Natalya Gornopolskaya

Blog by Natalya Gornopolskaya
“The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

The first story was about a law student who decided to undertake the task of finding a holy man known as Al-Mu’tasim. It was actually a story within a story; it starts out as a book review for “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” which contains a 1932 and a 1934 addition. The law student has renounced his Islamic faith, and finds himself at a crossroads in which he participates in a riot and kills another man. Throughout the book the law student goes through a long journey seeking out Al-Mu’tasim, who has been given a variety of descriptions. It seems as though this man is some sort of a godly figure to all religions who shape shifts in order to be significant to all. As it turns out the law student finds this legend of a man at the end, and the story ends there. I believe Borges wrote this story in order to show that religions can interrelate through one powerful unseen force such as the legend of Al-Mu’tasim.

This next reading conveys how great of an artist Pierre Menard was and how he was the true author of the “Quixote”. The narrator continuously compares the book which Pierre Menard supposedly wrote to the actual work by Miguel Cervantes. The narrator prefers the Don Quixote version written by Menard. When writing his version of the text Menard makes no attempt to translate it word for word, he simply revitalizes this work just as he envisioned it, not staying true to the original author. In a way Menard has spurned Cervantes’s artistic integrity by fabricating his own literary novel at the expense of Cervantes. This story tells me that Borges may be in favor of the concept of a “re-make” since he feels they can sometimes be more successful than the original. If something like this happened to me, I would sue my translator for copyright infringement and demand a large percentage of their profits.