What Can I Hold You With
我用什么才能留住你
By Jorge Borges 作者：豪尔赫·博尔赫斯
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.
我给你瘦弱的街道、绝望的落日、荒郊的月亮。
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哀。
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men,
我给你我已死去的祖辈，
the ghosts that living men have honoured in marble:
后人们用大理石祭奠的先魂：
my father&`&s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires,
我父亲的父亲，阵亡于布宜诺斯艾利斯的边境，
two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead,
两颗子弹射穿了他的胸膛，死的时候蓄着胡子，
wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow;
尸体被士兵们用牛皮裹起；
my mother's grandfather -just twenty-four，
我母亲的祖父——那年才二十四岁——
heading a charge of three hundred men in Perú,
在秘鲁率领三百人冲锋，
now ghosts on vanished horses.
如今都成了消失的马背上的亡魂。
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold.
我给你我的书中所能蕴含的一切悟力，
whatever manliness or humour my life.
以及我生活中所能有的男子气概和幽默。
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 –
我给你我设法保全的我自己的核心——
the central heart that deals not in words,
不营字造句，
traffics not with dreams
不和梦交易，
and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
不被时间、欢乐和逆境触动的核心。
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,
我给你关于你生命的诠释，
theories about yourself,
关于你自己的理论，
authentic and surprising news of yourself.
你的真实而惊人的存在。
I can give you my loneliness my darkness, the hunger of my heart;
我给你我的寂寞、我的黑暗、我心的饥渴；
I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
我试图用困惑、危险、失败来打动你
很喜欢的一首诗。