Alauddin Al-Azad has had a distinguished career as a professor of Bangla and a diplomat. He has been prolific in all the literary genres and has been honoured with numerous awards, including the Bangla Academy Award and the “Ekushey Padak.”

The Monument

Have they destroyed your memorial minaret?
Don’t you fear, comrade,
We are still here
A family of ten million, alert and wide awake.

The base that no emperor
Could ever crush
At whose feet
The diamond crown, the blue proclamation,
The naked sabre and the tempestuous cavalry

Have crumbled into dust.

We are that simple hero, that unique crowd,
We who work in fields,

Row on rivers,

Labour in factories!

Have they destroyed your brick minaret?
Well, let them. Don’t you fear, comrade,

We a family of ten million

Are alert and wide awake.

What kind of a death is this?
Has anyone seen such a death

Where no one weeps at the head

Of the departed?

Where all sorrow and pain from the Himalayas to the sea

Only come together and blossom
Into the colour of a single flag?
What kind of a death is this?

Has anyone seen such a death

Where no one laments aloud
Where only the sitar turns into the

Gorgeous stream of a mighty waterfall,
Where the season of many words

Leads the pen on to an era of Poetry?

Have they destroyed your brick minaret?
Well, let them. We forty million masons

Have built a minaret with a violin’s tune
And the bright colours of our purple heart.

The lives of the martyrs float like islands

In the dark deep eyes of

Rainbows and palash flowers
We have etched for you their names

Through the ages
In the foamy stones of love.

That is why, comrade,
On the granite peak of our thousand fists
Shines like the sun
The sun of a mighty pledge.

– Translated by Kabir Chowdhury