ABSTRACT
Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which is surely easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had not intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. (Borges, p. 91)
