Jorge Luis Borges, 1941
You are Yu Tsun, a spy for Germany in England, 1916. You have one name to send to Berlin, and Captain Madden, sent to catch you, is on the lane behind you. You are walking down this garden to Stephen Albert, who understood your ancestor’s novel, a labyrinth of time. Your ancestor Ts’ui Pên wrote: I leave to several futures (not to all of them) my garden of forking paths.
At a fork, look toward the branch you want. Someone will take the other.
You are already walking; nothing to press. At a fork, look toward the branch you want (drag, arrows, click or tap). Someone will take the other.
The Spanish is Borges’s own; the English lines are this page’s plain translations. Spanish, in the corner, shows Borges’s Spanish beneath each line.
The story is Yu Tsun’s deposition: the statement he dictated after his arrest, which Borges prints as a document with its first two pages missing.
Ts’ui Pên was Yu Tsun’s great-grandfather, a governor of Yunnan who gave up his office to write a novel and to build a labyrinth, and was murdered before he had finished either. Stephen Albert is an English sinologist living at Ashgrove, who worked out what the novel was. Captain Richard Madden is an Irishman in the English service, and he has already taken Yu Tsun’s only colleague.
Some boys at the station told Yu Tsun the way to the house: take the road to the left, and at every crossroads turn left. It is the way to the centre of certain labyrinths. Here, a look toward neither branch turns left.
You are already walking; nothing to press. At a fork, look toward the branch you want (drag, arrows, click or tap). Someone will take the other.
The Spanish is Borges’s own; the English lines are this page’s plain translations.
I leave to several futures (not to all of them) my garden of forking paths.
Dejo a los varios porvenires (no a todos) mi jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.
In every fiction, each time a man is faced with several alternatives he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of the all but inextricable Ts’ui Pên, he chooses, simultaneously, all of them.
En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con diversas alternativas opta por una y elimina las otras; en la del casi inextricable Ts’ui Pên, opta -simultáneamente- por todas.
Everyone imagined two works; no one thought that book and labyrinth were a single object.
Todos imaginaron dos obras; nadie pensó que libro y laberinto eran un solo objeto.
From that instant I felt about me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming.
Desde ese instante sentí a mi alrededor y en mi oscuro cuerpo una invisible, intangible pululación.
Centuries on centuries, and it is only in the present that anything happens;
Siglos de siglos y solo en el presente ocurren los hechos;
I lifted my eyes and the thin nightmare dissolved. In the yellow and black garden there was a single man; but that man was strong as a statue, but that man was coming up the path, and he was Captain Richard Madden.
Alcé los ojos y la tenue pesadilla se disipó. En el amarillo y negro jardín había un solo hombre; pero ese hombre era fuerte como una estatua, pero ese hombre avanzaba por el sendero y era el capitán Richard Madden.
What he does not know (what no one can know) is my numberless contrition and weariness.
No sabe (nadie puede saber) mi innumerable contrición y cansancio.