For Silvina Ocampo

The visible oeuvre this novelist has left behind can be enumerated easily and briefly. Therefore, the unforgivable omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a fake catalog published in a certain newspaper with a Protestant tendency that isn’t a secret has had the unpleasant impact on its deplorable readers, although these are few and Calvinist, if not masons and circumcised. Menard’s authentic friends have seen this catalogue with alarm and even certain sadness. Let us say we gathered yesterday around the final ivory and among the ill-fated cypresses and error is already trying to fog memory. Decidedly, a brief rectification is inevitable.

            I’m aware that it’s easy to recuse my poor authority. I hope, however, I won’t be forgiven from mentioning two high testimonies. The Bacourt Baroness (in whose unforgettable vendredis I had the fortune to know the lamented poet) has graciously approved the following lines. The Bagnoregio Countess, one of the most refined spirits of the Monaco principality (and now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after her recent wedding with the international philanthropist Simon Kautzsch, so frequently libeled, ah!, by the victims of his disinterested efforts), has sacrificed, “to veracity and to death” (these are her words), the dandy-like reserve that characterizes her and, in an open letter published in the magazine Luxe, she likewise conceded me the consent. Those judgements, I believe, aren’t insufficient.

            I have said that Menard’s visible oeuvre is of easy enumeration. Having examined with care his particular archive, I have verified that it includes the following items:

1. A symbolist sonnet that appeared twice (with variations) in the magazine La Conque (issues of March and October of 1899).
2. A monograph about the possibility of building a poetic lexicon of concepts that are not synonymous or periphrasis of those who inform the common language, “without ideal objects created by a convention or essentially destined to poetic necessities” (Nîmes, 1901).
3. A monograph about “certain connections and affinities” of Descartes’, Leibniz’s, and John Wilkins’ thought (Nîmes, 1903).
4. A monograph on the Characteristica Universalis by Leibniz (Nîmes, 1904).
5. A technical article on the possibilities of enriching the game of chess eliminating one of the tower pieces. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and ends of rejecting that innovation.
6. A monograph on the Ars Magna Generalis by Raimund Lull (Nîmes, 1906).
7. A translation with a prologue and notes of the Libro de la invención liberal y arte del juego del axedrez by Ruy López de Segura (Paris, 1907).
8. The drafts of a monograph on George Boole’s symbolic logic.
9. An exam of the metrical laws of French prose, illustrated with volumes by Saint Simon (Revue des Langues Romanes, Montpellier, October of 1909).
10. A reply to Luc Durtain (who had negated the existence of such laws) illustrated with volumes by Luc Duratin (Revue des Langues Romanes, Montpellier, December of 1909).
11. A handwritten translation of Aguja de navegar cultos by Quevedo, titled La Boussole des précieux.
12. A preface to a catalog of the exhibition of lithographs by Carolus Hourcade (Nîmes, 1914).
13. The work Les Problèmes d’un problème(Paris, 1917), which discusses, in chronological order, the solutions to the illustrious problem of Aquiles and the turtle. Two editions of this book have appeared so far; the second one includes, as an epigraph, Leibniz’s advice Ne craignez point, monsieur, la tortue, and renews the chapters devoted to Russell and Descartes.
14. An obstinate analysis of Toulet’s “syntactical customs” (N.R.F., March of 1921). I remember Menard declaring that censoring and celebrating are sentimental operations that have nothing to do with criticism.
15. A transposition of alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Cimetière marin (N.R.F., January of 1928).
16. An invective on Paul Valéry, in Jacques Reboul’s Hojas para la supresión de la realidad. (Such invective, it ought to be said parenthetically, is the exact reverse of Valéry’s true opinion. He understood it thus and the old friendship between the two of them didn’t run any risk.)
17. A « definition » by the Bagnoregio Countess. In the « victorious volume » the locution is by another collaborator, Gabriele d’Annunzio, which this lady publishes annually to rectify the inevitable stumbles of journalism and to present « to the world and to Italy » an authentic effigy of her own persona, so exposed (in due course of her beauty and her histrionics) to quick and erroneous interpretations.
18. A cycle of admirable sonnets by the Bacourt Baroness (1934).
19. A handwritten list of verses whose efficacy is owned to punctuation.[1]

This is the full extent (without any other omission but some vague circumstantial sonnets for hospitable, and avid, album by Madame Henry Bachelier) of Menard’s visible œuvre, in chronological order. I now move to the other one: the subterranean, the unendingly heroic, the unparalleled. Likewise, ah of human possibilities!, the unfinished one. This œuvre, perhaps the most significant of our time, is made of the ninth and thirty-eight of the First Part of Don Quixote, and of a fragment of chapter twenty-two. I know such affirmation appears like an absurdity; to justify that « absurdity » is the primary objective of this note.[2]  

            Two texts of unequal value inspired such an enterprise. One is that philological fragment by Novalis –the one that carries the number 2005 in the Dresden edition—which sketches the theme of total identification with a given author. Another one is one of those parasitic books that place Christ in a boulevard, Hamlet in the Cannebiére, or Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like any man of good taste, Menard abominated such useless carnivals, only aptly he would say to the occasional plebeian pleasure of anachronism or (which is worse) to captivate us with the prime idea that all epochs are the same or that they are different. More interestingly, although of contradictory and superficial execution, he believed Daudet’s famous purpose to be: to conjure in a figure, meaning Tartarín, the Ingenious Hidalgo and his squire… Those who insinuate that Menard spent his life writing a contemporary Quixote libel his clear memory.

            He didn’t want to make another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote. It is useless to add that he never confronted a mechanical transcription of the original; he didn’t intent to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce a few pages that coincided, word by word and line by line, with those by Miguel de Cervantes.

            « My purpose is merely astounding, » he wrote to me on September 20, of 1934, from Bayonne. « The final term of a theological or metaphysical demonstration—the external world, God, casuality, the universal forms—isn’t less previous and common that the well-divulged novel. The only difference is that philosophers publish agreeable volumes in intermediary stages of their labor and that I have resolved to lose them. » Indeed, not a single draft remains that testifies to that work of years,

            The initial method he imagined is relatively simple. To know Spanish well, to recover the Catholic faith, to fight the Moors and against the Turk, to forget the history of Europe between 1602 and 1918, to be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied that procedure (I know he achieved a fairly loyal handling of the Spanish of the seventeenth century) but ruled it out because it was easy. Or rather, because it was impossible, the reader might say. It’s true, but the enterprise was impossible from the start and of all the means to achieve it, this was the least interesting. In his opinion, to be in the twentieth century a popular novelist in the seventeenth was a diminishment. He deemed less arduous—and, consequently, less interesting—to somehow be Cervantes and arrive to the Quixote than to continue to be Menard and arrive to the Quixote, through Pierre Menard’s experiences. (That conviction, it ought to be said, made him exclude the autobiographical prologue to the Second Part of Don Quixote. To include that prologue would have entailed creating another character—Cervantes—but it would have also signified presenting the Quixote in relation to that character and not to Menard. He, naturally, rejected such easy route.) « Essentially, my enterprise isn’t difficult, » I read in another place of his letter. « It would be enough to be immortal in order to achieve it. » Shall I confess that I often imagine that he finished it and that I read the Quixote—the entire Quixote—as if Menard had thought it? A few nights ago, browsing chapter XXVI—never rehearsed by him—I recognized our friend’s style and something like his voice in this exceptional phrase: las ninfas de los ríos, la dolorosa y húmida Eco. This efficacious conjunction of a moral adjective and another physical one brought to my memory Shakespeare’s verse, which we discussed one afternoon:

Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk…

Why precisely the Quixote? Our reader will say. That preference, in Spanish, would not have been inexplicable; yet it doubtlessly is to a symbolist from Nîmes, an essential fan of Poe, who begat Baudelaire, who begat Mallarmé, who begat Valléry. Who begat Edmond Teste. The above-quoted letter illuminates this point. “The Quixote,” Menard clarifies, “interested me deeply, but it doesn’t appear to me, how shall I say, inevitable. I cannot imagine the universe without Edgar Allan Poe’s interjections:

Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!

or without the Bateau ivre or the Ancient Mariner, but I’m capable of imagining it without the Quixote. (I speak, naturally, of my personal capacity, not of the historical resonance of the works.) The Quixote is a contingent book, the Quixote is unnecessary. I can premeditate its writing, I can write it, without incurring in a tautology. I read it when I was twelve or thirteen years-old, perhaps completely. Afterward, I have read with attention some chapter, those I will not deal with now. I have also studied the entremeses, the comedias, the Galatea, the Novelas ejemplares, the no doubt laborious works of Persiles y Segismunda and the Viaje al Parnaso… My general recollection of the Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, might well correspond to the imprecise previous image of a book not written. Once this image is postulated (which no one in good measure can deny me) it is undisputable that my problem is far more difficult that Cervantes’. My complacent precursor didn’t reject the contribution of chance: he was shaping the immortal work a bit à la diable, carried by the inertia of language and invention. I have contracted the mysterious duty of constructing literally his spontaneous oeuvre. My solitary game is governed by two polar laws. The first one allows me to rehearse variants which are of a formal and psychological type; the second forces me to sacrifice the “original” text and to reason in an irrefutable way that annihilation… To these artificial obstacles one must add another congenital one. To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century is a reasonable, necessary, and perhaps fatal enterprise; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. Not in vain have three hundred years gone by, endowed with very complex events. Among them, to mention only one: the very same Quixote.”

            In spite of these three obstacles, Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is subtler than Cervantes’. The latter, in a clumsy way, opposes to the chivalry fictions his country’s poor provincial reality; Menard choses as “reality: the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope. What Spanish ticks Maurice Barrès and Doctor Rodríguez Larretta wouldn’t have advised! Menard, with every natural quality, eludes them. There are no gypsy tricks or conquistadors or mystics or Philip II or autos-da-fe in his oeuvre. He either disattends or proscribes the local color. This disdain indicates a new sense of the historical novel. This disdain contemns Salammbô without appeal.

            Not less stunning is to consider isolated chapters. For example, let us examine XXXVIII of the First Part, “which deals with the curious discourse Don Quixote made on the arms and the letters.” It is known that Don Quixote (like Quevedo in the analogous passage, and after, in La hora de todos) resolved the dispute against the letters and in favor of the arms. Cervantes was an old soldier: his choice can be explained. But that the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard—contemporaneous of La trahison des clercs and of Bertrand Russell—relapses in these nebulous sophistries! Madame Bachelier has seen in them an admirable and typical subordination of the author to the hero’s psychology; others (in no way perspicaciously) a transcription of the Quixote; the Bacourt Baroness, Nietzsche’s influence. To this third interpretation (which I judge irrefutable) I don’t know if I will dare to add a fourth one, which leads well to Pierre Menard’s almost divine modesty: his resigned or ironic habit to propagate ideas that were the strict reverse of those he preferred. (Let’s recall again his diatribe against Paul Valéry in the ephemeral page by Jacques Reboul.) The texts by Cervantes and Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is wealth.)

            It’s a revelation to compare the Don Quixote by Menard with that of Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, First part, ninth chapter):

             … truth, whose mother is history, rival to time, storehouse of deeds, witness

            for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future.

            Redacted in the seventeenth century, redacted by the “ingenious layman” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, instead, writes:        

             … truth, whose mother is history, rival to time, storehouse of deeds, witness

            for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future.

History, mother of truth; the idea is astonishing. Menard, a contemporary of William James, doesn’t define History as an investigation of reality but as its origin. The true history, for him, isn’t what happened; it is what we judge that happened. The final clauses—ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir—are shamelessly pragmatic.

            Vivid is also the contrast of styles. Menard’s archaizing style—a foreigner, after all—suffers from some affectation. It isn’t the case of his precursor, who handles with ease the common Spanish of his epoch.

            There is no intellectual exercise that isn’t in the end useless. A doctrine is at the beginning a plausible description of reality; years go by and it is a mere chapter—if not a paragraph or a name—in the history of philosophy. In literature, that expiration date is even more noticeable. The Quixote—Menard told me—was first and foremost an enjoyable book; now it’s the occasion of a patriotic toast, of grammatical pride, of obscene luxury editions. Glory is an incomprehension and perhaps the worst.

            There is nothing new in these nihilist proofs; what is singular is the decision Pierre Menard derived from them. He resolved to be ahead of the vanity that awaits all human fatigues; he embarked on a very complex enterprise which was futile from the start. He dedicated his scruples and wakefulness to repeat in someone else’s language a preexisting book. He multiplied the drafts; he tenaciously corrected and teared up thousands of handwritten pages.[3] He didn’t allow anyone to examine them and he made sure they didn’t survive them. I have attempted in vain to reconstruct them.

            I’ve reflected that it’s licit to see in the “final” Quixote a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces—tenuous but not indecipherable—must show up the “previous” writing of our friend. Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard, investing in the work of the previous one, could exhume and resuscitate those Troyas…

            “To think, to analyze, to invent (he also wrote to me) aren’t anomalous acts, they are the normal respiration of intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of that function, to treasure old and foreign thoughts, to remember with incredulous stupor that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our listlessness or our barbarism. Every human must be capable of all the ideas and I understand that in the future that will be the case.”

            Menard (perhaps without wanting it) has enriched, through a new technique, the sustained and rudimentary art of reading: the technique of the deliberate anachronism and of the erroneous attributions. That technique of infinite application encourages us to go through the Odyssey as if it was composed after the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it was by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique populates the adventure of the calmest books. To attribute to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce the Imitation of Christ, isn’t it sufficient renovation of those tenuous spiritual advices?                               

                                                                                                                        Nîmes, 1939

[1] Madame Henri Bachelier likewise lists a literal version of the literal version Quevedo made of Introduction à la vie dévote by Saint Francisco de Sales. In Pierre Menard’s library there are no traces of that work. It must be our friend’s joke, poorly conveyed.

[2] I also had the secondary purpose of sketching Pierre Menard’s image. But how should I dare compete with the aural pages I am told Bacourt Baroness is preparing or with Carolus Hourcade’s delicate and punctual pencil?

[3] I remember his notebooks, his black cross-outs, his peculiar typographic symbols and insect-like letters. He liked going for walks in the afternoon in the neighborhoods of Nîmes; he used to take a notebook with him and make a happy bonfire.

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated from the Spanish by Ilan Stavans. First published in Translation Review (issue 107, 2020), as part of a piece titled “Retranslation and Approximation,” accompanied by a parallel French translation of the story by Youssef Boucetta and a dialogue between the two translators. Later collected in Stavans’s book Translation as Home: A Multilingual Life, edited by Regina Galasso (University of Toronto Press, 2024). Used by permission of Ilan Stavans.