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How does our understanding of Cervantes or of Borges, of authorship or translation, change if we engage in the critical fiction that Pierre Menard is translator of Don Quixote and not its author? What are the dangers and possibilities of imagining a translation into the same language, into seemingly identical words? Is not the work of Cervantes's morisco aljamiado ultimately this? What is lost and what is gained, not just in translation, but in a translation that unsettles the original, that disrupts the very notion of translation? I begin with this critical fiction-of a "Pierre Menard, traductor del Quijote"-as preface to a close reading of a short passage from the story that turns on these very questions: the segment where the narrator reads, cannot help but read, not just the three chapters of the Don Quixote authored by Pierre Menard, but also other parts he never attempted, as if they were Menard's work.1
On one hand, my initial proposition of Menard as translator is not so farfetched, or at least no more farfetched than the story's premise; especially given the way in which those two seemingly separate categories of authorship are already conflated in Don Quixote and, markedly so, in the very chapters Menard decides to translate: chapter 9, a portion of which Borges cites in both Cervantes's and Menard's versions and that narrates the discovery of the manuscript authored by Cide Hamete in the alcaná de Toledo and the contracting of the morisco translator; chapter 38, which continues "el curioso discurso que hizo don Quijote de las armas y las letras" and ends with the opening of the Captive's tale itself, an adventure in translation and conversion (1.38:445); and a portion of chapter 22, the galley slaves episode, which opens with a characterization of Cide Hamete Benengeli, presumably offered by the morisco translator, as an "autor arábigo y manchego" (1.22:235).
On the other, the possibility of translation into the same language is one that Borges himself allows for in "Las versiones homéricas":
Un parcial y precioso documento de las vicisitudes que sufre [un texto] queda en sus traducciones. ¿Qué son las muchas de la Ilíada de Chapman a Magnien sino diversas perspectivas de un hecho móvil, sino un largo sorteo experimental de omisiones y...