What can I hold you with?
我用什么才能留住你?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.
我给你贫瘠的街道，绝望的日落，破败郊区的月亮。
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
我给你一个久久地望着孤月的人的悲伤。
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze:
我给你我已死去的先辈，后人们用大理石祭奠的先魂：
my father's father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow;
我父亲的父亲，阵亡于布宜诺斯艾利斯的边境，两颗子弹射穿了他的胸膛，蓄着胡子的他死去了，尸体被士兵们用牛皮裹藏；
my mother's grandfather --just twentyfour-- heading a charge of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.
我母亲的祖父——那年才二十四岁——在秘鲁率领三百人冲锋，如今都已成了消逝的马背上的亡灵。
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.
我给你我的书中所能蕴含的一切悟力，以及我生活中所能有的男子气概与幽默。
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
我给你一个从未有过信仰的人的忠诚。
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow --the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
我给你我设法留存的魂灵，——不营字造句，不和梦想交易，亦绝不被时间、喜乐和逆境触及。
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
我给你早在你出生前多年的一个傍晚看到的一朵黄玫瑰的记忆。
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
我给你关于你自己的诠释， 关于你自己的理论，关于你自己真实而惊人的消息。
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart;
我亦能给你我的寂寞、我的黑暗、我内心的饥渴；
I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
我正试图用困惑、用危险、用挫败 来打动你。
- Jorge Luis Borges (1934)
- 豪尔赫•路易斯•博尔赫斯 (1934)
