小径分岔的花园 The Garden of Forking Paths

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2024年1月14日发(作者：)

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小径分岔的花园 The Garden of Forking Paths

〔阿根廷〕博尔赫斯 Jorge Luis Borges

To Victoria Ocampo

In his A History of the World War (page 212), Captain Liddell Hart reports that a planned

offensive by thirteen British divisions, supported by fourteen hundred artillery pieces, against

the German line at Serre-Montauban, scheduled for July 24, 1916, had to be postponed until

the morning of the 29th. He ments that torrential rain caused this delay一which lacked any

special significance. The following deposition, dictated by, read over, and then signed by Dr.

Yu Tsun, former teacher ofEnglish at the Tsingtao Hochschule, casts unsuspected light upon

this event. The first two pages are missing.

…and I hung up the phone. Immediately I recollected the voice that had spoken in German. It

was that of Captain Richard Madden. Madden, in Viktor Runeberg's office, meant the end of

all our work and一though this seemed a secondary matter, or should have seemed so to me一of our lives also. His being there meant that Runeberg had been arrested or murdered.②

Before the sun set on this same day, I ran the same risk. Madden was implacable. Rather, to

be more accurate, he was obliged to be implacable. An Irishman in the service of England, a

man suspected of equivocal feelings if not of actual treachery, how could he fail to wele and

seize upon this e*traordinary piece of luck the discovery, capture and perhaps the deaths of

two agents of Imperial Germany

I went up to my bedroom. Absurd though the gesture was, I closed and locked the door. I

threw myself down on my narrow iron bed, and waited on my back. The never changing

rooftops filled the window, and the hazy si* o'clock sun hung in the sky. It seemed incredible

that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death. In

despite of my dead father, in despite of having been a child in one of the symmetrical

gardens of Hai Feng, was I to die now

Then Ireflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century,

and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea,

and all that really happens happens to me…The almost unbearable memory of Maddens

long horseface put an end to these wandering thoughts.

In the midst of my hatred and terror (now that it no longer matters to me to speak of terror,

now that I have outwitted Richard Madden, now that my neck hankers for the hangman's

noose), I knew that the fast-moving and doubtless happy soldier did not suspect that I

possessed the Secret一the name of the e*act site of the new British artillery park on the

Ancre. A bird streaked across the misty sky and, absently, I turned it into an airplane and

then that airplane into many in the skies of France, shattering the artillery park under a rain

of bombs. If only my mouth, before it should be silenced by a bullet, could shout this name

in such a way that it could be heard in Germany…My voice, my human voice, was weak. How

could it reach the ear of the Chief The ear of that sick and hateful man who knew nothing of

Runeberg or of me e*cept that we were in Staffordshire. A man who, sitting in his arid Berlin

office, leafed infinitely through newspapers, looking in vain for news from us. I said aloud, I

must flee.

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I sat up on the bed, in senseless and perfect silence, as if Madden was already peering at me.

Something一perhaps merely a desire to prove my total penury to myself一made me empty

out my pockets. I found just what I knew I was going to find. The American watch, the

nickel-plated chain and the square coin, the key ring with the useless but promising keys to

Runeberg's office, the notebook, a letter which I decided to destroy at once (and which I did

not destroy), a five shilling piece, two single shillings and some pennies, a red and blue pencil,

a handkerchief一and a revolver with a single bullet. Absurdly I held it and weighed it in my

hand, to give myself courage. Vaguely I thought that a pistol shot can be heard for a great

distance.

In ten minutes I had developed my plan. The telephone directory gave me the name of the

one person capable of passing on the information. He lived in a suburb of Fenton, less than

half an hour away by train.

I am a timorous man. I can say it now, now that I have brought my incredibly risky plan to an

end. It was not easy to bring about, and I know that its e*ecution was terrible. I did not do it

for Germany 一no! Such a barbarous country is of no importance to me, particularly since it

had degraded me by making me bee a spy. Furthermore, I knew an Englishman一a modest

man一who, for me, is as great as Goethe. I did not speak with him for more than an hour,

but during that time, he was Goethe.

I carried out my plan because I felt the Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those

uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow

man could save his armies. Besides, I had to escape the Captain. His hands and voice could,

at any moment, knock and beckon at my door.

Silently, I dressed, took leave of myself in the mirror, went down the stairs, sneaked a look at

the quiet street, and went out. The station was not far from my house, but I thought it more

prudent to take a cab. I told myself that I thus ran less chance of being recognized. The truth

is that, in the deserted street, I felt infinitely visible and vulnerable. I recall that I told the

driver to stop short of the main entrance.

I got out with a painful and deliberate slowness.I was going to the village of Ashgrove, but

took a ticket for a station further on. The train would leave in a few minutes, at eight-fifty. I

hurried, for the ne*t would not go until half past nine. There was almost no one on the

platform. I walked through the carriages. I remember some farmers, a woman dressed in

mourning, a youth deep in Tacitus' Annals and a wounded, happy soldier.

At last the train pulled out. A man I recognized ran furiously, but vainly, the length of the

platform. It was Captain Richard Madden. Shattered, trembling, I huddled in the distant

corner of the seat, as far as possible from the fearful window.

From utter terror I passed into a state of almost abject happiness. I told myself that the duel

had already started and that I had won the first encounter by besting my adversary in his first

attack-even if it was only for forty minutes一by an accident of fate. I argued that so small a

victory prefigured a total victory. I argued that it was not so trivial, that were it not for the

precious accident of the train schedule, I would be in prison or dead. I argued, with no less

sophism, that my timorous happiness was proof that I was man enough to bring this

adventure to a successful conclusion. From my weakness I drew strength that never left me.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, that soon only soldiers

and bandits will be left. To them I offer this advice Whosoever would undertake some

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atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already acplished, should impose upon himself a

future as irrevocable as the past.

Thus Iproceeded, while with the eyes of a man already dead, I contemplated the fluctuations

of the day which would probably be my last, and watched the diffuse ing of night.

The train crept along gently, amid ash trees. It slowed down and stopped, almost in the

middle of a field. No one called the name of a station. Ashgrove I asked some children on

the platform. Ashgrove, they replied. I got out.

A lamp lit the platform, but the children's faces remained in a shadow. One of them asked

me Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert's house Without waiting for my answer, another said

The house is a good distance away but you won't get lost if you take the road to the left and

bear to the left at every crossroad. I threw them a coin (my last), went down some stone

steps and started along a deserted road. At a slight incline, the road ran downhill. It was a

plain dirt way, and overhead the branches of trees intermingled, while a round moon hung

low in the sky as if to keep me pany.

For a moment I thought that Richard Madden might in some way have divined my desperate

intent. At once I realized that this would be impossible. The advice about turning always to

the left reminded me that such was the mon formula for finding the central courtyard of

certain labyrinths. I know something about labyrinths. Not for nothing am I the

greatgrandson of Ts'ui Pen. He was Governor of Yunnan and gave up temporal power to

write a novel with more characters than there are in the Hung Lou Meng, and to create a

maze in which all men would lose themselves. He spent thirteen years on these oddly

assorted tasks before he was assassinated by a stranger. His novel had no sense to it and

nobody ever found his labyrinth.

Under the trees of England I meditated on this lost and perhaps mythical labyrinth. I

imagined it untouched and perfect on the secret summit of some mountain; I imagined it

drowned under rice paddies or beneath the sea; I imagined it infinite, made not only of

eight-sided pavilions and of twisting paths but also of rivers, provinces and kingdoms…I

thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past

and future and would somehow involve the stars. Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot

my destiny一that of the hunted. For an undetermined period of time I felt myself cut off

from the world, an abstract spectator. The hazy and murmuring countryside, the moon, the

decline of the evening, stirred within me. Going down the gently sloping road I could not feel

fatigue. The evening was at once intimate and infinite.

The road kept descending and branching off, through meadows misty in the twilight. A

high-pitched and almost syllabic music kept ing and going, moving with the breeze, blurred

by the leaves and by distance.

I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the differing moments of other

men, but never an enemy of acountry not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West

wind.

Meditating thus I arrived at a high, rusty iron gate. Through the railings I could see an avenue

bordered with poplar trees and also a kind of summer house or pavilion. Two things dawned

on me at once, the first trivial and the second almost incredible the music came from the

pavilion and that music was Chinese. That was why I had accepted it fully, without paying it

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any attention. I do not remember whether there was a bell, a push-button, or whether I

attracted attention by clapping myhands. The stuttering sparks of the music kept on.

But from the end of the avenue, from the main house, a lantern approached; a lantern which

alternately, from moment to moment, was crisscrossed or put out by the trunks of the trees;

a paper lantern shaped like a drum and colored like the moon. A tall man carried it. I could

not see his face for the light blinded me.

He opened the gate and spoke slowly in my language.

I see that the worthy Hsi P'eng has troubled himself to see to relieving my solitude. No doubt

you want to see the garden

Recognizing the name of one of our consuls, I replied, somewhat taken aback.

The garden

The garden of forking paths.

Something stirred in my memory and I said, with inprehensible assurance

The garden of my ancestor, Ts'ui Pen.

Your ancestor Your illustrious ancestor e in.

The damp path zigzagged like those of my childhood. When we reached the house, we went

into a library filled with books from both East and West. I recognized some large volumes

bound in yellow silk-manuscripts of the Lost Encyclopedia which was edited by the Third

Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty. They had never been printed. A phonograph record was

spinning near a bronze phoeni*. I remember also a rose-glazed jar and yet another, older by

many centuries, of that blue color which our potters copied from the Persians…

Stephen Albert was watching me with a smile on his face. He was, as I have said, remarkably

tall. His face was deeply lined and he had gray eyes and a gray beard. There was about him

something of the priest, and something of the sailor. Later, he told me he had been a

missionary in Tientsinbefore he had aspired to bee a Sinologist.

We sat down, I upon a large, low divan, he with his back to the window and to a large circular

clock. I calculated that my pursuer, Richard Madden, could not arrive in less than an hour. My

irrevocable decision could wait.

A strange destiny, said Stephen Albert, that of Ts'ui Pen一Governor of his native province,

learned in astronomy, in astrology and tireless in the interpretation of the canonical books, a

chess player, a famous poet and a calligrapher. Yet he abandoned all to make a book and a

labyrinth. He gave up all the pleasures of oppression, justice, of a well-stocked bed, of

banquets, and even of erudition, and shut himself up in the Pavilion of the Limpid Sun for

thirteen years. At his death, his heirs found only a mess of manuscripts. The family, as you

doubtless know, wished to consign them to the fire, but the e*ecutor of the estate一a Taoist

or a Buddhist monk一insisted on their publication.

Those of the blood of Ts'ui Pen, I replied, still curse the memory of that monk. Such a

publication was madness. The book is a shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts. I

e*amined it once upon a time the hero dies in the third chapter, while in the fourth he is alive.

As for that other enterprise of Ts'ui Pen…his Labyrinth…〞

Here is the Labyrinth, Albert said, pointing to a tall, laquered writing cabinet. An ivory

labyrinth I e*claimed. A tiny labyrinth indeed…!〞

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A symbolic labyrinth, he corrected me. An invisible labyrinth of time. I, a barbarous

Englishman, have been given the key to this transparent mystery. After more than a hundred

years most of the details are irrecoverable, lost beyond all recall, but it isn't hard to image

what must have happened. At one time, Ts'ui Pen must have said; 'I am going into seclusion

to write a book,' and at another, 'I am retiring to construct a maze.' Everyone assumed these

were separate activities. No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the

same. The Pavilion of the Limpid Sun was set in the middle of an intricate garden. This may

have suggested the idea of a physical maze.

Ts'ui Pen died. In all the vast lands which once belonged to your family, no one could find

the labyrinth. The novel's confusion suggested that it was the labyrinth. Two circumstances

showed me the direct solution to the problem. First, the curious legend that Ts'ui Pen had

proposed to create an infinite maze, second, a fragment of a letter which I discovered.

Albert rose. For a few moments he turned his back to me. He opened the top drawer in the

high black and gilded writing cabinet. He returned holding in his hand a piece of paper

which had once been crimson but which had faded with the passage of time it was rose

colored, tenuous, quadrangular. Ts'ui Pen's calligraphy was justly famous. Eagerly, but

without understanding, I read the words which a man of my own blood had written with a

small brush I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths. I

handed back the sheet of paper in silence. Albert went on

Before I discovered this letter, I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not

imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the

same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely. I recalled, too, the

night in the middle of The Thousand and One Nights when Queen Scheherezade, through a

magical mistake on the part of her copyist, started to tell the story of The Thousand and One

Nights, with the risk of again arriving at the night upon which she will relate it, and thus on to

infinity. I also imagined a Platonic hereditary work, passed on from father to son, to which

each individual would add a new chapter or correct, with pious care, the work of his elders.

These conjectures gave me amusement, but none seemed to have the remotest application

to the contradictory chapters of Ts'ui Pen. At this point, I was sent from O*ford the

manuscript you have just seen.

Naturally, my attention was caught by the sentence, 'I leave to various future times, but not

to all, my garden of forking paths I had no sooner read this, than I understood. The Garden

of Forking Paths was the chaotic novel itself. The phrase 'to various future times, but not to

all' suggested the image of bifurcating in time, not in space. Rereading the whole work

confirmed this theory. In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at

the e*pense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses一simultaneously一all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start

others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the

contradictions in the novel.

Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger knocks at his door. Fang makes up his mind to kill

him. Naturally there are various possible outes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill

Fang, both can be saved, both can die and so on and so on. In Ts'ui Pen's work, all the

possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations.

Sometimes the pathways of this labyrinth converge. For e*ample, you e to this house; but in

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other possible pasts you are my enemy; in others my friend. If you will put up with my

atrocious pronunciation, I would like to read you a few pages of your ancestor's work.

His countenance, in the bright circle of lamplight, was certainly that of an ancient, but it

shone with something unyielding, even immortal.

With slow precision, he read two versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army

marches into battle over a desolate mountain pass. The bleak and somber aspect of the

rocky landscape made the soldiers feel that life itself was of little value, and so they won the

battle easily. In the second, the same army passes through a palace where a banquet is in

progress. The splendor of the feast remained a memory throughout the glorious battle, and

so victory followed.

With proper veneration I listened to these old tales, although perhaps with less admiration

for them in themselves than for the fact that they had been thought out by one of my own

blood, and that a man of a distant empire had given them back to me, in the last stage of a

desperate adventure, on a Western island. I remember the final words, repeated at the end

of each version like a secret mand Thus the heroes fought, with tranquil heart and bloody

sword. They were resigned to killing and to dying.

At that moment I felt within me and around me something invisible and intangible

pullulating. It was not the pullulation of two divergent, parallel, and finally converging armies,

but an agitation more inaccessible, more intimate, prefigured by them in some way. Stephen

Albert continued

I do not think that your illustrious ancestor toyed idly with variations. I do not find it

believable that he would waste thirteen years laboring over a never ending e*periment in

rhetoric. In your country the novel is an inferior genre; in Ts'ui Pen's period, it was a despised

one. Ts'ui Pen was a fine novelist but he was also a man of letters who, doubtless, considered

himself more than a mere novelist. The testimony of his contemporaries attests to this, and

certainly the known facts of his life confirm his leanings toward the metaphysical and the

mystical. Philosophical conjectures take up the greater part of his novel. I know that of all

problems, none disquieted him more, and none concerned him more than the profound one

of time. Now then, this is the only problem that does not figure in the pages of The Garden.

He does not even use the word which means time. How can these voluntary omissions be

e*plained

I proposed various solutions, all of them inadequate. We discussed them. Finally Stephen

Albert said

In a guessing game to which the answer is chess, which word is the only one prohibited

I thought for a moment and then replied The word is chess.

Precisely, said Albert. The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous guessing game, or

parable, in which the subject is time. The rules of the game forbid the use of the word itself.

To eliminate a word pletely, to refer to it by means of inept phrases and obvious paraphrases,

is perhaps the best way of drawing attention to it. This, then, is the tortuous method of

approach preferred by the oblique Ts'ui Pen in every meandering of his interminable novel. I

have gone over hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected errors introducedby careless

copyists, I have worked out the plan from this chaos, I have restored, or believe I have

restored, the original. I have translated the whole work. I can state categorically that not once

has the word time been used in the whole book.

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The e*planation is obvious. The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, inplete yet not false, of

the universe such as Ts'ui Pen conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer,

your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series

of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel

times. This web of time一the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or

ignore each other through the centuries一embraces every possibility. We do not e*ist in

most of them. In some you e*ist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet

others both of us e*ist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have e to my gate.

In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very

same words, but am an error, a phantom.

In all of them, I enunciated, with a tremor in my voice. I deeply appreciate and am grateful to

you for the restoration of Ts'ui Pen's garden.

Not in all, he murmured with a smile. Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable

futures and in one of them I am your enemy.

Once again I sensed the pullulation of which I have already spoken. It seemed to me that the

dew-damp garden surrounding the house was infinitely saturated with invisible people. All

were Albert and myself, secretive, busy and multiform in other dimensions of time. I lifted my

eyes and the short nightmare disappeared. In the black and yellow garden there was only a

single man, but this man was as strong as a statue and this man was walking up the path and

he was Captain Richard Madden.

The future e*ists now, I replied. But I am your friend. Can I take another look at the letter

Albert rose from his seat. He stood up tall as he opened the top drawer of the high writing

cabinet. For a moment his back was again turned to me. I had the revolver ready. I fired with

the utmost care Albert fell without a murmur, at once. I swear that his death was

instantaneous, as if he had been struck by lightning.

What remains is unreal and unimportant. Madden broke in and arrested me. I have been

condemned to hang. Abominably, I have yet triumphed! The secret name of the city to be

attacked got through to Berlin. Yesterday it was bombed. I read the news in the same English

newspapers which were trying to solve the riddle of the murder of the learned Sinologist

Stephen Albert by the unknown Yu Tsun. The Chief, however, had already solved this

mystery. He knew that my problem was to shout, with my feeble voice, above the tumult of

war, the name of the city called Albert, and that I had no other course open to me than to kill

someone of that name. He does not know, for no one can, of my infinite penitence and

sickness of the heart.

②A malicious and outlandish statement. In point of fact, Captain Richard Madden had been

attacked by the Prussian spy Hans Rabener, alias Viktor Runeberg, who drew an automatic

pistol when Madden appeared with orders for the spy's arrest. Madden, in self defense, had

inflicted wounds of which the spy later died. - Note by the manuscript editor.

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