Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote

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For other uses of "Pierre Menard", see Pierre Menard (disambiguation).

Borges's story "Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote" ("Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote") originally appeared in Spanish in the Argentine journal Sur, 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). That entire book was, in turn, included within his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944). Two English-language translations were published more or less simultaneously in 1962, one by James E. Irby in a diverse collection of Borges works entitled Labyrinths, the other by Anthony Bonner as part of a collaborative translation of the entirety of Ficciones published in 1962. The Bonner translation is reprinted in Borges, a Reader (1981, ISBN 0-525-47654-7). Quotations in this article follow that translation.

1 Plot summary
2 Possible sources of the name
3 Notes
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

"Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote" is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about (the non-existent) Pierre Menard. It begins with a brief introduction and a listing of all of Menard's work.

Borges's "review" describes this 20th century French writer who has made an effort to go further than mere "translation" of Don Quixote, but to immerse himself so thoroughly as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 16th century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of accurate translation.

Borges's work is indeed literary criticism, but through the medium of fantasy, irony, and humor. Borges's narrator/reviewer considers Menard's fragmentary Quixote (which is line-for-line identical to portions of the original) to be much richer than Cervantes's "original" work, because Menard's work must be considered in light of world events since 1602, and thus is richer in allusion. Cervantes "...indulges in a rather coarse opposition between tales of knighthood and the meager, provincial reality of his country." Menard writes of the, to him, distant past, "the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope," but "in his work there are neither bands of Gypsies, conquistadors, ... nor autos de fe." In this, Borges anticipates the post-modern theory that gives centrality to reader response.

(Another Borges story, "The Library of Babel", contemplates the opposite effect: impoverishment of a text through the means of its reproduction. In that story, in a pattern analogous to the infinite monkey theorem, all texts are reproduced in a vast library, but only because complete randomness eventually reproduces all possible combinations of letters.)

Borges wrote this story while recovering from a head injury. If it is to be counted as a work of fiction, then it was the first such published under his own name. (The 1933 "Hombre de la esquina rosada" was published under the pseudonym H. Bustos). As so often in his writings, the story abounds in clever references and subtle jokes. His narrator/reviewer is an arch-Catholic who remarks of the readers of a rival journal that they are "few and Calvinist, if not Masonic and circumcised". According to Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reed (Borges, a Reader, p. 346) Menard is in part "a caricature of [Stéphane] Mallarmé and [Paul] Valéry … or [Miguel de] Unamuno and Enrique Larreta."

[edit] Possible sources of the name

There was a historical Pierre Menard, the first Lieutenant Governor of Illinois.

Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda claimed in a 1999 interview that there really was a minor symbolist poet by this name, and that Borges simply embroidered his story, rather than creating it out of whole cloth.^[1]

[edit] Notes

^ Diálogo con Cobo Borda sobre Borges (final). Interview between José Ermides Cantillo Prada and Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, El Heraldo (Barranquilla), 14 November 1999. Accessed online 13 November 2006. "Yo leía la biografía de Rodríguez Monegal y realmente existió Menard como un poeta simbolista menor, pero que había hecho un libro, que había una tesis sobre el tiempo y Borges había encontrado ese libro. Entonces la gente se iba a buscar a Pierre Menard y se encontraba con un Pierre Menard, pero un Pierre Menard doble, que era el que había inventado Borges." (" I read the biography of Rodriguez Monegal and Menard actually existed as a minor symbolist poet, but who had made a book, which had a thesis about time and Borges had found that book. Then people were went to look for Pierre Menard and the found a Pierre Menard, but a doubled Pierre Menard, who was the one that Borges had invented.")

A particularly clever critique of the "Menard" was executed by Russ Leonard, a Comparative Literature seminarian at the University of Washington (Seattle)in 1985. Leonard famously presented his paper as that of the relatively unknown Babak Behdadnia, a West Viriginia University scholar, completely stolen - and presented "immersion-style" - a moderate jab at the ease of the Menard conceit (as well as a gentle unraveling of the Borgesian onion). Leonard's bewildered seminar audience, at that moment, took his point; this exercise is believed to have entered Borges critical thought since that time. Leonard's whereabouts are not known as of this entry.