Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

One of the primary motifs of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is that of translation. Many of the works that the critic lists in Menard’s catalog have to do with interpreting and translating works by other authors. Menard’s Don Quixote can also be considered a type of translation, but instead of interpreting the words of the original Don Quixote into another language, Menard is translating the composition of the work itself into another historical context.

If Menard’s Don Quixote is a type of translation, then we can also extend the critic’s conclusions about it to other types of translation, such as between languages. Translation, in the critic’s analysis, is always dependent on context: Just as the critic took context into account when developing his analysis of Menard’s Don Quixote, a language translator has to take context into account for their own work. This reinforces the centrality of historical context to the interpretation of literature.

A palimpsest is a page of a text in which the original words have been removed in preparation for the page’s reuse as another document. Typically, the faded words of the original text can still be seen faintly in a palimpsest, underneath the replacement text.