The Spanish-language original was first published in book form in Borges's 1941 collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), which was included in his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944).
While Menard writes of the distant past ("the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope"), in Cervantes "there are neither bands of Gypsies, conquistadors... nor autos de fé".
Following its completion, Borges was satisfied that his creativity remained and thus proceeded to write the rest of the stories that later made up the book El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.
According to Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid, Menard is in part "a caricature of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry ... or Miguel de Unamuno and Enrique Larreta".
Borges's biographer Emir Rodríguez Monegal notes that this name belonged to a real person, Louis Ménard, a self-described "pagan mystic" who was observed by contemporary Remy de Gourmont to have composed a work called Prometheus Unbound in both French and Ancient Greek.
This technique was actually attempted by Hunter S. Thompson, who retyped the entirety of The Great Gatsby when he studied at Columbia University, prior to the writing of any of his major works.
John Hodgman claims to have made a "controversial shot-by-shot remake" of "Pierre Menard" in the "page-a-day calendar" portion of his book More Information Than You Require, on the date 4 December 1998.
The joke references not only the recreation nature of the original short story, but also Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, which was released on the same date.
The novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov expands the concept of the 'frame narrative' of Borges's story, expanding this conceit into a novel-length structure in which a commentator appears, at first, to be simply analyzing the work of another character (a 1000-line poem, which the novel actually features) and doing so in good faith, before it becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to separate the truth about the lives of the two characters from the manner in which the commentary begins to dominate and manipulate the meaning of the fictional author's text to tell the commentator's own story.
Much as the narrator of Borges's story offers a list of Pierre Menard's fictional publications, the novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace contains a patience-testing list of the film credits of one of the characters, expanding the comedic possibilities of the structure of fictional references by offering both titles and sometimes-lengthy descriptions of the highly improbable (or downright impossible) films.
[5] The story is also referenced in TV show The Good Place, season 4, episode 13, "Whenever You're Ready", in a list of projects that character Tahani Al Jamil is working on in the afterlife.
In the HBO Series Los Espookys, season 2, episode 3, the character Tati decides to write a novel, which consists of transcribing an audiobook of Don Quixote.