Translating A Poem by Shamsur Rahman

#EverydayTranslations Day 2

A busy day today. Almost didn’t keep up, but managed to snatch in a few moments at the last hour! A small but significant one today. Something R sent me in a DM once. A wish maybe, maybe an attempt to make sense of all the time we don’t spend together anymore. Life gets busy, the clamour gets louder and louder still. In a way, what this poem speaks about is so much akin to the day we are both having today, and often have; filled with secondhand anguish and stress, turned away from each other under the same roof. As I sit down to a hurried translation session I am also preparing to go home to him. And what better way to prepare than this little gem of a poem?

Shamsur Rahman is a poet I hold firmly close to my heart; if only for the way he wrote of longing and loss and love. I have cried many a sentimental tear over his words; I still do, sometimes. The poem was sourced from the Instagram page poetry.bn run by Sultan Ahmed. I couldn’t find its title, nor the book it was originally from. Maybe let me know in the comments?

Here’s the poem as I received it…

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And here’s the translation.

Some other dawn maybe; in some birdsong dawn, You

And I will sit under an ancient Banyan by the water, silent, alone.

Yellow leaves maybe, dead leaves some, will fall

Underfoot; in the morning’s soft breeze.

Every day, under the sky of this Earth, the clamour increase.

The featured image is ‘Separation’ by Edvard Munch, Sourced from Wikimedia Commons.