Borges writes about the fictional French writer
Pierre Menard, attempting to defend his literary reputation. Borges specifies that Menard’s “visible” works are “easily enumerated,” and he goes on to list those works. They include monographs, translations, sonnets, and chapters 9 and 38 of
Don Quixote (along with a fragment of chapter 22). Borges admits that this sounds ridiculous, but he then describes Menard’s ambition to write
Don Quixote—Menard did not wish to create some kind of anachronistic reimagining of the story, nor did he want to copy the famous novel. Rather, he wanted to write it as Miguel de Cervantes would have written it. He planned to do this based only on his memory of reading
Don Quixote as a teenager and on his study of 17th-century Spanish.