What can I hold you with

What Can I Hold You With?

我用什么才能留住你？

—— Jorge Luis Borges 

        博尔赫斯

What can I hold you with?
我拿什么才能留住你?

I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the

jagged suburbs.

我给你消瘦的街道、绝望的落日，参差不齐荒郊的月亮。

I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and

long at the lonely moon.

我给你一个久久望着孤月的人的悲哀。

I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living

men have honoured in marble:

我给你我的祖先，我那被生者用大理石祭奠的死者：

my father's father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two

bullets through his lungs,

我父亲的父亲在布宜诺斯艾利斯的边境死去，肺叶被两颗子弹击穿，

bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow;

蓄着胡子倒下，尸体被士兵们用牛皮裹起；

my mother's grandfather -just twentyfour- heading a charge

of three hundred men in Perú,

我母亲的祖父——昔年二十四岁——在秘鲁率领三百人冲锋，

now ghosts on vanished horses.
如今是失落的马背上一般的魂灵。

I offer you whatever insight my books may hold. whatever

manliness or humour my life.
我给你我的书中也许有的一切领悟，生活之中有的一切的男子气概与幽默。

I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
我给你一个从未有过信仰的人的忠诚。

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.
我给你我所设法保全的我的真心——不营词造句，不与梦交易，不被时间、欢乐或逆境改变的衷心。

I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset,

years before you were born.
我给你，在你出生多年以前，我在薄暮邂逅那朵黄玫瑰的记忆。

I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself,

authentic and surprising news of yourself.
我给你你的解释，你的本来，你真实而惊人的存在。

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.

我能给你我的寂寞、我的黑暗、我心的饥渴；我正竭力用犹豫不决、危险、失败来贿赂你。