Asia

Asia, Asia, Asia,

Old marvelous land from childhood tales

Where fantasy sleeps like an empress

In her forest filled with mystery.

Asia,

I wish to go away with the boat

Cradled this evening in the port

Mysterious and solitary

And that finally deploys her violet sails

Like an enormous night-bird in the golden sky.

I wish to go away, toward the isles of flowers,

Listening to the perverse sea sing

Over an old, bewitching rhythm.

I wish to see Damascus and the cities of Persia,

With their light minarets in the air;

I wish to see beautiful silk turbans

On dark faces with bright teeth;

I wish to see eyes dark with love

And pupils shining with joy

In skin yellowed like oranges;

I wish to see velvet robes

And clothes with long fringes.

I wish to see pipes in mouths

Surrounded by white beards;

I wish to see harsh merchants with cross-eyed gazes,

And judges, and viziers

Who with a single movement of their crooked finger

Grants life, or death, according to their desire.

I wish to see Persia, and India, and then China,

The pot-bellied mandarins under their umbrellas,

And the princesses with dainty hands,

And the literary men who quarrel

Over poetry and over beauty;

I wish to linger in the enchanted palace,

And like a foreign traveler

Contemplate at leisure painted countrysides,

On fabrics in fir frames,

With a person standing in the middle of an orchard;

I wish to see smiling assassins,

The executioner who cuts an innocent neck

With his great curved Oriental blade.

I wish to see paupers and queens;

I wish to see roses and blood;

I wish to see death caused by love or even by hate.

And then returning, later

Tell my story to the dreaming and curious

Raising, like Sinbad, my old Arab cup

From time to time to my lips

To interrupt my tale with art....