Zafar Malik and Faisal Mohyuddin
for “Some Days Begin Like This” by Tara Skurtu

We began our translation work with Tara Skurtu’s poem “Some Days Begin Like This” on a Sunday afternoon in late March 2024, in the middle of Ramadan. We’d agreed to meet in Zafar’s beautiful home on the 26th floor of a building in Chicago that offered stunning panoramic views of Lake Michigan, with the curve of Lake Shore Drive flanked by beaches and parks as it stretched northward. The bright gray waters of the lake matched the bright gray of the overcast sky so well that the horizon existed only as an impression, a line we had to intuitively impose upon the gray. A kind of informed guesswork, you could call it, a fitting enough metaphor for the task awaiting us.

Both of us were fasting and feeling slower than usual as if our brains were lost in expansive gray clouds too. So our first move as translators was to create a four-columned table on a shared document, oriented in landscape mode. We needed the solid black lines of the table to give shape to our process, and the horizontal layout to allow us to spread things out as we worked. In the column on the far left, we placed the original text in English, which we read aloud several times to let the poem and its beautiful music enter the otherwise quiet, still living room. We talked about the poem, particularly keywords and phrases that held multiple meanings, and we discussed what might be possible to capture in Urdu, and what might have to be compromised. Our goal, of course, was to bring into Urdu not just the literal action of the poem but also its complexity, the musicality of both its language and line structure.

To what extent is the speaker actually “well”? Why would any word “regret” being spoken? How do we make sense of the “antibody” in the context of this poem — and what even is the Urdu word for “antibody”? Who — or what — is the mother at the end of the poem? Do we see her “abandonment” as an act of cruelty or compassion? Of offloading an unwanted burden or as a push toward self-sufficiency and growth? And how do we think of words as agents of their own survival and meaning?

The two of us have done some meaningful translation work in the past, beginning with an English translation from Urdu of an excerpt from Allama Iqbal’s “Taraneh-e-Hindi,” which Faisal used as the epigraph of his poetry collection The Displaced Children of Displaced Children. In the years since then, we have translated several of Munir Niazi’s short poems from Punjabi into English. This translation of Tara’s poem was our first real foray into translating from English into Urdu, and we quickly recognized this would pose a much greater challenge, despite both of our respective fluencies in Urdu.

In the second-from-the-left column on our shared document, we composed our first line-by-line translation (written in transliteration: Urdu captured in English letters) done as quickly as we could, without much deliberation, without consulting any dictionaries or anything. This initial draft allowed us to more carefully identify words and phrases that felt most challenging. Then we moved into the third column where we much more deeply and carefully considered each moment of the poem, striving to find the most meaningful words captured with the right rhythm and music; here we returned to those initial conversations about the original poem and to those words and phrases that left us most uncertain.

For example, we returned to the word “antibody,” which we initially did not translate. We talked about how common it is in spoken Urdu to include English words, particularly when it comes to medical and other technical terms. But as we reconsidered our goals as translators of a poem, we felt that to keep “antibody” in English felt and sounded “less poetic” to us, so we looked for as many possible alternatives in Urdu as we could. A really useful resource was John T. Platts’ A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Digital Dictionaries of South Asia); Faisal was introduced to this website by the Pakistani American poet and translator Adeeba Shahid Talukder when they collaborated on translations of their own work from English into Urdu in January 2024 as part of a seminar with Tamaas.

Ultimately, despite each of us struggling with the mental and physical sluggishness that comes from fasting, we arrived at a more refined translation, which we typed into the third column. But even after our efforts, we felt dissatisfied with certain moments. Given how our attention spans continued to wane as early evening darkened the lake and the sky outside, we decided we would have to call it a day, and then return, in the coming week, to our work with fresh eyes, full stomachs, and sharper minds. It took us nearly five weeks to finally resume our work!

The advantage of such a long delay was how it afforded us the opportunity to see and hear Tara’s poem anew and more carefully scrutinize our in-progress translation. We returned to our initial uncertainties and goals, reconsidered each word, each line, and then made a significant number of adjustments until we felt confident we had done our best; this version was written into the final column. And then, as he is much more adept at this, Zafar took our transliterated Urdu and rendered it into Urdu script by hand, which was then typed in Urdu by the Lakeer editors, who remained very generous with their patience given how long we took to complete this translation. In fact, even after the translation had been “finalized,” we made some adjustments. (No doubt, if it was still possible, we might still make another adjustment or two!)

We knew from the very beginning that no translation can ever do justice to the original. But we can try our best to retain as much of the complexity and beauty of the original by offering you something with its own complexity and beauty. So much of this work, even when collaborating, is based ultimately on feeling. As we had to do in order to see the invisible horizon on that overcast day in March when we first met to begin this process, we had to rely as translators ultimately on a shared sense of intuition — on saying to Tara’s poem: we know you hold more than we were able to capture; and also saying to you, the reader: we invite you to seek to discover all this poem holds, all it has to offer, all the ways it transcends our meager efforts to bring it closer to you.