SOURCE: “The Library of Forking Paths,” in Representations, No. 56, Fall, 1996, pp. 106–22.

In the following essay on the proliferation of versions of a manuscript in Borges's story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Chibka examines the significance of the proliferation of alternative, apparently trivial, details in several editions of the Spanish and English texts of that story.

Prologue

Alors je rentrai dans la maison, et j'écrivis, Il est minuit. La pluie fouette les vitres. Il n'était pas minuit. Il ne pleuvait pas.

—Samuel Beckett, Molloy¹

I begin this essay about Jorge Luis Borges's “The Garden of Forking Paths,” appropriately enough, with a small confession. I am here engaged in a practice of which I generally disapprove: writing professionally on a text in whose language of composition I am illiterate. That a trivial discrepancy between two English translations of “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” started me...