The similarity of words between Melania Trump, Michelle Obama, My Little Pony and Borges

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

Half-way through my first cup of coffee this morning, while I read the latest account and critique of Melania Trump’s plagiarized RNC speech, I remembered Pierre Menard.

My favorite college literature professor was a Chilean ex-pat who had an encyclopedic memory and a knack for storytelling. His name was Ricardo Benavidez, and he lectured on Latin American literature from a place of intimacy. He had studied in Spain, under Pío Baroja, and claims to have been a regular at Baroja’s weekly afternoon tertulias where wine was served and conversation was consumed. He was old when I met him, afflicted with cancer, but he insisted on having tertulias of his own.

It was at his home where I first heard of Pierre Menard, a character in a Borges short story. Professor Benavidez recounted the plot:

Menard is a deceased French literature critic who had left a work in progress, a re-writing of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The story’s narrator is a friend of the French critic who had taken it upon himself to rectify the critic’s tarnished reputation – the work he had left behind were the 9th and 38th chapters of Part 1 of Quixote, written verbatim from the original. Mernard was pegged as a plagiarist, but the narrator insisted that the work was truly original becasue the Frenchman hadn’t just transcribed the chapters, he argued that Menard’s “admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided-word for word and line for line-with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”  And he did so without recreating Cervantes’ life, but by living his own and writing those chapters of Quixote through the experiences of a French literature critic.

It’s a typical Borges head-game.

A different person with different experiences living in a different era wrote those exact words, so it can’t be the same work. The discussion filled the rest of the evening at Benavidez’ house while the professor sat back, smiled and deflected arguments back into the mix.

I was on the pragmatic side of the debate concerning authorship and original material. There’s only one Don Quixote, period.

A speech at a political convention is not a literary masterpiece . . . 

. . . but the questions of authorship and plagiarism are the same. Those were clearly not Melania Trump’s words – it’s only one paragraph, seven percent of the whole according to Chris Christi’s accounting, but it’s definitely cut from the Michelle Obama original 2008 DNC speech.

The RNC would take the Borges tack.

RNC Comunications Director Sean Spicer said today that the exact phrases used by Melania Trump have been used in the past by rappers and animated characters. He knows, he says, because he Googled the phrases. Professor Benavidez would be grinning widely.

So according to the GOP, Michelle Obama could have lifted some of the words of her 2008 speech from a Little Pony cartoon, and Melania’s use of those same phrases is merely coincidental.

They’re dead serious about this. 

Borges would have played with the idea that Melania is not Michelle is not Little Pony, so those couldn’t have been the same words. But Spicer isn’t Borges and this isn’t a work of fiction.

It’s the closest thing to fiction that you get in politics, it’s the world according to Trump and if Trump’s troops say it isn’t plagiarism, then it isn’t, beleive me.



[Photo courtesy of Justjarred]

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