What can I hold you with?
【阿根廷】Jorge Luis Borges(博尔赫斯)
- about the poet：豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯(Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986)，阿根廷诗人、作家，跟聂鲁达、帕斯齐名的拉美三大诗人之一。代表作有：短篇小说集《恶棍列传》《虚构集》《沙之书》；诗集《深沉的玫瑰》《雨》；等等。
What can I hold you with?
（我要用什么来留住你？）
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the ragged suburbs.
（我送给你单薄的街巷、绝望的落日和荒凉城郊的月光。）
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
（我送给你一个天荒地老地望着那轮孤寂明月的男人的悲怆。）
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.
（我送给你我的先祖，故去的人们啊，未亡之人用大理石祭奠他们的灵魂：我父亲的父亲，他被两颗子弹穿透肺叶，在布宜诺斯艾利斯的边境死去， 苍髯如戟（胡子像戟一样坚硬。形容男子容貌威猛），魂飞九天，麾下战士用一片牛皮裹了他的尸身；我母亲的祖父—那年二十四岁—在秘鲁率三百精兵冲锋陷阵，如今都随胯下战马烟灭灰飞。）
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness humour my life.
（我送给你我的书卷里容纳的所有洞悉，送你滋养我人生的所有男子气。）
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
(我送给你一个从不忠诚之人的忠诚。)
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.
（我送给她我无意间保存完好的核——那从未与文字过招，从未跟梦想交易，也从未被时间、欢欣，抑或艰难困苦触及过的内心。）
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
（我送给你一个有关落日余辉下黄玫瑰的记忆，那远在你出生的数年以前。）
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
（我送给你有关你的诠释，有关你的原理，有关你的真切而惊人的讯息）
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、我心底的饥馑；我妄图用将信将疑、危机四伏、穷途末路来贿赂你。)