  "averroÃ«s's search" (original spanish title: "la busca de averroes") is a 1947 short story by the argentine writer jorge luis borges. originally published in the magazine sur, it was later included in his second anthology of short stories, el aleph. ==plot summary== the story imagines the difficulty of averroÃ«s, the famed islamic philosopher and translator, in translating aristotle's poetics because (in the story) he was not able to understand what a play was, owing to the absence of live theatrical performances from averroÃ«s' cultural milieu, in contrast to that of ancient greece. ironically, in the story, averroÃ«s casually observes some children play-acting, then later hears a traveler ineptly describe an actual theatrical performance he once saw in a distant land, but still fails to understand that the tragedies and comedies of which aristotle writes are a kind of performance art, rather than merely literature. the process of writing the story is meant to parallel the events in the story itself; borges writes in an afterword to the story that his attempt to understand averroÃ«s was as doomed as averroÃ«s's attempt to understand drama. "i felt that the work mocked me, foiled me, thwarted me. i felt that averroÃ«s, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than i, trying to imagine averroÃ«s yet with no more material than a few snatches from renan, lane, and asÃ­n palacios." 
1947_short_stories Short_stories_by_Jorge_Luis_Borges Works_originally_published_in_Sur_(magazine)