我该怎样才能留住你？
记得我们曾漫步的窄巷，
我们共享的日落的时刻，
郊外那静静的月光？
月光下，我倾诉着一个中年男子的孤独和苦楚。
还记得给你讲述的我祖辈的往事？
街上的铜像见证着他们往昔的辉煌。
我的祖父，为保卫首都而被子弹刺穿胸堂。
他的士兵以牛革裹起他的身躯，他的胡须全被鲜血浸染。
我花信年华的曾祖母，帅领三百勇士出征异邦。
他们的亡灵至今还在那疆场纵马驰骋。
还记得我尽我所能向你展示男子气概和幽默情怀？
我的唯一海誓山盟只许给了你。
我心中的最真最纯只为你而珍藏。
我记忆中所见的最美的花朵，只想摘来给你。
我说起你来可一刻不停，毫不厌倦 -
我所知的，我想象的，以至我听说的。
我将自己全部给你，绝无保留 -
我的孤独，我的阴郁，我深藏的渴求。
我甚至不惜自曝软弱，
试图用我的疑虑，不安和失败来打动你。
by Jorge Luis Borges
To Beatriz Webster de Bullrich
II.
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the ragged
suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long
at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts 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 twentyfour— heading
a charge of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished
horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness
or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
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.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic
and surprising news of yourself.
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.
