The Imagined Library Books that were never written

The Fictions of Borges  ·  Novel

Pierre Menard's Quixote

also known as Don Quixote

Pierre Menard

Can I actually read this? A little. Scattered lines survive in the text around it. Quoted

Several chapters of Don Quixote, word for word as Cervantes wrote them, produced independently by a symbolist from Nîmes who did not want to copy the book and did not want to compose another one.

You can read this book. It is in every library. That is not a help.

Menard did not transcribe Cervantes. Transcription, the narrator says, would have been too easy. He proposed to produce a number of pages which would coincide — word for word, line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes, while remaining Pierre Menard. The resulting fragment is verbally identical to the Quixote and, we are told, almost infinitely richer, because a seventeenth-century soldier writing in Spanish is doing one thing and a contemporary of William James writing the same Spanish is doing another. History, the mother of truth, is rhetoric in 1605 and pragmatism in 1918.

This library exists to take invented books at their word. Menard’s Quixote is the test case. If we file it as a copy, we have missed the story. If we file it as a new work, we have agreed with a narrator who is himself invented. The correct catalogue record is the one Borges wrote: a visible bibliography, an invisible masterpiece, and a sentence printed twice.

On the readability rating. The completed chapters are identical to Cervantes, and Cervantes is available. What is not available is Menard’s path to them — the notebooks, the crossings-out, the decision not to be Cervantes. We have the text. We do not have the book.

From the book

… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor. Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter IX — and Pierre Menard, same words, in Borges, 1939

In-world history

Menard, author of a visible list of sonnets, monographs and a translation of Quevedo, devoted his private years to arriving at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. He completed the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I and a fragment of Chapter XXII. He did not finish. The narrator, writing from Nîmes in 1939, compares a sentence of Cervantes with the same sentence of Menard and prefers Menard.

Why it matters

The most concentrated joke about authorship ever printed. Menard's pages are identical to Cervantes' and, the narrator insists, infinitely richer. The catalogue has to take that claim seriously, because taking it seriously is the entry.

Appearances

  • Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) — Jorge Luis Borges A fictional essay on Menard's visible and invisible works; the Quixote is the invisible one

Connected volumes

Also from this world

Catalogue record

Category
Novel
World
The Fictions of Borges
Imagined by
Jorge Luis Borges
Language
Spanish, of the seventeenth century, arrived at by a twentieth-century Frenchman
First appearance
"Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote", Sur, May 1939
Readability
Quoted
Books Within Books Lost Manuscripts

Sources

  • Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote", Sur No. 51, May 1939; collected in Ficciones (Sur, 1944).

Added by house · last checked 2026-09-01