Everything about Pierre Menard Author Of The Quixote totally explained
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, 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.
Plot summary
"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 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's 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're "few and
Calvinist, if not
Masonic and
circumcised". According to
Emir Rodríguez Monegal and
Alastair Reid (
Borges, a Reader, p. 346) Menard is in part "a caricature of [Stéphane]
Mallarmé and [Paul]
Valéry … or [Miguelde]
Unamuno and
Enrique Larreta."
Possible sources of the name
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.Further Information
Get more info on 'Pierre Menard Author Of The Quixote'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://pierre_menard__author_of_the_quixote.totallyexplained.com">Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
