Poetic Renditions
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Some Days Begin Like This
by Tara Skurtu
Translated into Urdu
by Daniele Speziale,
Fatima Malik, Zafar Malik and Faisal Mohyuddin
Introduction by Sidra Tul Muntaha
A rendition of a work focuses on conveying its essence while a translation of it focuses on accurately conveying the originally intended meaning. There’s a fine line between the two, and you may find a bit of both as you read each piece in this section, where different poets from around the world offer their version of the same poem in a new language. Together, they are a celebration of the original work.
Some Days Begin Like This
by Tara Skurtu
The fear of forgetting I am well
crawls into my mouth like a word
that regrets being spoken;
it presses sour phrases against
my teeth, tongue, and gums.
I want to tell it stop,
that I am well,
that my blood is my blood.
But as I’m ready to swallow,
it wedges another phrase
onto the back of my tongue—
something about the flawlessness
of the antibody’s memory,
how it never forgets
the image of the mother
that abandoned it here.
– This poem is from the collection “The Amoeba Game”. Reprinted with permission from the author.
The poem uses the language of a physical sickness to describe an internal turmoil of identity. Our identities are an amalgamation of the culture, religion, and beliefs of the people and communities we have grown up in. But what happens when our authentic self stands in contradiction to all our learned beliefs? More specifically, how do we differentiate between our authentic traits and those we internalize from our surroundings? How do you separate yourself from the people you share your DNA with? The poem presents this crisis of identity as a fear of being unwell.
The title launches us headfirst into the poem’s premise: Some days begin like this. I can’t help but think of mornings when you wake up with a sore throat, in denial that you’re about to be sick until that first painful swallow brings you to reality. Towards the end of the poem, it establishes that this isn’t the first time you have felt this: of the antibody’s memory,/how it never forgets, because this response is rooted in memory. The B lymphocyte cells of the immune system create memory cells whenever they encounter an infection, making it easier for the body to recognize the same infection in the future. This crisis of identity does not occur once, it happens in repetition, and each time you get a little bit familiar with it.
The ending of the poem points back to its beginning: something about the flawlessness/of the antibody’s memory,/how it never forgets/the image of the mother/that abandoned it here. The fear of abandonment emerges again and again to find a home, especially if that abandonment comes from someone as close as family. The poem states, as a fact, that this repeated emergence is imminent because it’s rooted in the blood, in the antibody’s memory, and, like a sickness, we must welcome it, tend to it with compassion and care, and then let it go until its next arrival.
The versatility of Urdu has allowed our translators to take three unique journeys through the poem’s landscape. Daniele and Fatima have chosen a title that is close to the original with “days” becoming دن for Daniele and روز for Fatima. Faisal & Zafar took a different approach and used شروعات, a noun instead of the verb (begin/شروع) used in the original. Daniele’s translation is sensitive to the various sounds and forms a single word can take in Urdu and keeps the original poem intact in its preciseness. Fatima has focused more on keeping the poem’s true essence and emotional impact, creating a balance between literal and metaphorical expressions and cycling through multiple versions in search of the one closest to the original. Faisal & Zafar have retained the preciseness of the poem’s language and brought a subtle sophistication to its rhythm and lyrical quality through their slight deviations from the literal translation.
کچھ روز ایسے ہی شروع ہوتے ہیں
اپنی خیریت کو بھلانے کا ڈر
اپنے منہ میں رینگتا ہے کسی لفظ سا
جو لب پر آنے سے پچھتاتا ہے؛
کچھ تلخ جملہ دباتا ہے
دانتوں، زبان، مسوڑوں کے خلاف۔
اس ڈر کو کہنا چاہتا ہوں کہ رک
میں ٹھیک ہوں
میرا لہو اب تک میرا اپنا ہی لہو ہے۔
پر جب اس کو نگلنے کے لئے تییار ہوں
وہ میری زبان کے پیچھے ایک اور جملہ
ٹھونس دیتا ہے
ضدِ جسم کی یادداشت کی بےعیبی پر کچھ بات
وہ کیسے نہیں بھول جاتا کبھی
اس ماں کی تصویر
جو اس کو یہاں چھوڑ کر گئی۔
Note
In this translation, I opted for a relatively simple syntax to maintain the conciseness of the
original text. Thus, for instance, I rendered the “fear of forgetting I am well” as “the fear of
forgetting apni khairiyat,” something which allowed me to keep the Urdu syntax
straightforward while also preserving the meaning of the English original.
With “… word/that regrets being spoken,” I stuck to the English text by rendering the word
(lafz) the actual subject who regrets (pachtata hai) coming up, which I believe provides for a
better reflection of the original verses than hypothetical oblique-case structures such as “lafz
ko…afsos hai,” lit. “to-the-word regret is,” which makes the word a passive recipient of
regret.
“Something about the flawlessness / of the antibody’s memory” was a challenging passage,
and I condensed it into a single verse, slightly longer than the others. It is in any case a
straightforward translation, and the little particle “par” came to my aid to avoid the longer
phrase “ke baare mein” to translate “about” – if not, the verse would have had a good three
ki/ke possessive particles, roughly the equivalent of having three “of’s” in a single English
verse, quite a mouthful!
کچھ دن کچھ ایسے شروع ہوتے ہیں
میں ٹھیک ہوں۔ یہ بھول جانے کا ڈر
میرے گلے میں اُس لفظ کی طرح اُبھرتا ہے
جس کو بولنا ایک بھول ہو
وہ کُچھ باسی لفظوں کو میری زُبان پر
میرے دانتوں کے بیچ لے آتا ہے
!میں اس ڈر سے کہنا چاہتی ہوں بس
میں ٹھیک ہوں
مجھ میں دوڑتا خون میرا ہی ہے
پرجیسے ہی میں اِن لفظوں کو نگلنا چاہوں
وہ ایک اور خیال میری زبان پر لے آتا ہے
کچھ ایسے کہ اینٹی بوڈی کو بہت اچھی طرح یاد ہے
اُس ماں کی پرچھائی
جو اِسے یہاں بھول گئی تھی
Note
This moving, clever little poem was quite a difficult exercise in translation. The original is beautifully economical, yet rampant with personification and metaphors woven tightly into what I can only describe as a very particular, very specific feeling. That’s the whole poem. I started with quite a literal translation, just to get on the page faithfully what the poem was saying, word for word. I wanted a version I could deviate from. Then, just as an experiment, I asked ChatGPT to translate the piece into Urdu. It was interesting to see that this translation was quite close to mine, with one big exception: ChatGPT assumed the speaker identified as male. The next couple of versions I worked on, I went more for the feel of the poem rather than something verbatim, all the while not straying too far from the English. I made some deliberate deviations though, like omitting the word ‘gums’ from my translation; choosing the essence rather than the exact meaning in places – such as using khayal (thought/idea) for ‘phrase’; and leaning into an internal rhyme with the word bhool. This version here remains a work in progress, attempt x in search of the one that comes closest. But perhaps like Euclid’s parallel lines, the original and the translation are never actually meant to meet, even at infinity.
کچھ دنوں کی شروعات ایسے
بھولنے کا خوف میں ٹھیک ہوں
رینگتا ہے میرے منہ میں لفظ کی طرح
جسے ذکر کا ملال ہو
دبتے ہیں ترش کلمات
میرے دانتوں، زباں اور مسوڑوں پر
میں کہنا چاہتی ہوں رکو
کہ میں ٹھیک ہوں
کہ میرا لہو میرا لہو ہے
لیکن میں تیار ہوں نگلنے کو
وہ پچر ہے ایک دوسرا جملہ
میری زبان کے پشت پر
کچھ بے یاب ہیں یادیں
رفاع جسم
جیسے یہ بھولتا نہیں
ماں کا تصور
جسے یہاں ترک کیا
Note
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?
Read the full note here.
Tara Skurtu is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania, the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game, and the upcoming collection Faith Farm. Tara has over ten years of experience leading creative seminars, and she specializes in coaching through the lens of writing and storytelling. She has presented at TEDx, CreativeMornings, and The Power of Storytelling, and at multinational corporations. Tara is the founder of International Poetry Circle and a former steering committee member of Writers for Democratic Action. She is based in Brooklyn, where she is a writing coach for clients worldwide and is working on her collection of essays Don’t Ask Me Why I Live Here.
Sidra Tul Muntaha is a poet and physicist based in Lahore, Pakistan. She likes studying the universe and also creating new ones out of poems. Her hobbies include reading poems, collecting them in her notebook, and lending them to her friends whether they need one or not. Sidra is a poetry editor at Mollusk Literary Magazine and her work is forthcoming in The Ampersand Anthology (The Peepul Press, 2024).
Daniele Speziale, also known by the pen-name Rahi Italvi, was born in 1998. He is a social worker and a budding writer and translator from Italy. He currently lives and works with an NGO in Kinshasa, D.R. Congo. Daniele is also a graduate in MSc Development Studies from SOAS, University Of London, and has experience working with grassroot organizations in a variety of countries. A polyglot, Daniele has studied around 15 languages, with a predilection for Hindustani in which he also composes poetry under the pen-name of Rahi Italvi. In 2022, Daniele was a finalist in the Jawad Ali Memorial Prize For Urdu-English Translation, and his Hindustani poetry is currently being published on Rekhta.
Fatima Malik is a Pakistani-American poet with work in The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and others. Through her poems, she continues to grapple with grief from her father’s passing and stay in conversation with her heritage.
Zafar Malik is Director of Publications and Dean for Development and University Relations at East-West University in Chicago, the Managing Editor of East-West University’s Center for Policy and Future Studies journal, East-West Affairs, and an accomplished visual artist. He lives in Chicago and maintains his artist studio at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in Evanston, Illinois. His translations have appeared in RHINO, Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, and elsewhere.
Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of Elsewhere: An Elegy (Next Page, 2024), The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear, 2018), and The Riddle of Longing (Backbone, 2017). He teaches English at Highland Park High School in suburban Chicago and creative writing at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies. He also serves as a Master Practitioner with the global not-for-profit Narrative 4 and is a visual artist. You can read more about Faisal’s work at www.faisalmohyuddin.com.