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 twentyfour- heading a charge of three hundred men in Perú, 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 explanationsof 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?

我给你贫穷的街道、绝望的日落、破败郊区的月亮。

我给你一个久久地望着孤月的人的悲哀。

我给你我已死去的先辈,人们用大理石纪念他们的幽灵:

在布宜诺斯艾利斯边境阵亡的我父亲的父亲,两颗子弹射穿了他的胸膛,蓄着胡子的他死去了,士兵们用牛皮裹起他的尸体;我母亲的祖父——时年二十四岁——在秘鲁率领三百名士兵冲锋,如今都成了消失的马背上的幽灵。

我给你我写的书中所能包含的一切悟力、我生活中所能有的男子气概或幽默。

我给你一个从未有过信仰的人的忠诚。

我给你我设法保全的我自己的核心——不营字造句,不和 梦想交易,不被时间、欢乐和逆境触动的核心。

我给你,早在你出生前多年的一个傍晚看到的一朵黄玫瑰的记忆。

我给你你对自己的解释,关于你自己的理论,你自己的真实而惊人的消息。

我给你我的寂寞、我的黑暗、我心的饥渴;我试图用困惑、危险、失败来打动你。