Borges style is very complex and important to Latin American literature because it reflects a style which is often called surrealism. This genre describes Borges’ work well, and his mastery of the language has brought a wealth of resources to contemporary Spanish literature. Along with Cortázar, Borges has exemplified the personification of reality with absorbing tales of labyrinths, murder, and eastern philosophy. Translating this piece reflects a statement about the Hispanic world; I dare say it is a statement about the ways in which English readers interpret their Hispanic counterparts. It is a statement about the futility of translation in the face of culturally ignorant individuals who wish not to learn from their literature but to wallow in the comforts of the norm.

Thus, within the translation of The garden of forking paths you will find several endnotes, which can be read during the story or after. I have placed them at the end for the purpose of not interrupting the story, so as to allow space for a comfortable reading. Where necessary, I have cited examples of difficulties in the translation and attempt to bring some clarity to a confusing word or passage.

Mistral has also been an adept in the Spanish language and also a difficulty to translate her poems with precision. One must choose between a clear interpretation of the meaning of the poem, or rather the words within the poem and a clear interpretation of the sound of the poem. The translation of the rhythm and sound of the poem is very crucial because it lends itself to the feeling of the piece as a whole. Unfortunately, trying to make it sound equally potent in English breaks the realistic possibility of a translation of its meaning.

"O el río de Elqui de mi infancia

The second line is a play on words and cannot be translated literally without incoherence. When I had several native Spanish speakers look it at they could not translate it into English because the repetition of the me’s are not reproducible and it is not written in grammatically proper Spanish. I thus opted for doing two translations of the poem, one which focuses on the literal meaning of the words, and one which focuses on the sound and rhythm. Therefore it has been a daunting task to reproduce such grandeur in English, barbarous English.

Following the four levels of translation noted by André Lefevere I see several questions that arise in particular with respect to the Borges work. On an ideological level, The garden of forking paths may not play a major role in American society today, perhaps because of the subject matter and inaccessible nature of the writing (i.e., long sentences and an occasional glance in the dictionary). Yet I feel that it could be important in our society because Borges’ theme of contradictions and the parody of modern life call out to the modern individual, who can see these same dramas playing out in daily life.

On Lefevere’s level of ‘universe of discourse’, many problems are posed to an effective translation of Mistral and Borges’ works. Both authors were highly famed in their native countries and the impact of their works in a culturally receptive context can change the interpretation. Mistral was writing during a time when women were not regarded as equals in the literary world of white men. Yet her abilities earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature, and so changed the way in which her audience perceived that work, and in turn changed her own writings. Needless to say, the possibility of re-creating this effect is virtually impossible.

With these words of caution now behind us, let us proceed to the translations, which I guarantee will inspire a sense of the greatness which Mistral and Borges have left behind.

For Victoria Ocampo

On page 22 of Liddell Hart’s History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (assisted by 400 artillery pieces), had been planned for the 24^th of July, 1916 was postponed until the morning of the 29^th. The torrential rains (Captain Liddell Hart comments) caused this delay – an insignificant one, to be sure. The following statement, dictated, reread and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former professor of English at the Hochschule at Tsingtao, throws an unsuspected light over the whole affair. The first two pages of the document are missing.

"…and I hung up the phone. Immediately afterwards, I recognized the voice that had answered in German. It was that of Captain Richard Madden. Madden, in the office of in Viktor Runeberg, meant the end of our anxieties and –but this seemed, or should have seemed, very secondary to me –also the end of our lives. It meant that Runeberg had been arrested, or murdered. Before the sun set that day, I would encounter the same fate. Madden was implacable. Rather, he was obliged to be so. An Irishman at the service of England, a man accused of laziness and perhaps of treason, how could he fail to seize and be thankful for such a miraculous opportunity: the discovery, capture, maybe even the death of two agents of the German Reich? I went up to my room; absurdly I locked the door and threw myself on my back onto the narrow iron cot. Through the window I saw the usual roofs and the cloudy six o’clock sun. It seemed incredible to me that a day without premonitions or symbols would be the one of my implacable death. In spite of my dead father, in spite of having been a child in a symmetrical garden of Hai Feng… me, now, going to die? Then I reflected that everything happens to an individual precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the earth and the sea, and everything that is happening is happening to me… The almost intolerable recollection of Madden’s horse-face banished these wanderings. In the midst of my hatred and terror (now it means nothing to me to speak of terror: now that I have mocked Richard Madden, now that my throat yearns for the noose) it occurred to me that the tumultuous and doubtless happy warrior did not suspect that I possessed the Secret. The name of the exact location of the new British artillery park on the banks of the River Ancre. A bird streaked across the gray sky and blindly I translated it into an airplane and that airplane into many (in the French sky) annihilating the artillery station with vertical bombs. If only my mouth, before a bullet destroyed it, could cry out that secret name so it could be heard in Germany… My human voice was very weak. How might I make it carry to the ear of the Chief? To the ear of that sick and hateful man who knew nothing of Runeberg and me save that we were in Staffordshire and who was waiting in vain for our report in his arid office in Berlin, endlessly examining newspapers… I said out loud: I must flee. I sat up silently, in a useless perfection of silence, as if Madden were already lying in wait for me. Something –perhaps the mere ostentation of proving my resources were nil – made me look through my pockets. I found what I knew I would find. The American watch, the nickel chain and the square coin, the key ring with the incriminating useless keys to Runeberg’s apartment, the notebook, a letter which I resolved to destroy immediately (and which I did not destroy), a crown, two shillings and a few pence, the red-blue pencil, the handkerchief, the revolver with one bullet. Absurdly, I took it in my hand and turned it to inspire courage within myself. Vaguely I thought that a pistol report can be heard from far away. In ten minutes my plan was perfected. The telephone book listed the name of the only person capable of transmitting the message: he lived in a suburb of Fenton, less than a half hour’s train ride away.

I am a cowardly man. I say it now, now that I have carried to its end a plan whose risk no one can deny. I know its execution was terrible. I didn’t do it for Germany, no. I care nothing for a barbarous country which imposed upon me the abjection of being a spy. Besides, I know of a man from England – a modest man –who for me is no less great than Goethe. I talked with him for scarcely an hour, but during that hour he was Goethe… I did it because I felt the Chief somehow feared people of my race – for the innumerable ancestors who merge within me. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies. Besides, I had to flee from Captain Madden. His hands and voice could knock at my door any moment. I dressed silently, bade farewell to myself in the mirror, went downstairs, scrutinized the peaceful street and went out. The station was not far from my home, but I judged it wise to take a cab. I argued that in this way I ran less risk of being recognized; the fact is that in the deserted street I felt myself visible and vulnerable, infinitely so. I remember that I told the cab driver to stop a short distance before the main entrance. I got out with voluntary, almost painful slowness; I was going to the village of Ashgrove but I bought a ticket for a more distant station. The train left within a very few minutes, at eight-fifty. I hurried; the next one would leave at nine-thirty. There was hardly a soul on the platform. I went through the coaches; I remember a few farmers, a mourning woman, a young boy who was reading with fervor the Annals of Tacitus, a wounded and happy soldier. The coaches jerked forward at last. A man whom I recognized ran in vain to the end of the platform. It was Captain Richard Madden. Shattered, trembling, I shrank into the far corner of the seat, away from the dreaded window.

From this broken state I passed into an almost abject felicity. I told myself that my duel had already begun and that I had won the first round by frustrating, even if for forty minutes, even if by a stroke of luck, the attack of my adversary. I argued (no less sophisticatedly) that this slightest of victories foreshadowed a total victory. I argued that it wasn’t slight, that my cowardly felicity proved that I was a man capable of carrying out the adventure successfully. From this weakness I took strength that did not abandon me. I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious actions; soon there will be no one but warriors and bandits; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious action ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, he ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. Thus I proceeded as my eyes of a dead man registered the elapsing of that day, which was perhaps the last, and the diffusion of the night. The train ran gently, amid ash trees. It stopped, almost in the middle of the field. No one announced the name of the station. "Ashgrove?" I asked a few boys on the platform. "Ashgrove," they replied. I got off.

A lamp lit the platform but the faces of the boys were in shadow. One questioned me, "Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert's house?" Without waiting for my answer, another said, "The house is a long way from here, but you won't get lost if you take this road to the left and at every crossroads turn again to your left." I tossed them a coin (my last), descended a few stone steps and started down the solitary road. The road went down, slowly. It was of elemental earth, overhead the branches were tangled, the low, full moon seemed to accompany me.

For an instant, I thought that Richard Madden in some way had penetrated my desperate plan. Very quickly I understood that was impossible. The instructions to rum always to the left reminded me that such was the common procedure for discovering the central point of certain labyrinths. I know a thing or two about labyrinths: not for nothing am I the great grandson of that Ts'ui PÃ n, who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced worldly power in order to write a novel that might be even more popular than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost. Thirteen years he dedicated to these heterogeneous tasks, but the hand of a stranger murdered him and his novel was incoherent and no one found the labyrinth. Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I imagined it untouched and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain, I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water, I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . . . I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that could encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny, that of someone pursued. I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world. The vague and living countryside, the moon, the remains of the afternoon, worked on me; as well as the slope of the road which eliminated any possibility of weariness. The afternoon was intimate, infinite. The road descended and forked among the now confused meadows. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music approached and receded in the blowing of the breeze, dimmed by leaves and distance. I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets. I arrived, thus, before a tall, rusty gate. Between the iron bars I made out a poplar grove and a type of pavilion. I understood suddenly two things, the first trivial, the second almost unbelievable: the music came from the pavilion, and the music was Chinese. For that reason I had openly accepted it without paying it any attention. I don’t remember whether there was a bell or whether I knocked with my hand. The sparkling of the music continued.

But from the rear of the intimate house a lantern approached: a lantern that illuminated and sometimes eclipsed the trees, a paper lantern, that had the form of a drum and the color of the moon. A tall man was carrying it. I didn't see his face, for the light blinded me. He opened the door and said slowly, in my own language:

"I see that the pious Hsi PÃ ng persists in correcting my solitude. You no doubt wish to see the garden?"

I recognized the name of one of our consuls and I replied, disconcerted:

"The garden?"

"The garden of forking paths."

Something stirred in my memory and I uttered with incomprehensible certainty:

"The garden of my ancestor Ts'ui PÃ n."

"Your ancestor? Your illustrious ancestor? Come in."

The damp path zigzagged like those of my childhood. We came to a library of Eastern and Western books. I recognized bound in yellow silk several volumes of the Lost Encyclopedia, edited by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty but never had them printed. The record on the phonograph turned next to a bronze phoenix. I also recall a rose-colored vase and another, many centuries older, of that shade of blue which our craftsmen copied from the potters of Persia . . .

Stephen Albert observed me, smiling. He was (as I have said) very tall, sharp-featured, with gray eyes and a gray beard. There was something religious in him and also something like a sailor; later he told me that he had been a missionary in Tientsin "before aspiring to become a Sinologist."

We sat down; I on a long, low divan, he with his back to the window and a tall, circular clock. I calculated that my pursuer, Richard Madden, could not arrive for at least an hour. My irrevocable determination could wait.

"An astounding fate, that of Ts'ui PÃ n," Stephen Albert said. "Governor of his native province, learned in astronomy, in astrology and in the tireless interpretation of the canonical books, chess player, famous poet and calligrapher: he abandoned all this in order to compose a book and a maze. He renounced the pleasures of both tyranny and justice, of his populous bed, of his banquets and even of erudition and closed himself up for thirteen years in the Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude. When he died, his heirs found nothing except for chaotic manuscripts. His family, as you are aware, wished to condemn them to the fire; but his executor (a Taoist or Buddhist monk) insisted on their publication."

"We descendants of Ts’ui PÃ n," I replied, "continue to curse that monk. Their publication was senseless. The book is an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts. I examined it once: in the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive. As for the other undertaking of Ts’ui PÃ n, his Labyrinth . . ."

"Here is the Labyrinth," he said, indicating a tan lacquered desk.

"An ivory labyrinth! " I exclaimed. "A minimum labyrinth…"

"A labyrinth of symbols," he corrected. "An invisible labyrinth of time. To me, a barbarous Englishman, has been entrusted the revelation of this diaphanous mystery. After more than a hundred years, the details are irretrievable; but it is not hard to conjecture what happened. Ts’ui PÃ n must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; no one thought that the book and the maze were one and the same thing. The Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude stood in the center of a garden that was perhaps intricate; that fact could have suggested to the heirs a physical labyrinth. Ts’ui PÃ n died; no one in the vast territories that were his came upon the labyrinth; the confusion of the novel suggested to me that it was the maze. Two circumstances gave me the correct solution of the problem. One: the curious legend that Ts’ui PÃ n had planned to create a labyrinth which would be strictly infinite. The other: a fragment of a letter I discovered."

Albert rose. He turned his back to me for a moment; he opened a drawer of the black and gold desk. He returned with a sheet of paper that had once been crimson; now pink and tenuous and cross-sectioned. The fame of Ts’ui PÃ n as a calligrapher had been justly earned. I read, uncomprehendingly and with fervor, these words written with a minute brush by a man of my blood: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. I returned the paper in silence. Albert continued:

"Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A volume whose last page was identical with its first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely. I remembered too that night which is at the middle of the 1001 Nights when Shahrazad Dynasty (through a magical oversight of the copyist) begins to relate word for word the story of the 1001 Nights, establishing the risk of coming once again to the night when she must repeat it, and thus on to infinity. I imagined as well a Platonic, hereditary work, transmitted from father to son, in which each new individual adds a chapter or corrects with pious care the pages of his elders. These conjectures diverted me; but none seemed to correspond, not even remotely, to the contradictory chapters of Ts’ui PÃ n. In the midst of this perplexity, I received from Oxford the manuscript you have just examined. I lingered, naturally, on the phrase: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase the various futures (not to all) suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed that theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui PÃ n, he chooses simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times, which themselves also proliferate and fork. This is the explanation of the novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger knocks at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, etcetera. In the work of Ts'ui PÃ n, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. If you will resign yourself to my incurable pronunciation, we shall read a few pages."

His face, within the vivid circle of the lamplight, was unquestionably that of an old man, but with something unalterable about it, even immortal. He read with slow precision two versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches to a battle across a deserted mountain; the horror of the rocks and shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory. I listened with proper veneration to these ancient narratives, perhaps less admirable in themselves than the fact that they had been created by my blood and were being retold to me by a man of a remote empire, in the course of a desperate adventure, on a Western island. I remember the last words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

From that moment on, I felt about me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming. Not the swarming of the divergent, parallel and finally coalescent armies, but a more inaccessible, more intimate agitation that they in some manner prefigured. Stephen Albert continued:

"I don't believe that your illustrious ancestor played idly with these variations. I don't consider it credible that he would sacrifice thirteen years to the infinite execution of a rhetorical experiment. In your country now, the novel is a secondary form of literature; in Ts'ui PÃ n’s time it was a despicable form of literature. Ts'ui PÃ n was a brilliant novelist, but he was also a man of letters who doubtless did not consider himself a mere novelist. The testimony of his contemporaries proclaims – and his life fully confirms it – his metaphysical and mystical interests. Philosophic controversy usurps a good part of the novel. I know that of all problems, none disturbed him so greatly nor worked upon him so much as the abysmal problem of time. Now then, that is the only problem that does not figure in the pages of the Garden. He does not even use the word that signifies time. How do you explain this voluntary omission?"

I proposed several solutions; all unsatisfactory. We discussed them; finally, Stephen Albert said to me:

"In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?" I thought a moment and replied:

"The word chess."

"Precisely," said Albert. "The garden of forking paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time; this hidden cause prohibits the mention of its name. To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing it. That is the tortuous method he preferred, in each of the meanderings of his indefatigable novel by the oblique Ts'ui PÃ n. I have compared hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the errors that the negligence of the copyists has introduced, I have guessed the plan of this chaos, I have re-established, I believe I have re-established, the primordial organization, I have translated the entire work: it is clear to me that not once does he employ the word 'time.' The explanation is obvious: The garden of forking paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui PÃ n conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approach one another, fork, break off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others, I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost."

"In every one," I pronounced, not without a tremble, "I am grateful to you and revere you for your re-creation of the garden of Ts'ui PÃ n."

"Not in all," he murmured with a smile. "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."

Once again I felt the swarming sensation of which I have spoken. It seemed to me that the humid garden that surrounded the house was infinitely saturated with invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and I, secret, busy and multiform in other dimensions of time. I raised my eyes and the tenuous nightmare dissolved. In the yellow and black garden there was only one man; but this man was as strong as a statue… this man was approaching along the path and he was Captain Richard Madden.

"The future already exists," I replied, "but I am your friend. Could I see the letter again?"

Albert rose. Standing tall, he opened the drawer of the tall desk; for a moment his back was to me. I had readied the revolver. I fired with extreme caution: Albert fell silently, immediately. I swear his death was instantaneous: a fulmination.

The rest is unreal, insignificant. Madden broke in, arrested me. I have been condemned to the gallows. I have won out abominably: I have communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city they must attack. They bombed it yesterday; I read it in the same papers that offered to England the mystery of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert who was murdered by a stranger, one Yu Tsun. The Chief has deciphered this mystery. He knows my problem was to indicate (through the uproar of the war) the city called Albert, and that I could not find another way to do so than to kill a man of that name. He does not know (no one can know) my innumerable contrition and weariness.

Un río suena siempre cerca.

Ha cuarenta anos que lo siento.

Es canturía de mi sangre

O bien un ritmo que me dieron.

O el río de Elqui de mi infancia

que me repecho y me vadeo.

Nunca lo pierdo; pecho a pecho,

Como dos ninos, nos tenemos.

5^th part, Tala, pp. 137-38.