What can I hold you with?
我用什么才能留住你?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.
我给你贫穷的街道,绝望的日落,嶙峋郊外的月亮。
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
我给你一位久久凝望孤月之人的悲戚。
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honored 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;
我给你我的先祖,我已逝的先人,那被生者以大理石纪念的在天之灵:我父亲的父亲牺牲在布宜诺斯艾利斯的前线上,两枚子弹穿过他的肺叶,他死去时蓄着胡须,他的士兵们用一张牛皮裹起他的尸体;
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 humor my life.
我母亲的祖父——年方二十四——在秘鲁率领着三百人冲锋,而今化为奔逝战马上的幽灵。我给你我的书页所能承载的所有真知灼见,给你我生命里的全部刚毅与风趣。
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
我给你一个从未有过信仰之人的虔诚。
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.
我给你我设法保存下的我自己的核心-不遣词造句,不兜售梦境,并且在时间推移,欢愉以及厄运的侵袭下坚定不移的内心。
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
我给你在你降生多年之前,日落时分看见的一朵黄玫瑰的记忆。
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
我给你对于你自己的诠释,关于你自己的定律,有关你自己的,真切又令人惊喜的消息。
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.
我可以给你我的孤寂,我的阴暗,我内心的饥渴;我在试图用犹疑、危险和挫败来打动你。
原诗:Jorge Luis Borges
译:Irini_