Some nights past, while leafing through chapter XXVI—never essayed by him—I recognized our friend’s style and something of his voice in this exceptional phrase: “the river nymphs and the dolorous and humid Echo.” This happy conjunction of a spiritual and a physical adjective brought to my mind a verse by Shakespeare which we discussed one afternoon: Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/pierre-menard-study-guide-2207796. Page 2. Menard's version is less reliant on local color, more skeptical of historical truth, and on the whole "more subtle than Cervantes's" (93-94). Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time. In literature, this eventual caducity is even more notorious. To glorify the occasional performance of that function, to hoard ancient and alien thoughts, to recall with incredulous stupor that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our laziness or our barbarity. Instead, he decided that the best route was "continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard" (91). The title character of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote " is a poet and literary critic from France-and is also, unlike a more traditional title character, dead by the time the story begins. This idea of an “art of appropriation” also influenced painting, sculpture, and installation art. Quixote. But why precisely the Quixote ? Can Pierre Menard be the author of Don Quixote? But how can we know now whether the statement “In a place of La Mancha, whose name I don’t care to remember, there lived not long ago a nobleman who kept a lance and shield, a greyhound, and a skinny old nag” actually proceeded from divine inspiration? Rather as impossible! My solitary game is governed by two polar laws. Pierre Menard, autor do Quixote. Jorge Luis Borges (–) Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote (El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (; Ficciones, ). or without the Bateau ivre or the Ancient Mariner , but I am quite capable of imagining it without the Quixote . . My general recollection of the Quixote , simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, can well equal the imprecise and prior image of a book not yet written. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time. But that Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote—a contemporary of La trahison des clercs . To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him—and, consequently, less interesting—than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. the inevitable falsifications of journalists, an authentic image of her person, so often exposed (by very reason of her beauty and her activities) to erroneous or hasty interpretations, a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation, Introduction à la vie dévote of St. Francis of Sales, other than a few vague sonnets of circumstance written for the hospitable, or avid, album of Madame Henri Bachelier, consists of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two, I know such an affirmation seems an absurdity; to justify this “absurdity” is the primordial object of this note, I also had the secondary intention of sketching a personal portrait of Pierre Menard. Such a preference, in a Spaniard, would not have been inexplicable; but it is, no doubt, in a Symbolist from Nîmes, essentially a devoté of Poe, who engendered Baudelaire, who engendered Mallarmé, who engendered Valéry, who engendered Edmond Teste. I only know that any modifications would be sacrilegious and that I could not conceive of another beginning for Don Quixote. Hume identified our habitual idea of causality with the experience of temporal succession. I, in contrast, can only reject any divergence. To include that prologue would have been to create another character—Cervantes—but it would also have meant presenting the Quixote in terms of that character and not of Menard. Like many of Borges’s stories, it takes an unusual, non-fictional form: in this instance, the story purports to be a review of a semi-fictional book: the contemporary French writer “Pierre Menard” has transgressed received ideas about translation and produced a translation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote that in fact recreates the original Spanish text verbatim. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. (I speak, naturally, of my personal capacity and not of those works’ historical resonance.). Biography of Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's Great Storyteller. Kennedy, Patrick. This is not an artistic flaw; in fact, Borges’s narrator is fully conscious of these omissions. The first method he conceived was relatively simple. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. One is that philological fragment by Novalis—the one numbered 2005 in the Dresden edition—which outlines the theme of a total identification with a given author. autobiographical prologue to the second part of Don Quixote, I recognized our friend’s style and something of his voice in this exceptional phrase, Such a preference, in a Spaniard, would not have been inexplicable, Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted, but I am quite capable of imagining it without the Quixote . Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.” It is no less astounding to consider isolated chapters. The Countess de Bagnoregio, one of the most delicate spirits of the Principality of Monaco (and now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following her recent marriage to the international philanthropist Simon Kautzsch, who has been so inconsiderately slandered, alas! Two editions of this book have appeared so far; the second bears as an epigraph Leibniz’s recommendation “Ne craignez point, monsieur, la tortue” and revises the chapters dedicated to Russell and Descartes. “The Quixote ,” clarifies Menard, “interests me deeply, but it does not seem— how shall I say it?—inevitable. my reader will say. He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Naturally, Don Quixote would have intrigued an avant-garde Argentine author like Borges, partially because of its impact on Spanish and Latin American literature, and partially because of its playful approach to reading and writing. To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. The Quixote is a contingent book; the Quixote is unnecessary. 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