باران Rain

Reza, Moheb and I worked on this poem together. These are some of the changes I made to the literal version.

In the first stanza, I added the verb ‘wearing’ because English works better with verbs rather than the bald abstraction. In ‘the gates to the city’, I changed the tense to the present – ‘are sealed’ – for reasons of immediacy. I also went for ‘pillar’ rather than ‘column’ because I like the sound better in this context. I changed ‘obsolescence’, an abstract noun, to ‘relics’ which are tangible.

In the final stanza, I used the verb ‘purge’, rather than wash or clean, because it has the sense of a ritual cleansing.

Sarah Maguire