INTERVIEW We Now Have Means to Actively Build a Community and Train and Help Emerging Translators: Daisy Rockwell

Your translations—of Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard, and Geetanjali Shree’s Our City That Year and Once Elephants Lived Here, among others—give you an intimate insight into the way the communal discourse in South Asia took root, spread, led to Partition, impacted women, and is now playing out in its neoliberal form. Were these books consciously chosen for their overarching themes or because their language or voice excited you?

The selection of each book is its own story, but my choice of texts has always been thematic as well as rooted in the particular voice or style of an author. Of this list, Tamas is the only text I did not choose myself, as I was approached by Penguin to undertake a retranslation. I agreed because Partition has long been a preoccupation of mine, and Tamas is an essential text of the period, but I do not feel the same intimate connection with Sahni’s voice that I do with many of the other authors I’ve translated. To translate an entire book, a deep connection to the language and the themes is essential, and I’ve been fortunate to find that connection with many authors, including Geetanjali Shree, Krishna Sobti, and Khadija Mastur.

As someone who has translated both Krishna Sobti and Geetanjali Shree, what similarities do you see in the way they use language? What sets them apart?

Both are experimenters who constantly push language to see what it will yield. I do not think their experiments are the same, exactly. Sobti wants to expand and refashion language to capture various cadences and voices that are rarely expressed in Hindi. Geetanjali is an iconoclast who pushes writing and storytelling to its limits to find the breaking point, then picks up the pieces and refashions the bits of language anew.

What has been the most challenging thing about translating Shree’s latest book?

Our City that Year is narrated by an unnamed woman who claims not to be a writer but someone who is simply “copying down” everything she sees and hears. This means that she is often entering scenes suddenly, without any knowledge of what had been happening there before. Dialogue is very tricky to translate, and entering a dialogue already underway even more so.

Someone might say something like us ka kya fayda? in Hindi, and we don’t know what this us refers to: is it a person? A thing? This forces the translator to constantly search for clues to figure out something tiny, like should this phrase be translated as “who cares?” or “he’s useless” or “what’s the point?”

Is there a passage/section in Our City That Year that yielded to English after much struggle?

There was a passage near the beginning where the narrator is quoting Daddu talking about people becoming caricatures. It was quite difficult to capture because it contains an unusual image which is at once visual and literary:

“Daddu used to say that if you recognize a thing by only a fragment of the whole then it becomes trapped in its own contour, a useless, lifeless caricature. True recognition bursts forth, spreading and wandering about in the open, enveloped by all things, melting into everything. It is light. If you trap it within a single fragment to purify it, you’ll simply extinguish the light. The shape will be rendered lifeless. A repulsive lump of flesh.”

You have not only brought out the best of post-Independence writers in English but have also shone a light on a dimly lit translational route for others to follow, through your efforts at community building, mentoring, advocacy, and through your openness and accessibility. Can you share your thoughts on this?

Over the years, Hindi translator and SALT [South Asian Literature in Translation, a project under the University of Chicago] co-director Jason Grunebaum has dragged me to a couple of meetings of the American Literary Translators Association [ALTA]. There were never any translators of South Asian literature there, besides those on our own panels, and I remember one occasion when we had to talk to two or three people into attending ours because there was no interest. This is partly because no translations of South Asian literature were getting published in the US, but it was also because we had no community, or we had very little.

What I did notice at the ALTA meetings was the sense of community fostered in other language groups and how fulfilling and helpful that was. Jason felt that lack in our area and he was trying to build that sense of community for us when he organised those panels. With the spotlight that the International Booker Prize has shone on our translation world, as well as the funding and establishment of SALT, we now have the means to actively build a community and train and help emerging translators.

Translation is an ill-paid, lonely business, but when we build a community, we can lift one another up and find new ways to showcase the wealth of literature in the region. I am pleased to share that I just returned from the 2024 ALTA meeting in Milwaukee. I was on a panel devoted to questions about translating South Asian literature, and the room was absolutely packed with translators from our community. The convenor dropped her outline, and we had a wonderful group discussion about the challenges we face in our translation corner. Things are changing and solidarities are emerging and this is truly heartwarming to see.

Keeping intact the cultural specificity of the source text while simultaneously striving to make the translation accessible to a larger audience is a contradiction inherent in the act of translation. Any pointers on how you negotiate this? Are your translations tweaked when published for the US/UK market? Can you share some instances?

I have barely published anything outside of India, so the short answer is no. The long answer is that I have always translated for the broadest audience possible. I have a “big tent” philosophy: I like to imagine that I am planning a wedding that brings together two clans full of family members with disparate tastes and interests. The trick is to create a buffet that satisfies as many guests as possible. One easy technique for doing this is to keep an original word or phrase and then add an “inline gloss”, which is just a fancy term for a brief translation or definition. There are many words and phrases that I think are fine to leave in the original, even without a gloss, such as words for food items, which can easily be entered in a search engine.

But one must also be conscious of overloading the reader who does not know the source culture at all, so one must strike a balance on a case-by-case basis.

With reference to your poetry in The Paris Review on the dangers of the monocrop of monolingua, tell us why reading translations is essential.

Reading translations reminds us of a plurality of voices, it alerts us to the fact that there are ways of thinking and speaking that we know nothing about, and it can also beckon us to return to languages we have allowed to languish. My poem was inspired by my anxiety that by translating into the hegemonic global language, English, I was participating in flattening language and culture. My strategy for avoiding this is to gesture towards the brilliance of the original work and language within my translation, to entice readers who have left off reading in the original language and are reading my version instead to turn back and re-engage with Urdu or Hindi, and to invite readers with no background to marvel at the brilliance and diversity of non-English worlds.

Faithfulness or liberty, what should be a translator’s north star?

Neither! When I taught a translation workshop this summer in Sri Lanka for the SALT initiative, I banned both terms. I find both disturbingly sexual—the implication is that a faithful translator does not sleep around, and a translator who takes liberties is something like a rapist. Are these useful analogies? No. When we translate, we must recreate a text in a new language.

Foregrounding fidelity to the text is a way of prioritising literalism: if you simply translate every word on the page according to dictionary definitions, you are being “faithful”. But the words on a page are not simply lying there lifeless. They are conjuring a vast miasma of meanings: culture, intertextuality, allusion, illusion, and so on. The translator must be keeping all these in mind when they create a new version of the text. This is why literal translations that are considered “faithful” can feel dull and lifeless.

For many critics (by which I mean both professional and armchair translation critics), “taking liberties” is considered the bad thing that translators do when they don’t stick to literalism and “go too far”. What is meant by going too far? This is when the translator’s interpretation and representation of the miasma surrounding the words on the page appear out of bounds to the reader who has access to the original. But this is a subjective opinion. Someone can translate a word incorrectly, that is, they might choose a meaning for a word or phrase that is simply wrong and write “horse” for “kitab”. But cherry-picking one word from the translation and subjecting it to scrutiny is not necessarily a useful exercise. Maybe the word kitab was being used in an equestrian metaphor, and the translator, in trying to capture the broader metaphor, did away with the word “book” because it became a mixed metaphor in English, which is a big taboo.

Far better than these outdated terms, I suggest we speak instead of creative approaches and solutions and whether they capture the dhwani of the original.

Although acknowledging the translators on book covers has become mainstream now, it has been a long time coming. But the visibility also means that translations are subject to criticism in a way authors never are. Mostly these criticisms are regarding the kind of translation it is. Too faithful. Too much liberty. Too much interpretation. Even too long forewords. What is your advice to translators on dealing with these?

This problem is particularly challenging in India, where there are always literally millions of bi- and multilingual people to judge your translation. As translators we have to be prepared for this to happen but not allow it to dictate our process. This can start by rejecting the unhelpful dichotomies laid out by fidelity and liberties and focussing on creativity. Literary translation is poorly understood as an art and a craft by the reading public, including critics and reviewers, and unfortunately, that forces us to educate as we go along.

What translation is up next?

I am currently in the midst of translating a 1955 Urdu novel by Nisar Aziz Butt called Nagari Nagari Phira Musafir. I like to say it’s like Middlemarch meets Magic Mountain in the North-West Frontier Provinces of Pakistan. It’s kind of a Bildungsroman about a young Pashtun woman named Afgar (the author was herself Pashtun), a highly intellectual orphan growing up in her uncle’s home. Afgar longs for love but finds most men to be intellectual lightweights, and thus terribly disappointing. She also contracts tuberculosis and ends up in a sanatorium in the mountains for a period of time.