Coin

Fatima Jafar's poem + its Urdu translation

A sunset in New York City, 2023

I first read Fati’s poems in the Fall of 2024 when I learnt that she was an incoming Stegner Fellow for Poetry. I immediately fell in love with her poetry. Allow me to ask you all—respectfully—to also fall in love with it.

Coin

To speak of this would be to speak of 
a cave, the utterance of a unlettered mouth. 

The moon floats like a coin in black water. 

The candle on the table is dead.

A throat hangs forlorn like a
well. A year hangs forlorn like a well.

But still, a glint in the dark—

a fish’s tail. Silver whisper, silvered 
whisp. God is closer to me 

than my jugular vein. The hummingbird winds up. 

Drinks syrup from a velvet plate. 

A nub of honey begins to spin in its throat. 

Inevitable life stirs, like a cracked
seed, its green shoot, ringing off the walls 

its song. Every day I tried to say it—

my family, when I saw your faces 

in the good sun
I died once, then 

many times, again and again

Coin by Fatima Jafar was first published by The Drift.

Here is Fatima’s reading of her poem:

Translation

Translation—for me—is just another exercise in deep engagement with a piece of work. When I love a work so much, all I want to do is to sit with it longer, to try to make it a part of myself, to share it with beloveds.

Substack is not equipped to handle Nastaliq right now, so I am going to try paste a screenshot of the translation here instead. For my Urdu-understanding but not reading beloveds, you can also find an audio of me reading the translation below.

Here is the version you can listen to in my voice:

(excuse the traffic noises in the background; these are the perils of living in a city on a chaand raat (not that I’d be anywhere else)).

Notes on Translation

• I wanted to maintain the form of the piece, so each monostich and couplet appears—largely—as in the original.

• “Silver whisper, silvered whisp” has both repetition and alliteration. I try to achieve a similar effect with the repetition of “chaandi” (silver) and “rang” (color).

• Family is literally “khandaan” in Urdu—but that sounded awkward. I thought of “family” as superseding species in this poem, inculcating all kinds of birds, animals, and objects. Everything alive in the world the poet finds herself pulled by.

  “Hum-nafas,” literally “those who breathe together” or “those who breathe the same,” came closest to that feeling. Hum-nafas is also used to address a beloved or a friend in Urdu and Persian.

• Fati’s original phrase of “good sun” is chef’s kiss but translating it literally in Urdu as “acha suraj” felt awkward and clunky. Instead, this is where I relied on meaning more than the word itself: what does a good sun feel like?

  And those of us from this side of the world know that a good sun is one that is just setting, when its heat does not feel like our skins are boiling. A setting sun is gentle, even beautiful. It is promising that life could be good.

  Thus, I translated it as “maddham suraj” or “the dull sun.” (Also a nod to one of my favorite songs ever.)

You can follow Fati’s work here: fatimajafar.com

As always, I am very eager to know your thoughts on this.

P.S Eid Mubarak to all those celebrating!

In solidarity,

Javeria