What Can I Hold You With? 我用什么才能留住你？

Jorge Luis Borges · 1934

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-four — heading a charge of three hundred men in Peru, 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

我用什么才能留住你？

我给你瘦落的街道、绝望的落日、荒郊的月亮。

我给你一个久久地望着孤月的人的悲哀。

我给你我已死去的祖辈，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境，两颗子弹射穿了他的胸膛，

死的时候蓄着胡子，尸体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，

如今都成了消失的马背上的亡魂。

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和幽默。

我给你一个从未有过信仰的人的忠诚。

我给你我设法保全的我自己的核心——

不营字造句，不和梦交易，不被时间、欢乐和逆境触动的核心。

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。

我给你关于你生命的诠释，关于你自己的理论，你的真实而惊人的存在。

我给你我的寂寞、我的黑暗、我心的饥渴；

我试图用困惑、危险、失败来打动你。

—— 博尔赫斯（中文常见译本出自王永年等）

[致心中最高的作家]

Source: “What Can I Hold You With?”, 1934. Appears in Selected Poems 1923–1967.