The amazing audacity of it: the concept of rewriting Cervantes’ Don Quixote exactly word for word without referencing, and yet come up with different meaning. This is the premise of Borges’ story.
For me the glory is not in the reading of the story as much as in the very idea of it, and in so doing, one cannot help but come back to the author, Borges himself. But isn’t the very nature of the story to spoof the author, the critic, the reader?
In one part, Borges compares the work of Menard, whose intent is to write Don Quixote just as Cervantes did, to its original. In both Spanish and its English translation, the two examples are exact and yet Borges (or his narrator) attempts to convince that there is a difference:
The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is a richness). (p. 52)
Or is this a tribute to the reader who does indeed find his own path within the words that may be contrary to those of others?
Astounding story because of the idea, not of the story itself which was the only way the idea could be told.
This one’s a definite re-read; knowing that every reader changes with every word that is read. What will I find, what will I add the next time around?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Do you have the whole collection? It’s splendid — so many memorable stories, hardly a dog in the bunch.
That makes as much sense to me as the “Goodbye Girl” remake a few years back with Jeff Daniels and Pat Heaton performing the exact same screenplay of Neil Simon’s classic.
Ficciones includes 17 of his stories; I have Aleph on my list.