“Translation Is a Continuum” – An Interview with Daisy Rockwell
Daisy Rockwell. Photo: Saurabh Sharma
Shooting to fame after the critical success of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, Daisy Rockwell speaks about the iconic Indian authors she has translated, Partition-themed narratives, and interpreting language from a visual eye.
“A tale tells itself.”
So begins Tomb of Sand (2021) the English translation of Geetanjali Shree’s 2018 Hindi novel Ret Samadhi. But not all tales can merely tell themselves—some need to be probed, as the translator Daisy Rockwell did with Shree’s work to capture the nuances of the novel in a new language.
Rockwell has often said that Shree and her pairing was akin to an Indian ‘arranged’ marriage setup. And true to such an alliance, the duo did have their share of compromises. The duo, who won last year’s International Booker Prize and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, could hardly agree on the English title. “Well, it’s the word samadhi that was the issue,” Rockwell tells me. “‘Samadhi’ means many things, and Geetanjali was concerned about losing all those shades of meaning. The way she envisioned the word ‘tomb’ was as something like a marble mausoleum. But a translator has to make choices. The moment you make the tomb a tomb of sand, then it raises a question in your mind: how can a tomb be made of sand? We had several conversations about it, and we finally arrived at this title. Part of our compromise was to put a definition of ‘samadhi’ on the first page. I also define the word within the translation, so readers will know exactly what it means.”
“My formulation is partly informed by the model of queer theory. In translation, you can think of a continuum that starts with the original text and progresses all the way to the completely English text. What is the ideal endpoint? For some people, the final translation will always be under- or over-translated.”
Rockwell has extensively translated from Hindi and Urdu to English, including the work of iconic authors like Upendranath Ashk, Bhisham Sahni, Khadija Mastur, and Krishna Sobti. But the literary blockbuster Tomb of Sand shot her to fame. It’s been the success of ToS that has broken new grounds in the translation sectors of South Asia.
In January, Rockwell was awarded with the 2023 Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award.
“It’s the first award I’ve won in India for my work, so it’s an exciting recognition,” Rockwell says. “Usually, translators are recognised in pairings with their authors; it’s a great honour to be recognised all by myself. It would have been impossible to have predicted this since this is my ninth or tenth book to have been published. Translations don’t usually have such a big impact; they don’t make headline news. Most of my translations have only been modest successes in comparison. Winning this prize was very unexpected and not the kind of thing any translator would anticipate.”
“Any recognition at all is unusual. Though many people have read my other work, it’s still a niche kind of thing. When I go to bookstores, I’ll sign 40 copies of ToS, but when I enquire if they’d like me to sign other books of mine, I learn they don’t have them. This is why the Vani Foundation recognition is important: because it’s for the body of work. As translators, our work changes so much: we’re constantly evolving, and the entire body of work is part of that evolution. ToS is part of the cumulative process of my learning how to translate, and how to think about Hindi and Urdu literature.”
While ToS has been received very well in all literary quarters, I mention a particular review on Deccan Chronicle that called the book “wordy but under-translated.” I ask Rockwell about ‘under’ and ‘over translations’, to which she answers, “Any translation belongs on a continuum. My formulation is partly informed by the model of queer theory. In translation, you can think of a continuum that starts with the original text and progresses all the way to the completely English text. What is the ideal endpoint? For some people, the final translation will always be under- or over-translated.”
Photo: Karan Madhok
“Take for example my translation of Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard (2018), which some reviewers felt I over-translated. This is partly because, in the South Asian linguistic environment, no one is ever speaking just one language. In this particular case, many readers disliked that I translated all the kinship terms into English. But then you get criticism on the other side: this reviewer [referring to the Deccan Chronicle review] thought I left too much Hindi in ToS.”
Some readers of Rockwell’s translations are likely to regard her as a translator of Partition-themed novels. Even ToS has been categorised as a ‘Partition novel’ by select critics. “Geetanjali [Shree] rejects the categorisation of this book as a Partition novel,” Rockwell says. “I didn’t realise that it had Partition in it when I agreed to translate it because, for two-thirds of the book, Partition doesn’t feature in the story.”
She continues, “Long ago, I heard Amitav Ghosh speak about the Shadow Lines and Partition. He made a distinction between people writing [based on] their memories in the aftermath of the Partition, and those from later generations who have been inspired by contemporary realities to write about it. In that sense, Shree’s 1998 novel Hamara Shahar Us Baras—which I am translating now—is very interesting. It depicts the 1992 riots in Gujarat. One realises from this novel that [Shree] is interested not just in the Partition of India and Pakistan, but also in the ongoing, continuous partition of Indian society. I feel that those continuous partitions are her inspiration for ToS.”
With time, the literary responses to these continuing Partitions have evolved, too. There have been obvious shifts in the narratives by writers who wrote in the first few decades of the Partition, and the current generation, who write in the haze of intergenerational memories and reconciliation that’s never going to materialize.
“The newer works are often responding to contemporary realities,” Rockwell notes. “These works want to keep the memory alive in society. But in a way, Tamas (a 1973 novel by Bhisham Sahni) is also a later work. Sahni is looking back and thinking about the mechanisms that caused that sort of violence to happen. Tamas is an anatomy of a riot.”
“Often, one finds a sense of loss and nostalgia in these works: the shock of losing one’s property, one’s homeland. Interestingly, no one calls [Upendranath] Ashk’s works Partition-themed novels. His novel Girti Divaren was published in 1947, and most of his works are set in 1930s Jalandhar and Lahore. He meticulously weaves together memories of those cities: in a way, he’s reconstructing a portrait of the life that was lost, in closely linked Punjabi cities like Amritsar, Lahore, and Jalandhar. He vividly captures every corner and every gali, twenty or even thirty years later. That was a life that existed and has been irretrievably lost.”
She further adds that it’s “similar to Joginder Paul’s novel Khwabrau, or Sleepwalkers (1990), about refugees who were displaced from Lucknow and now live in Karachi, whom Paul portrays as sleepwalking through life. In such earlier works, we see a sense of loss that is no longer present in contemporary books because they weren’t written by people who were actually there.”
Rockwell has also translated the works of Krishna Sobti, the author considered to be a mentor—a guru—by Geetanjali Shree. There’s this obvious Punjabiyat in Sobti’s Hindi works, and experimental prose in Shree’s Ret Samadhi, but according to Rockwell, the “Hindis” of the two authors are starkly different.
“One realises from this novel that [Shree] is interested not just in the Partition of India and Pakistan, but also in the ongoing, continuous partition of Indian society. I feel that those continuous partitions are her inspiration for Tomb of Sand.”
“I remember asking Krishna ji [Sobti] why she never wrote in Punjabi herself,” says Rockwell. “She said, ‘Well, I don’t know Punjabi.’ By that, I believe what she meant was that she didn’t know literary Punjabi. But her books have a Punjabi flavour; she’s very clever in creating the illusion of Punjabi in her Hindi. She doesn’t just throw in Punjabi words. That would be easy. She does it in the form of Punjabi cadences; which is quite brilliant. Regionalist authors grab words and whole phrases from local languages, but she didn’t do it that way.”
“Translating her helped prepare me to translate ToS. I learnt how to create the illusion that you’re reading Hindi when it’s actually English.”
“I think that Krishna ji inspired Geetanjali to take risks, and not get boxed in by the boundaries of your language. That’s what I loved about her. Krishna ji never saw herself as bound by conventions. She was always up for the challenge of what stories and language can do. She wanted me not to feel bound by the conventions of translations, too. I couldn’t have translated her A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There (2019) otherwise. She lived her life this way as well. She got married was she was 70. When I asked her why she’d waited so long, she said: ‘Well, I had my fun.’ That’s the kind of person she was. She never felt the need to get married and when she did, she found that this was the person with whom she’d like to spend her life.”
Translating, like writing, can be a solitary job. But Rockwell has donned another hat: that of a mentor. She has been mentoring a young translator, Vaibhav Sharma, the Saroj Lal mentorship awardee of the 2022-2023 Emerging Literary Translator Mentorships Programme. “I’ve spent years and years translating all by myself. And no one ever wanted to hear about what I was doing in much detail. People ask me questions, but they don’t want to hear what I am doing at the sentence or word level, or even down to the punctuation level,” Rockwell notes. “And suddenly, I have this person [pointing to Sharma] who wants to know. So, it’s fun to share and it helps me articulate what I’m thinking.”
Daisy Rockwell and Vaibhav Sharma. Photo: Saurabh Sharma
Sharma says that he has no “words to describe” being mentored by the award-winning translator. “I have known about her [Rockwell] since my college days in BHU when she won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Award for Translation of a Literary Work award for translating A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There in 2019,” Sharma says. “I have read her interviews, forewords, and translation notes. Her translation notes and talks were especially useful to me because I am not a trained translator. Those were like gems for me. Never in my life had I imagined I will get to talk to her, meet her, and be mentored by her!”
Sharma shares that Rockwell and he never tire of talking about translation. “It’s literally every day and 24x7,” he says. “Because there’s no trick to translating. Every sentence and every word is a challenge.” He shares his experience in the past deliberating on word alone and how things have changed now that he has someone to bounce off ideas with. “Earlier, I used to [think that] these are the same words, but when it comes to translation, same words can have different meanings because the context is different. And that’s what we discuss all day. Sometimes I get very attached to a particular word. For example, there’s this work by Anil Yadav [that] I am translating, and the boat in the book has a flag made of zari. And I am adamant that we should keep it as is,” he submits but is interrupted by Rockwell who asserts that, “No one outside of India knows what zari means.”
“So, there’s this back and forth we have about words,” Sharma adds. “I am also learning from her how to detach myself from the original text. ‘It has to be an English book’, she keeps on telling me. I had observed before that there are translated books that sound clunky. I used to wonder why … now I know it’s because at some point you’ve got to say, as she says, ‘goodbye’ to the Hindi text, otherwise your translation will be a jarring collection of words.”
Rockwell has dedicated a lifetime to finding literature in the jarring collections of words, However, while chiefly known for her literary output, the writer also employs a keen artistic eye to visualise storytelling. I tell her that the ToS cover adroitly translates the book in an image form. Very gladly, Rockwell chimes in, “[Even] I have been thinking about how illustration is also a kind of translation. My grandfather was an illustrator. He is very famous for his classical American illustrations in the United States, and people there often find it strange that his granddaughter is translating Indian languages.”
“My cover for ToS is an illustration of the book, but translators must also learn to think visually all the time. We have to be able to envision exactly what is going on and what everything looks like, especially architecturally. How does a door shut? What sort of sound does it make? Translators have to understand everything in 3D.”
“Sometimes I have to travel to research what a setting might look like. I spent time in Jalandhar while translating Ashk, because he was writing about these super narrow networks of galis. It’s a very specific setting, and I needed to know what it looked like. I went to Shimla to see the Gaiety Theatre that Ashk describes in Falling Walls (originally published in 1947). I wanted to know how it was laid out. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, like if it’s a conventional space.”
“But as translators, we must show our audience what it is we see—and what we imagine.”
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Saurabh Sharma is a reader and a writer. He works as a writer in an IT research and advisory firm in Gurgaon. He reviews books and pretends to write on weekends. You can find him on Instagram: @writerly_life and Twitter: @writerly_life.
