Two English Poems
To Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich
(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 twenty four—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.
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两首英文诗
献给贝阿特丽斯 比维罗尼 韦伯斯特 德布尔里奇
(之二)
我可以用什么来留住你?
我献给你逼仄的街道,令人沮丧的落日,以及在犬牙交错的郊区升起的月。
我献给你一个久望孤月的男人的酸楚。
我献给你我的先祖们,我家族那些逝去的男子汉们,至今活着的人们仍旧在青铜雕像前缅怀的我的那些先祖们的魂灵:
我那牺牲在布宜诺斯艾利斯前线的祖父,两颗子弹穿过他的肺,他留着胡须死去,被他的战友们用一张牛皮包裹;
我的外祖父 — 年仅二十四岁,在秘鲁统帅一支三百人的队伍,如今他们的魂灵漂浮在无形的马背上。
我献给你我所有的书里可能包含的任何洞见,还有我生命中任何的男子汉气概或者幽默。
我献给你一个男人从未献出过的忠诚。
我献给你我深藏的真心,一定程度上 — 此心无法用语言来表述,无法用梦想来传述,它不曾被时间、欢乐和灾难所沾染。
我献给你在距你出生几年前我看见夕阳下一朵黄玫瑰的记忆。
我献给你我对你的解读,有关你的理论,还有关于你的原汁原味的、惊喜的传闻。
我可以给你我的孤独,我的阴暗,以及我心灵的渴望;
我在试图用不确定、危险和失败来诱惑你。