4 ms·

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

56 points by tokai 3y ago

lampiaio 3y ago
Here's an interesting tidbit about Jorge Luis Borges that may have inspired him to write that story. First, some backstory: "Under his grandmother's tutelage, Borges learned to read English before he could read Spanish. [...] In Borges's autobiographical essay, he recalled reading even the great Spanish masterpiece, Cervantes's Don Quixote, in English before reading it in Spanish." The funny thing is, when he finally came across a copy of Don Quixote in its original Spanish... he dismissed it as "a bad translation" of the book he had read in English.
- lmarcos 3y ago
  For Spanish speakers who know English, reading Don Quixote in English is probably easier (and more pleasant). The Spanish one is full of words that even though a native speaker can understand (with footnotes sometimes), it's just not as pleasant as reading modern Spanish.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    It's curious that we accept translations from spanish to english, but not from old spanish to modern spanish.
    - Schiphol 3y ago
      Andrés Trapiello, a well-known Spanish writer, did just that a few years ago [to some backlash](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/19/modern-version-of-don-quixote-declared-against-literature https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/19/modern-version...)
    - Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
      For some cultural reason that I'm not qualified to explain, the Spanish literary world is much more stilted than the English one. When I first read the Odyssey about 20 years ago, I found it more pleasant to read in English than in my native Spanish because all Spanish translations were full of intrincate poetic language and obscure words, while English ones where much more down-to-earth. (Now there is at least one Spanish edition with a plain language translation as well, edited by Blackie Books, which as a layman in these things I have found enjoyable). By the way, this happens also with original literature (I mean, not translations). I find most Spanish literature rather pedantic, there tends to be a huge focus on form over content, using the richest vocabulary, the longest sentences, the most complex subordinates, the most subtle nuances, spending 4 pages on describing the movement of a leaf with the wind, etc. while in English literature actual stuff happens and is told in a nice but practical way. As a native Spanish speaker, I read much more Anglo-Saxon literature than Hispanic one, although I guess it's all a matter of taste, of course. (PS, since the post talks about Borges: he's an exception. He sounds like an Anglo-Saxon writer writing in Spanish).
      - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
        > while in English literature actual stuff happens and is told in a nice but practical way. That’s an overly broad generalisation. I can give you a ton of English novels spending pages after pages describing the movement of a leaf in the wind in rather florid language. It’s much more likely that you have been mostly exposed to a lot of old and rather serious novels during your education in Spanish are now mostly consuming novels you find entertaining in English. It’s the same with the Odyssey which let’s not forget is originally written in ancien Greek verses. The epic has been translated hundreds of times with vastly different goals. Even in the same language, some translations aim to capture the poesy of the original either in its rythme or in its evocative power, some try to stay as close as possible to the Greek text, some just want to be easy to understand.
      - cryptonector 3y ago
        > For some cultural reason that I'm not qualified to explain, the Spanish literary world is much more stilted than the English one. When I first read the Odyssey about 20 years ago, I found it more pleasant to read in English than in my native Spanish because all Spanish translations were full of intrincate poetic language and obscure words, while English ones where much more down-to-earth. This is a common theme in Romance language writing, but it's especially so in Spanish. Lots of elliptical sentences longer than most paragraphs in English, requiring extensive effort to parse. Lots of flowery language. A bit of a word game, but usually just dreadful. > (PS, since the post talks about Borges: he's an exception. He sounds like an Anglo-Saxon writer writing in Spanish). He learned to read English before Spanish while living in Switzerland as a child. In a way he very much was an English language author writing in Spanish. The result is that his writing is very accessible in the original Spanish and very translatable to English, and his writings have a very unique flavor.
    - snet0 3y ago
      I don't know how it is in Spanish culture, but in English culture there is certainly an amount of sneering done at "modernisations" of older English texts.
      - cryptonector 3y ago
        It's the same.
  - narag 3y ago
    Agree with easier, disagree with pleasant. First time I read the whole book, it was an annotated edition with lots of footnotes, explaining all the differences. I was hating the experience. Solution? I stopped reading the footnotes. After some time, I got much more engaged in the story and got the occasional arcaism right from the context. The "bad translation" must have been Borges identifying old Spanish as a broken, not idiomatic modern Spanish.
  - NoboruWataya 3y ago
    I guess when an old text is translated into a foreign language, the translator often takes certain liberties to make the translated text more accessible to a modern audience. But there isn't really any separate process by which old works are "translated" to a more modern version of their original language (and any such process could be controversial). An interesting lacuna.
    - retrac 3y ago
      The boundaries between languages over time are as elusive as they can be between dialects in the present day. Most educated people can read English prose from the 1800s on a familiar topic and generally understand it. It's English. But to be fair, some will struggle. Further back in the 1600s, it's much harder. Does it need translation? If we go back to the 1400s, there's general agreement that it's Middle English, which is a different language, and it needs translation, as even many educated fluent speakers can't make heads or tails of it. One of my textbooks in high school had a translation of Shakespeare into modern English, alongside the original text in both original and modernized spellings, with glossary and cultural notes. I'm not sure I'd have understood even it half as well without those.
    - msla 3y ago
      > But there isn't really any separate process by which old works are "translated" to a more modern version of their original language (and any such process could be controversial). This is dependent on the perception of the source language: For example, Beowulf is often translated into Modern English, even though it is (officially) written in English itself, but even the worst prig will admit that Old English isn't comprehensible to a modern reader who hasn't explicitly learned it as a foreign language. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is almost never translated, even though his poetic Early Modern English is so distant from our own that Juliet's famous "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" is often performed with Juliet looking for Romeo from her perspective on the balcony. Translating Shakespeare would be admitting defeat, I daresay, so the prigs allow footnotes and no more. Is Chaucer translated these days? Have the prigs ceded at least that much? That said, there's No Fear Shakespeare and (probably) some other works aimed at students, which do essay an actual translation: https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/hamlet/act-1-scene-1/ https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/hamlet/act-1-s...
- toth 3y ago
  That is very interesting. As you most likely know, Borges was famously a huge anglophile, he once said "I find English a far finer language than Spanish" in an interview. There's a video of his reasoning: https://www.reddit.com/r/Spanish/comments/13cg3xv/jorge_luis_borges_speaking_about_key_differences/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Spanish/comments/13cg3xv/jorge_luis... I tend to agree with him. I am not a native English speaker and also find it more expressive than my mother tongue.
DiscourseFan 3y ago
We had a literary theory seminar at college, and I read this text for the first time therein. The arguments for a reading of a historical difference between the "translations" falls apart when you show that the "history" is constructed therein: and such was my reading, Borges is making a magic trick which makes you think that there is such a thing as historical difference by inventing an impossible condition where you think the only reason the two different texts are different is because two different people wrote them, even though Borges authored neither.
ojosilva 3y ago
If you haven't read Ficciones, it's a must! Besides the Spanish original, I've read the English version and it's just as excellent. The stories in the book are each one a universe in itself and is part of today's core literary cannon: Funes the memorious, The Garden of the forking paths, ... An HN must! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones
- aamargulies 3y ago
  Seconded.
- NoboruWataya 3y ago
  Agree, one of my favourite short story collections. Each story is like its own thought experiment.
andybak 3y ago
My coarse take on the story: Borges imagines that a modern writer rewrites Don Quixote by "immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually re-create it, line for line, in the original 17th-century Spanish". Based on this conceit Borges then reviews both versions (which remember are identical) and finds the modern version superior. It's an extended joke and/or thought experiment which is meant to investigate ideas around the extent to which the merit of a work is contained within the work itself vs our knowledge of the conditions in which it was created (especially our knowledge of the intent and situation of the author). It goes to the heart of a lot of debates around artistic value and the approach to literary criticism. It's very short and quite funny in a dry, academic way. In general I tend to read Borges as somewhere in between a very concise, elegant philosopher and a stand-up comic.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
zetalyrae 3y ago
A fun aside: https://old-sound.medium.com/pierre-menard-inventor-of-lisp-5ddc12c1363e https://old-sound.medium.com/pierre-menard-inventor-of-lisp-...
- cryptonector 3y ago
  Hilarious!
steppi 3y ago
Something I find fascinating is that many of Borges’ stories demonstrate a solid grasp of fairly advanced mathematics of his time [0] but he had little formal education. I like to try imagine the work he must have put in to attain this knowledge. I think of Pierre Menard as an example of the extremal principle [1], bringing insight into how works of literature are interpreted by considering extreme cases. A good counterpart to Pierre Menard is The Library of Babel [2], also in Ficciones. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges_and_mathematics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges_and_mathem... [1] https://brilliant.org/wiki/extremal-principle/ https://brilliant.org/wiki/extremal-principle/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
- kjellsbells 3y ago
  Borges may have studied mathematics, but I posit that he was simply a well educated man of the time. Its not unreasonable to assume that he would have read ancient Greek thinking, grounding him in logic and paradoxes, for example, or looked at Pascal and Descartes for their philosophy and picked up mathematics on the way. I see evidence of a well educated and supremely well read humanist rather than someone quietly studying Cauchy and Legendre on the down low.
  - steppi 3y ago
    Borges’ depth of knowledge of philosophy and mathematics far exceeded what would have been covered in the BA he received in 1914. He was an autodidact who quietly studied a great deal of topics [0]. Beyond being an educated man of his time, I think he was a genius. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts
comonoid 3y ago
I've read all Borges' work translated to my native language. I consider it a replacement of humanitarian sciences course (I've graduated from a math department).
beepbooptheory 3y ago
Another one I think about alot these days is "Funes, the Memorious." So much in the broad culture of the tech world is wrapped up in these, I find, odd and misguided commitments to the idea/fantasy of a pure form of "intelligence," artificial or otherwise. As if the world was literally an RPG game or something. To me, so many of the more... enthusiastic AI-heads seem to be unwittingly aspiring towards that space Funes is in in the story: all-knowing and in that, totally impotent. Attempting to amass knowledge, but not considering the inflation of meaning such accumulation necessarily entails. Attemping to know everyone, but in that, never being able to be with anyone.

56 points by tokai 3y ago

Here's an interesting tidbit about Jorge Luis Borges that may have inspired him to write that story. First, some backstory: "Under his grandmother's tutelage, Borges learned to read English before he could read Spanish. [...] In Borges's autobiographical essay, he recalled reading even the great Spanish masterpiece, Cervantes's Don Quixote, in English before reading it in Spanish." The funny thing is, when he finally came across a copy of Don Quixote in its original Spanish... he dismissed it as "a bad translation" of the book he had read in English.

lmarcos 3y ago
For Spanish speakers who know English, reading Don Quixote in English is probably easier (and more pleasant). The Spanish one is full of words that even though a native speaker can understand (with footnotes sometimes), it's just not as pleasant as reading modern Spanish.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  It's curious that we accept translations from spanish to english, but not from old spanish to modern spanish.
  - Schiphol 3y ago
    Andrés Trapiello, a well-known Spanish writer, did just that a few years ago [to some backlash](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/19/modern-version-of-don-quixote-declared-against-literature https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/19/modern-version...)
  - Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
    For some cultural reason that I'm not qualified to explain, the Spanish literary world is much more stilted than the English one. When I first read the Odyssey about 20 years ago, I found it more pleasant to read in English than in my native Spanish because all Spanish translations were full of intrincate poetic language and obscure words, while English ones where much more down-to-earth. (Now there is at least one Spanish edition with a plain language translation as well, edited by Blackie Books, which as a layman in these things I have found enjoyable). By the way, this happens also with original literature (I mean, not translations). I find most Spanish literature rather pedantic, there tends to be a huge focus on form over content, using the richest vocabulary, the longest sentences, the most complex subordinates, the most subtle nuances, spending 4 pages on describing the movement of a leaf with the wind, etc. while in English literature actual stuff happens and is told in a nice but practical way. As a native Spanish speaker, I read much more Anglo-Saxon literature than Hispanic one, although I guess it's all a matter of taste, of course. (PS, since the post talks about Borges: he's an exception. He sounds like an Anglo-Saxon writer writing in Spanish).
    - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
      > while in English literature actual stuff happens and is told in a nice but practical way. That’s an overly broad generalisation. I can give you a ton of English novels spending pages after pages describing the movement of a leaf in the wind in rather florid language. It’s much more likely that you have been mostly exposed to a lot of old and rather serious novels during your education in Spanish are now mostly consuming novels you find entertaining in English. It’s the same with the Odyssey which let’s not forget is originally written in ancien Greek verses. The epic has been translated hundreds of times with vastly different goals. Even in the same language, some translations aim to capture the poesy of the original either in its rythme or in its evocative power, some try to stay as close as possible to the Greek text, some just want to be easy to understand.
    - cryptonector 3y ago
      > For some cultural reason that I'm not qualified to explain, the Spanish literary world is much more stilted than the English one. When I first read the Odyssey about 20 years ago, I found it more pleasant to read in English than in my native Spanish because all Spanish translations were full of intrincate poetic language and obscure words, while English ones where much more down-to-earth. This is a common theme in Romance language writing, but it's especially so in Spanish. Lots of elliptical sentences longer than most paragraphs in English, requiring extensive effort to parse. Lots of flowery language. A bit of a word game, but usually just dreadful. > (PS, since the post talks about Borges: he's an exception. He sounds like an Anglo-Saxon writer writing in Spanish). He learned to read English before Spanish while living in Switzerland as a child. In a way he very much was an English language author writing in Spanish. The result is that his writing is very accessible in the original Spanish and very translatable to English, and his writings have a very unique flavor.
  - snet0 3y ago
    I don't know how it is in Spanish culture, but in English culture there is certainly an amount of sneering done at "modernisations" of older English texts.
    - cryptonector 3y ago
      It's the same.
- narag 3y ago
  Agree with easier, disagree with pleasant. First time I read the whole book, it was an annotated edition with lots of footnotes, explaining all the differences. I was hating the experience. Solution? I stopped reading the footnotes. After some time, I got much more engaged in the story and got the occasional arcaism right from the context. The "bad translation" must have been Borges identifying old Spanish as a broken, not idiomatic modern Spanish.
- NoboruWataya 3y ago
  I guess when an old text is translated into a foreign language, the translator often takes certain liberties to make the translated text more accessible to a modern audience. But there isn't really any separate process by which old works are "translated" to a more modern version of their original language (and any such process could be controversial). An interesting lacuna.
  - retrac 3y ago
    The boundaries between languages over time are as elusive as they can be between dialects in the present day. Most educated people can read English prose from the 1800s on a familiar topic and generally understand it. It's English. But to be fair, some will struggle. Further back in the 1600s, it's much harder. Does it need translation? If we go back to the 1400s, there's general agreement that it's Middle English, which is a different language, and it needs translation, as even many educated fluent speakers can't make heads or tails of it. One of my textbooks in high school had a translation of Shakespeare into modern English, alongside the original text in both original and modernized spellings, with glossary and cultural notes. I'm not sure I'd have understood even it half as well without those.
  - msla 3y ago
    > But there isn't really any separate process by which old works are "translated" to a more modern version of their original language (and any such process could be controversial). This is dependent on the perception of the source language: For example, Beowulf is often translated into Modern English, even though it is (officially) written in English itself, but even the worst prig will admit that Old English isn't comprehensible to a modern reader who hasn't explicitly learned it as a foreign language. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is almost never translated, even though his poetic Early Modern English is so distant from our own that Juliet's famous "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" is often performed with Juliet looking for Romeo from her perspective on the balcony. Translating Shakespeare would be admitting defeat, I daresay, so the prigs allow footnotes and no more. Is Chaucer translated these days? Have the prigs ceded at least that much? That said, there's No Fear Shakespeare and (probably) some other works aimed at students, which do essay an actual translation: https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/hamlet/act-1-scene-1/ https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/hamlet/act-1-s...
toth 3y ago
That is very interesting. As you most likely know, Borges was famously a huge anglophile, he once said "I find English a far finer language than Spanish" in an interview. There's a video of his reasoning: https://www.reddit.com/r/Spanish/comments/13cg3xv/jorge_luis_borges_speaking_about_key_differences/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Spanish/comments/13cg3xv/jorge_luis... I tend to agree with him. I am not a native English speaker and also find it more expressive than my mother tongue.

DiscourseFan 3y ago

We had a literary theory seminar at college, and I read this text for the first time therein. The arguments for a reading of a historical difference between the "translations" falls apart when you show that the "history" is constructed therein: and such was my reading, Borges is making a magic trick which makes you think that there is such a thing as historical difference by inventing an impossible condition where you think the only reason the two different texts are different is because two different people wrote them, even though Borges authored neither.

ojosilva 3y ago

If you haven't read Ficciones, it's a must! Besides the Spanish original, I've read the English version and it's just as excellent. The stories in the book are each one a universe in itself and is part of today's core literary cannon: Funes the memorious, The Garden of the forking paths, ... An HN must! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones

aamargulies 3y ago
Seconded.
NoboruWataya 3y ago
Agree, one of my favourite short story collections. Each story is like its own thought experiment.

andybak 3y ago

My coarse take on the story: Borges imagines that a modern writer rewrites Don Quixote by "immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually re-create it, line for line, in the original 17th-century Spanish". Based on this conceit Borges then reviews both versions (which remember are identical) and finds the modern version superior. It's an extended joke and/or thought experiment which is meant to investigate ideas around the extent to which the merit of a work is contained within the work itself vs our knowledge of the conditions in which it was created (especially our knowledge of the intent and situation of the author). It goes to the heart of a lot of debates around artistic value and the approach to literary criticism. It's very short and quite funny in a dry, academic way. In general I tend to read Borges as somewhere in between a very concise, elegant philosopher and a stand-up comic.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

zetalyrae 3y ago

A fun aside: https://old-sound.medium.com/pierre-menard-inventor-of-lisp-5ddc12c1363e https://old-sound.medium.com/pierre-menard-inventor-of-lisp-...

cryptonector 3y ago
Hilarious!

steppi 3y ago

Something I find fascinating is that many of Borges’ stories demonstrate a solid grasp of fairly advanced mathematics of his time [0] but he had little formal education. I like to try imagine the work he must have put in to attain this knowledge. I think of Pierre Menard as an example of the extremal principle [1], bringing insight into how works of literature are interpreted by considering extreme cases. A good counterpart to Pierre Menard is The Library of Babel [2], also in Ficciones. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges_and_mathematics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges_and_mathem... [1] https://brilliant.org/wiki/extremal-principle/ https://brilliant.org/wiki/extremal-principle/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

kjellsbells 3y ago
Borges may have studied mathematics, but I posit that he was simply a well educated man of the time. Its not unreasonable to assume that he would have read ancient Greek thinking, grounding him in logic and paradoxes, for example, or looked at Pascal and Descartes for their philosophy and picked up mathematics on the way. I see evidence of a well educated and supremely well read humanist rather than someone quietly studying Cauchy and Legendre on the down low.
- steppi 3y ago
  Borges’ depth of knowledge of philosophy and mathematics far exceeded what would have been covered in the BA he received in 1914. He was an autodidact who quietly studied a great deal of topics [0]. Beyond being an educated man of his time, I think he was a genius. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts

comonoid 3y ago

I've read all Borges' work translated to my native language. I consider it a replacement of humanitarian sciences course (I've graduated from a math department).

beepbooptheory 3y ago

Another one I think about alot these days is "Funes, the Memorious." So much in the broad culture of the tech world is wrapped up in these, I find, odd and misguided commitments to the idea/fantasy of a pure form of "intelligence," artificial or otherwise. As if the world was literally an RPG game or something. To me, so many of the more... enthusiastic AI-heads seem to be unwittingly aspiring towards that space Funes is in in the story: all-knowing and in that, totally impotent. Attempting to amass knowledge, but not considering the inflation of meaning such accumulation necessarily entails. Attemping to know everyone, but in that, never being able to be with anyone.