With the end you are tired of this old world

Shepherdess ô Eiffel Tower the herd of the bridges bleats this morning

You have enough of it to live in Greek and Roman antiquity

Here even the cars seem to be old
The religion alone remained very new the religion
Remained simple like the hangars of Port-Aviation

Only in Europe you are not ancient ô Christianisme
European most modern it is you Black and white Pape X
And you that the windows observe shame retains you
To enter daN a church and of you to confess this morning to it
You read the leaflets the catalogues the posters which sing high
Here is poetry this morning and for prose there are the newspapers
There are the deliveries with 25 centimes full with adventure police
Portraits of the great men and thousand titles various

I saw this morning a pretty street of which I forgot the name
New and clean of the sun it was the bugle
Directors workmen and beautiful shorthand typists
Monday morning at Saturday evening four times per day pass there
The morning by three times the siren groans there
A rageuse bell barks there about midday
Inscriptions of the signs and the walls
The plates the opinions the made-to-order of the parrots criaillent
I like the grace of this industrial street
Located in Paris enters the street Aumont-Thieville and the avenue of the Terns

(Google translation of the start of Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone”, from here, complete in French here, and an anonymous translation – not that of LeRoy C. Breunig, Donald Revell, or Samuel Beckett –into English here.)

(Perhaps related: bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire.)