What can I hold you with?
【阿根廷】Jorge Luis Borges(博爾赫斯)
- about the poet：豪爾赫·路易斯·博爾赫斯(Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986)，阿根廷詩人、作家，跟聶魯達、帕斯齊名的拉美三大詩人之一。代表作有：短篇小說集《惡棍列傳》《虛構集》《沙之書》；詩集《深沉的玫瑰》《雨》；等等。
What can I hold you with?
（我要用什麼來留住你？）
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the ragged suburbs.
（我送給你單薄的街巷、絕望的落日和荒涼城郊的月光。）
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
（我送給你一個天荒地老地望着那輪孤寂明月的男人的悲愴。）
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghost 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.
（我送給你我的先祖，故去的人們啊，未亡之人用大理石祭奠他們的靈魂：我父親的父親，他被兩顆子彈穿透肺葉，在布宜諾斯艾利斯的邊境死去， 蒼髯如戟（鬍子像戟一樣堅硬。形容男子容貌威猛），魂飛九天，麾下戰士用一片牛皮裹了他的屍身；我母親的祖父—那年二十四歲—在祕魯率三百精兵衝鋒陷陣，如今都隨胯下戰馬煙滅灰飛。）
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness humour my life.
（我送給你我的書卷裏容納的所有洞悉，送你滋養我人生的所有男子氣。）
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
(我送給你一個從不忠誠之人的忠誠。)
I offer her 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.
（我送給她我無意間保存完好的核——那從未與文字過招，從未跟夢想交易，也從未被時間、歡欣，抑或艱難困苦觸及過的內心。）
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
（我送給你一個有關落日餘輝下黃玫瑰的記憶，那遠在你出生的數年以前。）
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
（我送給你有關你的詮釋，有關你的原理，有關你的真切而驚人的訊息）
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.
(我送你我的孤寂、我的幽暗、我心底的饑饉；我妄圖用將信將疑、危機四伏、窮途末路來賄賂你。)