Pierre Menard

**Pierre Menard** (?-?) is a minor 20th-century French writer who attempted to recreate, word-for-word and line-by-line, certain chapters of Cervantes' Don Quixote.  His attempt was documented by Borges in *Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote.* This story was published in the journal Sur in 1939, a year before the printing of *Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius* in that very same journal.

### Borda's Critique

The Colombian poet Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda has argued that there existed a minor poet by this name whose story Borges had appropriated without attribution:

> I read the biography of Rodríguez Monegal and Menard actually existed as a minor symbolist poet who had written a book, a thesis on time, and Borges had found that book. Then people went to look for Pierre Menard and they found a Pierre Menard, but a doubled Pierre Menard, the one that Borges had invented.
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### The Karpathy Experiment

In February 2015, the doctoral student Andrej Karpathy attempted Menard's famous recreation - except the target was not Cervantes' *Don Quixote*, but Borges' *Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote.*

Borges says that - initially - Menard's method was

> relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918...
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However, Menard then rejected this method as not being challenging enough, because he did not wish to write *Don Quixote* by becoming Cervantes - he wished to do so by remaining Pierre Menard.

Karpathy's aim is fundamentally more similar to Menard's initial system. Of course, Karpathy did not wish to learn Spanish, return to Argentina, be hit on the head, and nearly die of septicemia before discovering the ability to write short-stories. Instead, he wished to understand, parse, and memorize every text of Borges - other than *Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote* - such that Karpathy would be able to predict what else Borges could have written.

Borges mentions that Menard made "endless" drafts of Quixote but destroyed them all, all except the final finished version. Karpathy, on the other hand, is more forthright about his process and we can see Borges (albeit a Borges translated into English) evolve like sonograms of the fetus in the womb.

At first, the Borges he predicts is a useless garble of letters, punctuation, and empty space.

> tyntd-iafhatawiaoihrdemot lytdws e ,tfti, astai f ogoh eoase rrranbyne 'nhthnee e
> plia tklrgd t o idoe ns,smtt h ne etie h,hregtrs nigtike,aoaenns lng
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Then the first splashes of word spacing begin to appear.

> Tmont thithey" fomesscerliund
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> Keushey. Thom here
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> sheulke, anmerenith ol sivh I lalterthend Bleipile shuwy fil on aseterlome
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> coaniogennc Phe lism thond hon at. MeiDimorotion in ther thize.
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Then comes the ghost of a sentence.

> we counter. He stutn co des. His stanted out one ofler that concossions and was to gearang reay Jotrets and with fre colt otf paitt thin wall. Which das stimn
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Some semblance of grammar:

> Aftair fall unsuch that the hall for Prince Velzonski's that me of her hearly, and behs to so arwage fiving were to it beloge, pavu say falling misfort how, and Gogition is so overelical and ofter.
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We begin to see quotations and exclamation marks:

> "Kite vouch!" he repeated by her door. "But I would be done and quarts, feeling, then, son is people...."
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Finally we come to a passage of *Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote*.

> There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter - if not a paragraph or a proper noun - in the history of philosophy. In literature, that "falling by the wayside," that loss of "relevance," is better known. The Quixote, Menard remarked, was first and foremost a pleasant book; it is now an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, obscene de luxe editions. Fame is a form - perhaps the worst form - of incomprehension.
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