This reminds me of the wonderful short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. In the story, the character attempts to authentically rewrite Cervantes’ Don Quixote — not by simply copying the known text, not even by attempting to re-live Cervantes’ life and spontaneously writing the novel just as Cervantes did, but by somehow living his own 20th century life and happening onto writing a novel that is word for word identical to Don Quixote. It’s a marvelous, impossible premise which speaks to our fantasies of creativity and fetishization of original artifacts.

“Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre did not want to compose another Quixote, which is surely easy enough — he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided — word for word and line for line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”

Here’s a PDF of an English translation:

http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-P...

The story has some really funny sections where Borges compares a passage by Cervantes with an (identical) passage by Menard, comparing their style and meaning (which are not the same!). It's just fantastic.