"Don Quixote", Menard told me, "was above all else an entertaining book: but now it has become an occasion for patriotic toasts, for grammatical insolence, for obscene de luxe editions. Glory is a form of incomprehension and it is perhaps the very worst."

     "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"

When Jorge Luis Borges wrote that, in the early 1940s, he was already known in Argentina as a poet fond of peculiar metaphors, a fierce literary polemicist, and the author of some strange short stories that looked like essays but were, despite the academic apparatus seemingly embedded in them, exercises in fantasy. He was not considered a likely candidate for "glory." True, as early as 1933 Drieu La Rochelle had reported after a trip to Buenos Aires that "Borges vaut le voyage." But, this and other omens notwithstanding, Borges was still the private passion of a few, most of whom...