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by RupertEisenhart
1271 days ago
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"Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a
contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did
not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough-he
wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note
that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no
intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of
pages which coincided-word for word and line for line-with those of
Miguel de Cervantes. ... Initially, Menard's method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish,
return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of
Europe from 1602 to 1918-be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed
that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth-century
Castilian) but he discarded it as too easy. Too impossible, rather!, the reader
will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and
of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting.
To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed
to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving
thereby at the Quixote-that looked to Menard less challenging (and there-
fore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to
the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard." ~ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (Borges) https://www.jenliu.info/DIAP/Borges-Pierre-Menard_text.pdf |
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When I was learning Spanish in adulthood, I decided for practice to re-translate this Borges story back into Spanish, having never read it in the original. Incredibly challenging (for such a beginner), but also very amusing to see the overlaps and the differences.