博尔赫斯：我用什么才能留住你？
豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯（Jorge Luis Borges ，1899年8月24日-1986年6月14日），阿根廷诗人、小说家、散文家兼翻译家，被誉为作家中的考古学家。
英文诗两首
——献给贝阿特丽斯 · 比维洛尼 · 韦伯斯特 · 布尔里奇
I
II
（王永年 译）
编注：
1.贝阿特丽斯 · 比维洛尼 · 韦伯斯特 · 布尔里奇，阿根廷社交名媛，博尔赫斯的好友，曾受博尔赫斯倾慕，但对其态度平平，她曾对博尔赫斯说：「就像你对结交诗人和作家感兴趣一样，我对认识有钱人感兴趣」。此诗写于 1934 年，应当正处在博尔赫斯与她的友谊期内，此时贝阿特丽斯 32 岁，已为人母八年。（引自译者“清隳”的注释）
2.王永年先生本的这一译本中第二首“我给你我已死去的祖辈，后人们用大理石祭奠的先魂”（I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze:）一句疑似有误，非“大理石”，而应为“青铜”。感谢读者“老马”的指正。
Two English Poems
To Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich
by Jorge Luis Borges
I
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves; darkblue top heavy waves laden with all the hues of deep spoil, 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.
1934
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