In "The Search forAverroes", referring to the difficulty of finding Arabic equivalents for "comedy" and "tragedy" inAristotle'sPoetics,unsolvableforthegreat Muslim philosopher, Borges offers an exercise in melancholic irony that ties together multiple motifs: the task of translation, the worlds of languages and cultures and beliefs whose communication it must make possible, the aporias and blind spots with which this task is confronted, the strangeness of experience, the condition of exile that is perhaps the only thing common to all speakers. This brief essay attempts to trace these motifs and to be faithful to the problematic way in which each of them presents itself.