What can I hold you with?

我用什么才能留住你

博尔赫斯

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之人的悲哀

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

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What can I hold you with?

Jorge Luis Borges

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 marble: 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 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.