Fernando Sdrigotti
In the short story Pierre Menard: Author of Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges
writes of an author’s quest to reproduce Cervantes’ masterpiece, word
by word, comma after comma. “Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough – he wanted to compose the Quixote,” Borges writes.
More likely than not to be aware of this Borgesian playfulness, Argentine author Pablo Katchadjian decided in 2009 to remix
one of Borges’s most renowned short stories The Aleph, keeping the
original text but adding a considerable amount of his own writing. The
result was the short experimental book called El Aleph engordado (The
Fattened Aleph), published by a small underground press in a short run
of 300 copies. An unfortunate consequence of Katchadjian’s literary
experiments is an ongoing lawsuit initiated in 2011 by Maria Kodama,
Borges’s widow and fervent guardian of his literary estate.
