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我用什麼才能留住你？　　◎波赫士　　王永年譯

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 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 twenty-four, 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.

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我用什麼才能留住你？
我給你瘦落的街道、絕望的落日、荒郊的月亮。
我給你一個久久地望著孤月的人的悲哀。
我給你我已死去的祖輩，後人們用大理石祭奠的先魂：我父親的父親，陣亡于布宜諾斯艾利斯的邊境，兩顆子彈射穿了他的胸膛，死的時候蓄著鬍子，屍體被士兵們用牛皮裹起；我母親的祖父──那年才二十四歲──在秘魯率領三百人衝鋒，如今都成了消失的馬背上的亡魂。
我給你我的書中所能蘊含的一切悟力，以及我生活中所能有的男子氣概和幽默。
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。
我給你關於你生命的詮釋，關於你自己的理論，你的真實而驚人的存在。
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。




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