Daisy Rockwell
Daisy Rockwell is a painter and prolific award-winning translator of Hindi and Urdu literature. She most recently translated Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (2022), for which she won the International Booker prize. She received her PhD in South Asian Literature from the University of Chicago.
South Asia Institute was delighted to welcome her as part of an evening celebration translated literature of South Asia in partnership with SALT. After the intimate and enriching event, we were excited to continue the conversation with Daisy in our Community Conversations series. In this interview, she tells us a bit more about her process, philosophy of translations, and exciting future projects!
How does the relationship between author and translator function for you? How collaborative or intimate is that relationship?
This really depends on who the author is. I’ve translated several works whose authors are no longer with us. In such cases, I have to wing it or ask around if there’s something difficult going on with the text, like words that are hard to find meanings for, or customs that are no longer practiced. When the author is there to discuss things with it can be quite collaborative, but sometimes authors don’t have answers for translators’ questions, because the process of writing an original work and translating it are quite different.
You’ve said that you made the decision to not translate literature by male authors in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement. How do your politics influence the projects you choose to take on, and how has that evolved?
When I first started translating, I was in graduate school and I was less of a political animal. As I grew as a person and a translator, I became much more political and I came to understand that the act of translation is in itself political, even if we sometimes wish that it was a purely linguistic/aesthetic exercise. Now for me there is always a political element to what I translate. Sometimes it might be as simple as feeling that a certain kind of voice should be raised up and heard, and sometimes it is more explicit, such as choosing a work with an overtly political theme.
The Emperor of Ice Cream/Shahenshah-e-Kulfi by Daisy Rockwell, acrylic on wooden panel.
Some of your paintings involve calligraphy and the written word. Can you say a bit about how you think the written word and visual arts are connected in your work?
For a long time, there really didn’t feel like that much connection, although whenever I have had art shows, I have had extensive writing on my labels. In some ways, my art has been illustrative in that way–it has been inspired by ideas that I have written about and thought about. Calligraphy has been a way for me to bring the visual and the written together. I have a series of paintings which involve Urdu calligraphy of American poetry that has been translated by my friend and fellow translator Aftab Ahmad into Urdu, and these bring text, image and translation all together.
You’ve described your perspective on translation as a “continuum informed by queer theory.” Can you say a bit more about that?
Yes, I think translation is often discussed as a binary: two languages, two versions of a text. I like to think of these pairs as existing on a continuum and the translator is always making choices of how far to push a word or a phrase or even an entire text along the continuum from point A to point B. Often there are thousands of micro-decisions that must be made along the way and each of these micro-decisions can be located at different points along the continuum. When I mentioned queer theory, what I meant is that I think the way we are learning to reconsider gender nowadays is very useful to other ways of considering classic binaries.
Daisy Rockwell and Geetanjali Shree holding Tomb of Sand
Congratulations on the Booker and accolades received for Tomb of Sand! Looking ahead, could you share a bit about what kinds of projects (written or visual) you are keen to work on next?
I am deep in the throes of translating a 1955 Urdu novel called Wandered the Traveler (Nagari Nagari Phira Musafir), by Nisar Aziz Butt. It’s kind of a coming-of-age novel about an intellectual young Pashtun woman who comes down with TB and spends a long period in a mountain sanatorium before returning to study the sciences in Lahore. I like to say it’s Middlemarch meets Magic Mountain in the Northwest Frontier Provinces of Pakistan. I’m also going to have a poetry translation coming out in 2025, which is a book-length prose poem called Sleep Journeys (Neend ki Musafatein), by Azra Raza from the Urdu, it’s a mystical unknowable work of tremendous beauty, which I simply love. I have a novel (written by me) called Alice Sees Ghosts and a collection of my own poems, mixed metaphors for translation, called Mixed Metaphors, both coming out from Bloomsbury India in 2025 as well, and hopefully there will soon be a US publisher for both of these.