“I don’t know why but I fell in love with Hindi…it became my life partner”: Daisy Rockwell

Fresh at Dhaka Lit Fest Bangladesh, Vermont-based Rockwell is in the capital for the first time since Booker’s win, for a short seminar and translation mentoring program before traveling to next week’s Jaipur Literature Festival. She has also just won the 2023 Vani Foundation Outstanding Translator Award. All of which helped her dive deeper into a world she first encountered at the age of nineteen. When she learned French, Latin, German and Greek, she wanted to try something completely different. “She wanted to try a language she didn’t know anything about. Hindi fit in my schedule, so I started taking it, but it was very hard,” she says. But Rockwell loved her challenge. Unfamiliar with the words rolling off her tongue, she first fumbled for their meanings and later learned to savor them. American painter Norman, one of the most famous press illustrators of the 20th century. Her Rockwell granddaughter and born to artist parents, she paints with her words alone. was.

International Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell. (Express photo by Gajendra Yadav)

In 1989, a year after I started learning Hindi, I had the opportunity to travel to India. Mussoorie, studied at the Randall Language School, which specializes in teaching Indian. She was already drawn into the world of South Asian literature, and her visit to India made her professional choices clear. Ramanujan was a leading authority and translator of South Asian languages, which she briefly taught at the University of Chicago in 1993 before her death. By the time Upendranath stepped into the academic world in the late 90s, he was steeped in the literature of Ashuk, Mohan Rakesh and the rest of her 20th-century heavyweights. A Sufi in an underground mosque was taking Urdu lessons from her imam. To help her develop her understanding of Hindi and South Asian literature. “I was sitting on the floor opposite him, answering calls from his flock while he taught a primer in Urdu that he had brought from Pakistan. It was a completely different kind of training. But it wasn’t worth it,” says Rockwell.

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In translation, the relationship between writer and translator is, as Rockwell once said, almost like a dance. The two hug and hug each other, taking cues from each other’s bodies and her language to create a mesmerizing performance. Cultivate a partnership that cares about each other, even when the audience is looking away or only caring about the person leading the dance. The English translation of Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel 2007 Flight, Man Booker International Prize In 2018, the translator, Jennifer Croft, noticed that her name was missing from the cover of the book, even though she had been involved with the project for a long time. Two years later, in September 2021, her Croft announcement on Twitter would be the catalyst behind a significant move by translators to seek acknowledgment for book covers and royalties. “I won’t translate any more books that don’t have my name on the cover. It’s not only disrespectful to me, it’s disrespectful to readers who are supposed to know who chose the words to read,” she tweeted. The initiative brings together other writers and translators who rally for change, and publishers eventually begin to nominate translators for their book covers.
By 2018, Rockwell also made some key choices. Her name on the cover of the book is one of them. Her experience in academia put her on the backburner of her translation pursuits. “It was considered a hobby, something to do on your own time, not an important form of study. At the time, I had small children and translation was something I could do in between household chores. America Lydia Davis, author and translator of I started translating to the sounds of people coming and going.I sat down with a book and a notebook and kept writing.”

Daisy recently translated Geetanjali Shree’s Sand Grave. (Express photo by Gajendra Yadav)

Rockwell’s translation of Ashuk’s Girti Deevarein, which she began while in graduate school, finally found a publisher in 2014 and later became an influential author through a chance connection with an Indian editor. opened the door for more commissions, including translations of works by Such as Bisham Sahani, Srilal Shukla, Hadija Mastur, Krishna Sovti and of course Ashuk. In India, the explosion of her indie publishing had created a more nurturing ecosystem for her translated work, but the international market was less affected. As she was translating Ashuk’s book, the work she was doing led to the Bechdel Test, an index devised by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel to measure the representation of women in film and literature. I knew I was bound to fail. At that time, she decided to only work with female authors. Two years later, Deborah Smith (English translator) Korean Smith of The Vegetarian, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for author Han Kang, founded Tilted Axis Press in 2015 to promote literature outside of Europe and the United States), translation of Shree’s Let Samadhi While looking for someone, I found Rockwell.

The rest, of course, is history. Shree and Rockwell had only met at the Booker Prize ceremony, but in the midst of hundreds of emails, Rett Samadhi transformed into a sand grave, a major triumph for translation in general. A rich and diverse world of South Asian languages. She is currently translating Shree’s novel Hamara Shahar Us Baras and another by Urdu writer Nisar Aziz Butt (1927-2020), with a US edition of Tomb of Sand due out at the end of the month. It’s a schedule. Rockwell reflects on her early experiments with language and how it changed her life. “Languages ​​are like people. Sometimes you just love them, sometimes you really hate them. It was like Hindi became my partner in life,” she says.

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