Pierre Menard is not actually my name -- it is a pseudonym derived from one of my favorite stories, Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote by the Argentine writer and philosopher Jorge Louis Borges.

The story is about a man named Pierre Menard who sets out to write Don Quixote . He does not want to write a modern adaptation or a new translation -- no, he wants to write Don Quixote itself, word for word -- not by immersing himself in the Spanish culture of the time, but by naturally letting it flow out of his own experiences.

Eventually he succeeds in writing parts of Don Quixote; the Borges story purports to be a review of his work. In a hilarious passage, the work of Pierre Menard is compared to the text of Cervantes :

It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes'. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):


. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and
adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.


Written in the seventeeth century, written by the "lay genius" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:


. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time,
depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and
adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.


History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases--exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor --are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard--quite foreign, after all--suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.