Papá cuéntame otra vez [English translation]

Dad, tell me again that lovely story

about French policemen and fascists and students with fringes

and gentle urban guerrillas in bell-bottom trousers,

and songs by the Stones, and girls in mini-skirts.

Dad, tell me again about all the fun you had

ruining the old age of rusty dictators.

and how you sang 'Al vent' and occupied the Sorbonne

in that French May in the days of wine and roses.

Dad, tell me again that lovely story

about the crazy revolutionary they killed in Bolivia,

and whose rifle nobody has dared to take up again.

and how, since then, everything seems uglier.

Dad, tell me again how, after so many barricades,

so many raised fist salutes, so much spilled blood,

at the end of the game you couldn't do anything,

and under the cobbles there was no beach sand.

The defeat was very hard: everything that you had dreamt

rotted in the corners and was covered with spiderwebs

now nobody sings 'Al Vent' ,there are no more madmen, no more outcasts,

but it still has to rain and the square is still dirty.

That May was long ago, very distant Saint-Denis,

very distant Jean Paul Sartre, very distant that Paris.

even so I think sometimes that it ultimately made no difference,

the shit still comes down on anyone who says too much

And there are the same bodies, rotted with cruelty.

Now they die in Bosnia those who died then in Vietnam

Now they die in Bosnia those who died then in Vietnam

Now they die in Bosnia those who died then in Vietnam