Papá cuéntame otra vez [English translation]

Dad, tell me again

that beautiful tale

of police officers, fascists

and students with long hair.

That sweet urban guerrilla

in bell-bottom trousers,

songs by the Rollings

and girls in mini-skirts.

Dad, tell me again

about the fun you had

ruining the last days

to rusty dictatorships.

And how you sang 'Al vent'

and occupied the Sorbonne

in that French may

full of days of wine and roses.

Dad, tell me again

that beautiful story

of that crazy fighter

killed in Bolivia,

whose rifle nobody

dared to rise again.

Tell me how, since then on,

everything seems uglier.

Dad, tell me again

that, after so many barricades,

so many lifted fists,

so many spilled blood,

at the end of the game

you couldn't do anything,

and under the cobblestones

there was no beach sand.

The defeat was hard,

everything that you dreamt

rotted in the corners

and covered with dust.

Nobody sings 'Al vent' anymore,

no more madmen, no more pariah,

but it has to rain again:

the streets are still dirty.

That May seems long ago,

far away Saint-Denis,

far away Jean Paul Sartre,

far away that Paris Spring.

However, sometimes I think

that eventually nothing mattered,

anyone that speaks too much

is still battered so bad.

And the same bodies lay there,

rotten with cruelty.

The ones that died in Vietnam

now die in Bosnia.