It was towards the end of her undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, when the professor gave the class its first exercise in translation that Daisy Rockwell had her Peter Parker moment. “We had to translate a page and he assigned each one of us a book. We were all at radically different levels of Hindi. There were native speakers from Delhi in the class and he gave them books like Braj Bhasha prem-akhyans, the really hard stuff. But I was given Mohan Rakesh’s Andhere Bandh Kamre, a classic modernist novel set in Delhi in the ’60s. So, I translated the first page and it was sort of like a Peter Parker moment, when he feels the webs coming out of his hands. It just felt right to me,” says Rockwell, 53, translator, most recently of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, which won the International Booker Prize last year.
Fresh off the Dhaka Lit Fest in Bangladesh, the Vermont-based Rockwell is in the Capital, the first time since the Booker win, for a brief round of seminars and translation mentorship programmes before she travels to the Jaipur Literature Festival, to be held next week. Nothing can quite match up to the high of the International Booker Prize, but she has also just been awarded the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award for 2023. All of it has served to entrench her deeper into a world that she first stumbled upon at 19, when, having learned French, Latin, German and Greek, she wanted to try her hand at something completely different. “I wanted to try a language that I didn’t know anything about. Hindi fit into my schedule, so I started taking it and it was very difficult,” she says. Rockwell loved the challenge, though, the unfamiliarity of the words rolling off her tongue, the meanings of which she fumbled for in the beginning, and later, learned to savour. The granddaughter of the American painter Norman Rockwell, one of 20th century’s most well-known press illustrators, and born to artist parents, it was almost like painting a picture — only with words.
Daisy Rockwell, the International Booker Prize-winning translator. (Express photo by Gajendra Yadav)
A year after she started learning Hindi, in 1989, she had an opportunity to travel to India, to Mussoorie, to study at the Landour Language School, that specialises in the teaching of Indian languages. She had already been drawn into the world of South Asian literature and the visit to India made clear her professional choice. If she needed more affirmation, it came in the form of AK Ramanujan, one of the foremost scholars and translators of South Asian languages, who taught her briefly before his demise in 1993 at the University of Chicago. By the time she joined academia in the late Nineties, steeped in the literature of Upendranath Ashk, Mohan Rakesh and other 20th century stalwarts, Rockwell had also enrolled herself for lessons in Urdu from a Sufi Imam at a tiny basement mosque in north side Chicago, to firm up her understanding of Hindi and South Asian literature. “I sat on the floor opposite him and he taught me from Urdu primers brought from Pakistan, while fielding calls from his flock. It was a different kind of training altogether, but no less valuable,” says Rockwell.
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In translation, the relationship between a writer and translator, Rockwell once said, is almost like a dance. The two hold each other in an embrace, pirouetting and picking up cues from one another’s body language to put together a performance designed to enthrall. It fosters partnerships that look out for each other, even when the audience is looking away, or watching out only for the one leading the dance. When the English translation of Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel 2007 Flights won The Man Booker International Prize in 2018, its translator Jennifer Croft found her name missing from the cover of the book, despite her long engagement with the project. Two years later, in September 2021, Croft’s announcement on Twitter would be the catalyst behind an important movement for translators to find acknowledgement on book covers and in royalties. “I’m not translating any more books without my name on the cover. Not only is it disrespectful to me, but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they’re going to read,” she tweeted. Croft’s initiative would bring together other writers and translators rallying for change and for publishers to finally start naming translators on book covers.
By 2018, Rockwell, too, had made some crucial choices, her name on the book’s jacket being one among them. Her experience in academia had put her pursuit of translation on the back burner. “It was considered to be a hobby, to be done in one’s own time, not a significant form of scholarship,” says Rockwell, who quit it in 2006, to return to art and translation, easing into the latter by 2012. “At that time, I had a small child, and translation is something you can do between demanding household works. As American writer and translator Lydia Davis says, “When you translate, you’re never staring at a blank page and it’s hard to stare at a blank page if you have a four year old. But you can translate. My daughter’s 13 now and she’s a dancer. I started to translate a lot in the waiting rooms of dance studios, to the sound of ambient noise and people coming and going. I just sat with my book and my notebook and kept writing.”
Daisy, most recently transalated Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand. (Express photo by Gajendra Yadav)
Rockwell’s translation of Ashk’s Girti Deevarein, that she’d begun during graduate school, had finally found a publisher in 2014, and, afterwards, a fortuitous connection with an Indian editor opened up the door to more commissions, including translations of works by seminal writers such as Bhisham Sahani, Shrilal Shukla, Khadija Mastur and Krishna Sobti, and, of course, Ashk. In India, the explosion of indie publishing had led to a more nurturing ecosystem for works in translation, even though the international market remained largely impervious to it. She’d been translating a book by Ashk when it struck her how invariably the work she had been doing failed the Bechdel Test, a metric devised by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel to measure the representation of women in films and literature. That’s when she decided to work almost exclusively with works of women writers. Two years later, when Deborah Smith (British translator of Korean writer Han Kang’s Man Booker International Prize-winning The Vegetarian, Smith founded Tilted Axis Press in 2015 to promote literature outside of Europe and the US) was looking for a translator for Shree’s Ret Samadhi, she found Rockwell.
The rest, of course, is history. Shree and Rockwell only met at the award ceremony of the Booker, but over the course of hundreds of emails, Ret Samadhi transformed into Tomb of Sand, notching up a significant win for translation at large, that would see the international market open up to the rich and diverse world of South Asian languages. Now, in the middle of translating Shree’s novel, Hamara Shahar Us Baras, and another work by Urdu writer, Nisar Aziz Butt (1927-2020), and with the US edition of Tomb of Sand due for publication at the end of the month, Rockwell looks back to her early trysts with the language and how it changed her life. “Languages are like people, sometimes you just like a language, sometimes you really don’t. And sometimes, you fall in love with a language. I don’t know why, but I fell in love with Hindi. It was like Hindi became my life partner,” she says.
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Daisy Rockwell, the International Booker Prize-winning translator. (Express photo by Gajendra Yadav)
Daisy, most recently transalated Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand. (Express photo by Gajendra Yadav)
