What can I hold you with?

I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.

我给你瘦狭的街道，孤绝的余晖，荒郊的冷月。

I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.

我给你整个人的悲苦，那个人曾久久凝望寂寞的月亮。

I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in marble:

我给你我的祖先，死者的灵魂被生者铭刻在大理石上：

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口，他死时蓄着胡子，被同袍裹于兽皮之内；

my mother's grandfather -just twentyfour- heading a charge of three hundred men in Perú, now ghosts on vanished horses.

我母亲的祖父——才二十四岁——曾在秘鲁率领三百军士，如今已成死马上的幽魂。

I offer you whatever insight my books may hold. whatever manliness or humour my life.

我给你我书中所有的一切，给你我命里所有的男子气和幽默。

I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.

我给你一个浪荡子的忠心。

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.

我给你我设法保存的生命核心——它难以言表，无法入梦，不被时间、欢愉和灾难所触动。

I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.

我给你一朵黄玫瑰的记忆，你未出生时，她曾在夕照中绽放。

I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.

我给你关于你的阐释，关于你的理论，关于你的真实而让人惊叹的消息。

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.

我给你我的孤独，我的暗夜，我内心的饥渴；我要用我的无常、危险和失败来留住你。

- Jorge Luis Borges (1934)

--- 博尔赫斯