中文譯作：我用什么才能留住你？

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，后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，死的時候蓄著胡子，尸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(lǐng)三百人沖鋒，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(shè)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(guān)于你生命的詮釋，關(guān)于你自己的理論，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

英文原作才是真正的風華絕代：

I

The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have outlived the night.

Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves laden with all the hues of deep soil, laden with things unlikely and desirable.

Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things half given away, half withheld, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act that way, I tell you.

The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd ends: some hated friends to chat with, music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart has no use for.

The big wave brought you.

Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words.

The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city.

Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name, the lilt of your laughter: these are the illustrious toys you have left me.

I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find? them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and to the few stray stars of the dawn.

Your dark rich life ... I must get at you, somehow; I put away those illustrious toys you have left me, I want your hidden look, your real smile -- that lonely,? mocking smile your cool mirror knows.

II

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.

- Jorge Luis Borges (1934)