Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
| "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" | |
|---|---|
| Author | Jorge Luis Borges |
| Translator | Anthony Bonner |
| Country | Argentina |
| Language | Spanish |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy, short story |
| Published in | Sur |
| Media type | |
| Publication date | May 1939 |
| Published in English | 1962 |
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (original Spanish title: "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote") is a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
It originally appeared in Spanish in the Argentine journal Sur in May 1939. The Spanish-language original was first published in book form in Borges's 1941 collection El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), which was included in his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944).
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about Pierre Menard, a fictional 20th-century French writer. It begins with a brief introduction and a listing of Menard's work.
Borges' "review" describes Menard's efforts to go beyond a mere "translation" of Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th-century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation, and interpretation.
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a form of literary criticism, but through the medium of fantasy, irony, and humor. His narrator/reviewer considers Menard's fragmentary Quixote (which is line-for-line identical to the original) to be much richer in allusion than Cervantes's "original" work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602. Cervantes, the reviewer claims, "indulges in a rather coarse opposition between tales of knighthood and the meager, provincial reality of his country". While Menard writes of the distant past ("the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope”), in Cervantes “there are neither bands of Gypsies, conquistadors... nor autos de fé". In "The Library of Babel", Borges contemplates the opposite effect: impoverishment of a text through the means of its reproduction. In a pattern analogous to the infinite monkey theorem, all texts are reproduced in a vast library only because complete randomness eventually reproduces all possible combinations of letters.
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