The Garden of Forking Paths

"The Garden of Forking Paths"
Collection first edition
Author	Jorge Luis Borges
Original title	"El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan"
Translator	Anthony Boucher
Country	Argentina
Language	Spanish
Genre(s)	Fantasy, short story
Published in	El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941) Ficciones (1944)
Publisher	Editorial Sur
Media type	Print
Publication date	1941
Published in English	1948

"The Garden of Forking Paths" (original Spanish title: "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan") is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones (Fictions) in 1944. It was the first of Borges's works to be translated into English by Anthony Boucher when it appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in August 1948.

Borges's vision of "forking paths" has been cited as inspiration by numerous new media scholars, in particular within the field of hypertext fiction. Other stories by Borges that express the idea of infinite texts include "The Library of Babel" and "The Book of Sand".

The story takes the form of a signed statement by a Chinese professor of English named Doctor Yu Tsun who is living in the United Kingdom during World War I. Tsun is a spy for the German Empire who has realized that an MI5 agent called Captain Richard Madden is pursuing him, has entered the apartment of his handler Viktor Runeberg, and either captured or killed him. Doctor Tsun is certain that his own arrest is next. He has just discovered the location of a new British artillery park and wishes to convey that knowledge to his German handlers before he is captured. He at last hits upon a desperate plan in order to achieve this.

Doctor Tsun explains that his spying has never been for the sake of Imperial Germany, which he considers "a barbarous country". Rather, he says, he did it because he wanted to prove to his racist masters that an Asian is intelligent enough to obtain the information needed to save their soldiers' lives. Tsun suspects that Captain Madden, an Irishman in the employ of the British Empire, might be similarly motivated.