我用什么留住你？

原作：博尔赫斯（1934）
译者：灵兮

让我给你窄长的街道，绝望的日落
和荒郊外的冷月
让我给你一个男人凝望长夜时的苦涩
让我给你我的祖先，我的亡人
死者的灵魂被生者铭刻在大理石上：
我父亲的父亲死于布宜诺斯艾利斯的前线
两颗子弹穿过他的胸膛
他死时蓄着胡须，士兵们用牛皮
裹起他的尸体；我母亲的祖父——
二十四岁的时候——曾在秘鲁率领三百军士
如今成了消失在马背上的幽魂

让我给你我书中所能蕴含的智慧
我的男子气概和幽默
让我给你忠诚尽管我曾是个浪荡子
让我给你我苦心保留着的本真
它不浮留在文字
不游离于梦境
不被时间、欢愉和逆境所改变
我还要给你
在夕阳下见过的一朵黄玫瑰
我见过她 早在你出生之前

让我解说你和你的理论
有关你的新闻 真实而让人惊叹
让我献给你 我的孤独
我的黑暗，我灵魂的饥渴
请让我用未知，危险和征服
打动你的心

What can I hold you with

Jorges Luis Borges (1934)

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.

作者

博尔赫斯（Jorge Luis Borges 1899年8月24日－1986年6月14日），阿根廷诗人、小说家、散文家兼翻译家，被誉为作家中的考古学家。生于布宜诺斯艾利斯（Buenos Aires）一个有英国血统的律师家庭。在日内瓦上中学，在剑桥读大学。掌握英、法、德等多国文字。作品涵盖多个文学范畴，包括：短文、随笔小品、诗、文学评论、翻译文学。其中以拉丁文隽永的文字和深刻的哲理见长。