A REVIEW ON Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard,

Transcript:A REVIEW ON Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard,:
A REVIEW ON Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”& “Some Versions of Homer” by Dudu BAL ÖZBEK Introduction “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is a short story originally appeared in Spanish in the Argentine journal Sur in May 1939 and “Some Versions of Homer” was first published in 1932 in Discusión, a volume of essays reflecting Borges' principal preoccupations at the time: Argentine reality, Eastern philosophy, and literary and rhetorical issues. Both of these essays are masterpieces to understand Borges’ ideas related to literary discussion and the nature of translation. Borges was born in1899 in Buenos Aires, of Spanish, English and (very remotely) Portuguese origin. Borges and his companions were affected by the social turmoil of the post-war period and industrialism. “But out of these general conditions, shared by many in our time, Borges has created a work like no other. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of his writings is their extreme intellectual reaction against all the disorder and contingency of immediate reality, their radical insistence on breaking with the given world and postulating another” (Irby, 1964: 10). Borges wrote “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" to test his mind after recovering from a head injury that gave him hallucinations and was complicated by a dangerous case of septicemia. The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays (1997) calls "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" "the most influential essay ever written in Latin America." Typical of Borges' style, the work does not fall neatly into the genre of narrative story or of essay. It may be regarded as a ‘fictional essay’. Normally one separates stories and essays functionally. However, this distinction is not so clear-cut for most of Borges’ writings. “It is the Schopenhauerian principle in Borges which makes him wonder what is real and what is illusory in our common experience. And it is this which makes him deliberately blur the borderline between his fiction and his essays: as if in order to imitate nature he blurs the boundary between reality and dream” (Agassi, 1970:288). "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about Pierre Menard, a fictional 20th-century French writer. It tells of the character Pierre Menard, a French symbolist recently died, who had undertaken the absurd task of rewriting Cervantes' Don Quixote as a product of his own creativity. Because of Borges' intellectual reputation,