臆想佛斯丁

What can I hold you with?    我用什麼才能留住你？   （Jorge Luis Borges 博爾赫斯）

I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs. 

我給你狹窄的街道、絕望的落日、缺口的月。

I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon. 

我給你一個痛苦的人，看著遙遠遙遠而孤獨的月。

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, 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 Perú, now ghosts on vanished horses. 

我給你我的祖先、死去的人們、石壁上刻寫著光榮事蹟的鬼魂：我父親的父親在布宜諾斯艾利斯的邊界被殺害，兩顆子彈穿過了他的肺，他留著長鬚，然後死亡，被他的士兵用牛皮包裹著。我母親的祖父，在24歲時率領著三百士兵闖入秘魯，如今已是亡馬上的幽魂。

I offer you whatever insight my books may hold. whatever manliness or humour my life. 

我給你我書中一切的領悟、一生的氣概與幽默。

I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal. 

我給你一個從未忠誠過的男人的忠誠。

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. 

我給你用某種方式保存了起來的我的核心——不經營字句、不與夢交談、不與時間、快樂、逆境接觸的內心。

I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born. 

我給你記憶裡的黃玫瑰，在日落之時，在你出生之前。

I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself. 

我給你對自己的解釋、對自己的理論、自己可靠又驚人的消息。

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. 

我可以給你我的孤單、黑暗、我內心的渴望，我嘗試賄賂你，用無常、危險與失敗。