The aesthetic power of Persian images and figures - the nightingale, the Simurgh, the chessboard of life - found in the works of Omar Khayyam and the poet-astronomer, Farid al-Din ’Attar, clearly delighted Borges and served to rhetorically embellish his own metaphysical explorations. Engaging with the ’Rubaiyat’ of Omar Khayyam, he perceived a model of translation as an act of mysterious, generative non-linear literary collaboration. ’Attar is the author of the exemplary literary construction of the theme of the seeker being sought. In fictions such as ’El Zahir’ and essays such as ’The Simurgh and the Eagle’, Borges enlists Persian referents to confront and unsettle the centre-periphery dynamics he, and subsequent post-colonial thinking, perceived at play among world literatures.