What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged 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 bronze:
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 the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
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.
我用什么才能留住你?
我給你貧窮的街道、絕望的日落、破敗郊區的月亮。
我給你一個久久地望著孤月的人的悲哀。
我給你我已死去的先輩,人們用大理石紀念他們的幽靈:
在布宜諾斯艾利斯邊境陣亡的我父親的父親,兩顆子彈射穿了他的胸膛,蓄著胡子的他死去了,士兵們用牛皮裹起他的尸體;我母親的祖父——時年二十四歲——在秘魯率領三百名士兵沖鋒,如今都成了消失的馬背上的幽靈。
我給你我寫的書中所能包含的一切悟力、我生活中所能有的男子氣概或幽默。
我給你一個從未有過信仰的人的忠誠。
我給你我設法保全的我自己的核心——不營字造句,不和 夢想交易,不被時間、歡樂和逆境觸動的核心。
我給你,早在你出生前多年的一個傍晚看到的一朵黃玫瑰的記憶。
我給你你對自己的解釋,關于你自己的理論,你自己的真實而驚人的消息。
我給你我的寂寞、我的黑暗、我心的饑渴;我試圖用困惑、危險、失敗來打動你。
