Mediterranean - Our sea

Perhaps because my childhood
continues playing on your beach,
and hidden behind the canes
my first love sleeps,
I wear your light and your smell
wherever I go,
and piled on your sand
I keep love, plays and sorrows.

I, that in my skin have
the bitter flavour of the eternal crying,
which a hundred peoples have shed into you
from Algeciras to Istanbul,
so that you can paint in blue
their long nights of Winter.
Beacause of misadventures,
your soul is deep and dark.

My eyes got used to
your red dusks
like the bend to the truck...
I am a singer, I am a liar,
I like gambling and wine,
I have the soul of a sailor...
What can I do?
I was born in the Mediterranean.

And you approach,and you leave
after kissing my small village.
Playing with the tide
you go away,thinking of returning.
You are like a woman
scented with tar
who is missed and loved,
who is known and feared.

Oh...! If the fate comes
in search of me an unhappy day.
Push my boat to the sea
with an autumnal east wind
and allow the storm
can strip its white wings.
And bury me without mourning
between the beach and the sky...

In the hillside of a mountain,
higher than the horizon.
I want to have a good view.
My body will be way,
I will give green to the pines
and yellow to the broom...
Near the sea.Because I was born
in the Mediterranean.

By Joan Manuel Serrat. Translated from Catalan to English