What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze:
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;
my mother’s grandfather -just twenty for-heading a charge of three hundred men in Perú, now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold.
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
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.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart;
I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
Jorge Luis Borges
我要怎样能留住你？
我给你狭窄的街道，孤寂的落日，郊外残缺的月亮。
我给你一个人类的失望，一个迟迟凝望孤月的男人的全部绝望。
我给你我已死去的先祖，后人们用大理石祭奠的先魂：
我父亲的父亲，阵亡于布宜诺斯艾利斯的边疆，
两颗子弹射穿他胸膛，死时蓄着胡子，亡时被士兵们用牛皮裹起。
我母亲的祖父，那年才二十四岁，在秘鲁率领三百人冲锋在秘鲁的沙场，
如今都成了消失的马背上的亡魂，四处飘荡。
我给你我书籍里蕴含的任何洞悉，
给你我生命中的任何男子气概或担当。
我给你一个从未有过信仰的人的信仰。
我给你，
我心脏的心脏，
不修饰于辞藻，不亵渎于梦想，不让时间、欢乐和挫折使其彷徨。
我给你——在你出生前——我记忆里日落中的黄玫瑰。
我给你，关于你的剖析，关于你的理论，关于你真挚又惊讶的畅想。
我赠予你我的孤独，我的黑夜，我饥肠辘辘的灵魂。
让我贿赂你吧，用我的迷惘、危险和败亡。
豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯