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Pierre Menard

Pierre Menard is a fictional character created by writer Jorge Luis Borges in his essay "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." Menard is depicted as a 20th-century French writer who aims to reproduce Miguel de Cervantes’ "Don Quixote" word-for-word, not by copying it, but by independently recreating the work through his own effort, context, and understanding. Borges uses Menard to explore ideas about authorship, originality, and the nature of texts—highlighting that a new work can have different meanings depending on its creator's perspective, even if it shares the same words as an original.