Next in our journey through the New Media Reader textbook is a short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges who wrote a very influential short piece of fiction called "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941).
Here's the translation from my book, also the original translation by Donald A. Yates.
Here's another translation I found online that isn't as good by Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd.
The difference can be seen clearly in the final words between:
- "infinite penitence and sickness of the heart" (Temple/Todd)
and
– "innumerable contrition and weariness" (Yates).
Maybe I'm just partial to the words I read first. But the language in the first story was evocative enough that not only did I read the story twice, but created a cut-out poem from it.
Anyway, the heart of the story is a conversation about narrative direction (or directions) and possible alternate, simultaneous narratives, like Quantum Mechanics talks about.
The story is about an Asian soldier in the British Army during World War I. He is a spy for the Germans and is about to be discovered and arrested before he can send his final message.
He picks a very random but secret message delivery method and then goes about trying to make it happen. He encounters a random person who just so happens to have the key to a long-held family mystery of his and in the process of their conversation the man explains to him the idea of narrative forking.
The story itself soon becomes as an illustration of narrative alternatives and "innumerable outcomes."
Often referenced as ground zero for narrative forking, this story spawned the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books and similar digital variations.
It's worth checking out.
I picked up used copies of Ficciones (Grove Press) and Labyrinths (the one with the William Gibson intro) a couple years ago. Some overlap between these collections, but I didn’t notice there were different translators for this story. The Temple-Todd translation looks to be from 1956, Yates from 1958. I would usually go with the newer translation, figuring it reflects critical reactions to the earlier translations. But shouldn’t “innumerable” be followed by a plural noun? Maybe that’s why Temple-Todd went with “infinite,” although “innumerable” sure is a nice echo of the multiverse described earlier in the story, whereas “infinite” suggests distance to me.
My Yates has a typo (“a Taoist of Buddhist monk”) that confused me; it appears to have been corrected in your edition.
The New Media Reader may be inaccurate but it says the Yates translation is from “Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings” from 1964, New Directions press, so that’s a lot later than 1956 Temple-Todd for sure. The word ‘innumerable’ is repeated throughout the story (as if you couldn’t even begin, white flag, surrender the count) vs. infinite (just a ton and we have a good sense of that ton). Example: “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.” I agree that “infinite’ suggests distance and is so abstract it’s cold. Innumerable sounds more human with its limitations. I’m ruminating on the idea of “innumerable contritions and wearinesses.” Microsoft Word is telling me those words are misspellings so I went online in search of expertise. According to WordHippo these words can also be the plural forms (but do we trust a hippo for English tips?):
https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the-plural-of/contrition.html
https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the-plural-of/weariness.html
The typo is fixed in my book, as well.