Reading Mind of A Translator Who Worked On The International Booker Awardee Book : Daisy Rockwell

Reading Mind of A Booker Award Winning Translator : Daisy Rockwell 

Geejanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Ret Samadhi had become the first book in any Indian language to win the prestigious International Booker Award. Originally released in 2018, Tomb of Sand , the English translation of the novel done by Daisy Rockfield. The novel  traces the unconventional lease of life an elderly woman gets was published by Penguin India in March 2022. It is the story revolves around an 80-year old woman who slips into depression at the death of her husband, but then comes out of it to tackle life once again. Based on a tragic premise, the story however has a playful tone and exuberant wordplay. At the same time, it is an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact on borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or gender. 

I met Ms Rockwell yesterday at Kitab Khana , the iconic book store at Fort and briefly spoke to her about her interest in the art of translation and Geetanjali Shri’s Booker Award winning novel . 

I always felt that there were not so many outstanding and quality translation of Indian novels published but never recognized at the  international level. Before I tell you what we talked about, briefly about the translator. 

Daisy is from  Northern New England , USA. She is basically a painter and paints under the alias, Lapata , her paintings are available on Flickr. She grew up in a family of artists in western Massachusetts, some of the works adorn the surfaces of chinaware and brightens up the waiting rooms of dentists’ offices, and others whose artistic output has found more select audiences. Rockwell grew interest in Literature of Hindi and Urdu languages, and obtained PhD degree in South Asian literature, a book on the Hindi author Upendranath Ashk.  Thereafter , she translated numerous translations of Hindi and Urdu work, that  includes Ashk’s  Falling Walls (2015), Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (2016), and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her translation of Krishna Sobti’s final novel, A Gujarat here, a Gujarat there (Penguin, 2019) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2019. Her best translation work so far is Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (Tilted Axis Press, 2021) awarded the International Booker award. 

Apart from all this , Rockwell has also written The Little Book of Terror, a volume of paintings and essays on the Global War on Terror (Foxhead Books, 2012), and her novel Taste was published by Foxhead Books in April 2014. Her 2004 book, Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography, is an exemplary work of literary biography, locating Ashk and his writing within the history of Hindi language and literature.

How did she start translation of Hindi/ Urdu literary works. She tells that she started off being interested in translation in graduate school, when she  began her doctorate in South Asian studies. 

Before studying Hindi, she also  had studied Latin for many years, as well as French, and some German and ancient Greek. She feels that classical languages really teach you to break down language into microscopic bits, and that is how she  first started translating, although not with the purpose of publication. She says that her advisor in graduate school at the University of Chicago encouraged her , and she  also took up a translation seminar with AK Ramanujan, perhaps the best known and most talented translator from South Asian languages.

Many of us in India, growing up in a multilingual society, take it for granted that we move constantly between languages. For most bilingual or trilingual Indians, their relationship to different languages may not be something they actively consider very often. 

I also asked her that her  relationship to Hindi is qualitatively different from that of a native speaker because she acquired the language as an adult? And does her  more self-conscious relationship with Hindi aid her life as a translator, or make it harder?She says her  relationship to Hindi is absolutely different from that of a native speaker. She also claims to be  an apt language learner. Strangely , she did not start learning Hindi until she was only 19. By then, as studies have shown, the  brain is less capable of soaking in new languages. According to her It took her  a long time to be able to read or speak Hindi with any fluency, and even now she  make ridiculous mistakes and find some idiomatic phrases and words impenetrable.

I was little curious that why she was  drawn to Upendranath Ashk. 

“I started reading Ashk at  graduate school and I was drawn to his attention to detail and his focus on literary production. His work is full of poetry and quotations, and is a great meditation on what it means to be a creative person.”

I ask her, ‘As someone who is also a writer of fiction, how would you describe the difference between the work of writing and that of translation? Does translating ever create a temptation to rewrite?’

 Says she, ‘To me translation is a form of creative writing, it’s just creative writing within very strict parameters. Robert Frost once said that “writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” Non-translation writing for me is like tennis with the net down as well. You can do anything, but do you want to?’

What was your experience working with Geetanjali Shri ?

” My experience with Geetanjali was unique in my translation career because her English is obviously so perfect. We talked a lot. One thing that I like to say is that sometimes translation is like an act of channelling. You know, it's like you're holding a seance even when the author is dead. I have to hold a seance because I can't ask them because I can't think what they mean. Why would they say this? What would they do if they were me? Having translated a lot of books by authors that are no longer living, I have developed this technique of trying to channel their intentions and their way of thinking.

And I came to Geetanjali, who obviously was alive and kicking, and I did that because she's not me, right? And her English is not like my English. And so sometimes I would say to myself, if Geetanjali were me, how would she say this? Because she's not, so it's still a sort of a different type of channelling where I think, you know, like people in America, you know Trump-supporter type people. There were these hats that say WWJD. Which means ‘what would Jesus do?’ So I have replaced Jesus with the author's name. So WWGSD, what would Geetanjali Shree do? So I have to answer this question, even though she could answer it for me. But she doesn't want to be a translator, and she does trust me, so I have to think what would Geetanjali Shree do? And then I just go for it.”