豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯（Jorge Luis Borges） - 维基百科，自由的百科全书
我用什么才能留住你（1934）
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.
我给你一无所有的街道 毫无希望的日落 荒郊野岭的月光
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
我给你那遥望孤月已经许久之人的悲伤
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.
我给你我已死去的先辈
他们的亡灵被后人用青铜殉葬:
我的祖父在布宜诺斯艾利斯边境阵亡
两颗子弹射穿了他的胸膛
浓密的胡须陪伴他的遗容
战友用牛皮将他的尸体裹藏
我母亲那二十四岁的的祖父
率领三百名士兵在秘鲁驰行
如今也成了随战马消散的幽灵
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.
我给你我书中所含的一切洞明
我给你我命中的一切气概或幽默
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
我给你一个从未忠贞过的人的至死不渝
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.
我给你我设法留存的魂灵
—-不用辞藻应付的内心 不靠出卖梦想而交易
而这绝不会被时间 被喜悦 被逆境触及
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
我给你有关在你出生前几年的黄昏中看到的那朵黄玫瑰的记忆
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
我给你你对自己的解释 涉及你自己的理论 和有关你自己的令人意外的真相
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.
我亦能给你我的寂寞 我的黑暗 我心的饥渴; 我正试图用困惑、危险、失败来打动你
这首诗于1934年所作，收录在《另一个，同一个》（1964），
诗本身是 《献给贝阿特丽斯•比维洛尼•韦伯斯特•德布尔里奇》的节选。
关于天赐的诗——天堂应该是图书馆的模样
上帝同时给我书籍和黑夜，这可真是一个绝妙的讽刺，
我这样形容他的精心杰作，且莫当成是抱怨或者指斥。
他让一双失去光明的眼睛主宰起这卷册浩繁的城池，
可是，这双眼睛只能浏览那藏梦阁里面的荒唐篇什，
算是曙光对其追寻的赏赐。
白昼徒然奉献的无数典籍，
就像那些毁于亚历山大的晦涩难懂的手稿一般玄秘。
有位国王傍着泉水和花园忍渴受饥，
那盲目的图书馆雄伟幽深，我在其间奔忙却漫无目的。
百科辞书、地图册、东方和西方、世纪更迭、朝代兴亡、经典、宇宙及宇宙起源学说，
尽数陈列，却对我没有用场。
我心里一直都在暗暗设想，天堂应该是图书馆的模样
English version:
POEM ABOUT GIFTS
May no one slight, with tears or a reproach,
This declaration of God’s mastery,
That, with sublime irony,
Gave me at once books and the night.
He vested those lightless eyes
With guardianship of the city of books,
Even though they can read
But senseless passages in the library of dreams,
Where sunrises give way to zeal. The day
Lavishes them in vain with infinite books,
Toilsome like the manuscripts
That perished in Alexandria.
Of hunger and of thirst (or so goes the Greek legend)
A king once died amidst fountains and gardens;
Aimless and unrelenting I tire the confines
Of this blind vault of a slender library.
Encyclopedias, atlases, the East
And West, centuries, dynasties,
Symbols, the cosmos and cosmogonies,
Afford us the walls, albeit uselessly.
Slow by my shadow, I explore the
Hollow penumbra with a tottering crosier,
I, who imagined Paradise
Under the figment of a library.
Something unnamed, certainly not
Random fate, governs all this;
Somebody else has already received in hazy
Evenings the many books, and their shadow.
As I rove through the slow galleries,
I happen to feel with sacred horror that
I am the other, the dead one, who must have
Ambled his days past, in a similar vein.
Who between the two writes this poem of
A plural me albeit of just one shadow?
Who cares about the word convoking me
If the anathema is one and indivisible?
Groussac or Borges, I behold this dear
World both distorting and dying down
Into a pale, vague ash, all too
Similar to both slumber and oblivion.
1957
@ref::