Who wrote the story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote?

Jorge Luis Borges wrote the short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” The Argentine writer first published it in Spanish as “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.”

The story takes the form of an elaborate literary review of Pierre Menard, a fictional French writer who attempts to recreate Don Quixote word for word in its original seventeenth-century Spanish. Menard is not translating Cervantes or copying the novel mechanically; Borges’s narrator treats the project as a new act of authorship.

Borges uses the premise to explore how historical context changes the meaning of identical words. A passage written by Cervantes and the same passage produced by Menard would carry different implications because the writers belong to different eras. The story is therefore a landmark of metafiction and a playful meditation on originality, interpretation, and authorship.

It first appeared in the Argentine journal Sur in May 1939, entered a 1941 collection, and later became part of Ficciones. It is not a novel or a lost continuation of Don Quixote, but a short story about writing one.