between poetic experience and its rational interpretation while offering a methodological alternative to abstract literary criticism.