American artist, writer and translator Daisy Rockwell has translated several works of modern classical Urdu and Hindi literature, including Khadija Mastoor’s Aangan [The Women’s Courtyard] and Upendranath Ashk’s Girti Deevarein [Falling Walls]. In 2022, she won the International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand, her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s novel Ret Samadhi. At the Lahore Literary Festival, Eos spoke to Rockwell about bilingualism, the importance of mentorship and what compelled her to begin translating women writers

Do we have a translation movement at the present?

Yes, there is a translation movement in South Asia and internationally. Maybe they were separate movements until the Booker. Now they’re joined because the International Booker for Tomb of Sand made translations from South Asia more visible. But there is an increasing number of translations being produced in South Asia, and more purposeful publishing of translations than previously.

With this greater visibility, would North American publishers accommodate more translated South Asian works in their catalogues? It may remain a very small number.

It may remain a very small number, but I would like publishers to choose what translations to publish more deliberately. Right now, we translators come up with what we want to translate, create a sample and then pitch it to the publishers. So almost all translation is based on the eccentric whims of translators, who are not paid well enough to be commissioned for translations of major works. Most publishers in South Asia are not seeking out translators for new and important works in South Asian languages, or even classical works. If they were, they’d have to pay the translators better than they presently do. They do sometimes ask for specific translations but, in most cases, the translators say no, because they only get paid enough to translate what they truly love.

Would the situation change if the original publishers of translated works pooled together to distribute and market in North America and Europe?

Yes, and another thing we need, which I’m realising more and more, is mentoring of translators. Bilingualism is mistakenly seen as sufficient qualification to become a translator. At the moment, the mechanism by which people become translators is haphazard and individual. This can produce some really good translators, but it can also produce many uneven translations. I’ve been mentoring an emerging Hindi translator through the United Kingdom’s National Centre for Writing. I selected one mentee out of 25 applicants for the Hindi language, and it’s exciting to see how someone with a lot of potential can quickly become quite good through mentorship.

What is your definition of an ideal translator?

Bilingualism is a great start, but a person has to be able to write well in the target language. Another thing to understand is that the work you’re translating will have to stand as an independent work in the target language, so if you are translating into English, for example, then you have to be willing to let go of the original text at a certain point, and bring it fully into being in English. In the South Asian context I find that, for a lot of translators, if their main qualification is that they’re bilingual, they just transfer from one language to another, not realising that they have to create a standalone work that can exist independently from the source text.

How do you see these translations impacting future Subcontinental literature in the native languages?

What we are seeing with Tomb of Sand is a very different phenomenon than usual, which is that people get excited with the translation and start reading the original Hindi text. So a good translation can help people return to reading in languages they had not read in for many years. This is happening in India, with people picking up other Hindi books. It’s different for each language but, in the context of South Asia where so many people are multilingual and could be reading in more than one language, but are only reading in English, translations can bring readers back to non-English languages. That is really good for the languages because it can also inspire people to begin writing in their mother tongues. All that brings new life into literature.

Which of your translated works is closest and most personal to you?

One can become attached to any book one translates, because translation is so exhausting and exhaustive that it becomes very personal. The novels of Upendranath Ashk are what turned me into a translator, the first long works that I translated. I still haven’t translated his third [from the heptology] because it’s 800 pages, but I know that, if I went in and started working on it, it would just flow very easily.

Your translations have acquired a new focus: you’ve started translating more women writers. What brought that about?

Probably a bunch of factors, but I was translating Ashk’s novel Sheher Mein Ghoomta Aaina [In the City a Mirror Wandering] which is set in Jalandhar, and was struck by a long passage, maybe even a hundred pages, where a woman is beaten badly [because of] a caste dispute. She’s put on a charpoy in the chowk and everyone starts to argue about what to do. They decide not to give her medical attention right away, since she looks terrible and this will make for a good case when they take her to the police station to lodge a complaint. So they carry her on the charpoy through the streets. Anyway, it goes on for a long time and she never speaks, her thoughts are never brought up. What’s interesting is that I think it was written as a feminist passage because Ashk believes he’s bringing attention to her plight. But he makes no attempt to enter her interiority, or bring her alive as a character. For a long time, I couldn’t even tell if she was alive or not because there was some ambiguity with the way her condition was portrayed.

At the same time, I was reading Les Misérables in French and there’s a similar thing where Jean Valjean is very concerned about Fantine, who’s ill and dying, but then he gets all wrapped up in a panic about his identity being revealed. That goes on for pages and pages, where she’s dying somewhere and he completely forgets about her, and goes off, and we don’t really see what happens to her. So, I started thinking about how male writers tend not to include the interiority of female characters much — they just don’t seem to notice. It’s not necessarily true of all male authors, of course, but I started to get interested in seeing how women authors constructed the interior worlds of women.

Khadija Mastoor’s Aangan is really interesting that way because it’s highly focused on the experiences of women. The action never leaves the courtyard. The men come and go, they are characters and we know about their thoughts and feelings, but they are away from home all day because that’s what men do, and the women are stuck in this courtyard. That forces the focus of the narration on what the women are experiencing. It’s a very interesting book in that regard.

One other thing I’m interested in finding out is, what does your first draft look like, because mine does not look at all human!

[Laughs] Yeah, same! Mine is all written in longhand and it’s all covered with doodles and question marks.

Please tell me that it’s also in ungrammatical language.

Oh, yeah! Totally! And it’s often very literal. I kind of make it exactly the same as the original language.

Thank you for saying that on record, because if anybody discovers my first drafts…!

I know, it’s a horror, it’s a total horror. I have words that I’m researching and I just put question marks all around them. And [if] there are some things I don’t want to deal with at the moment, [such as] poems or songs, because translating those requires a different mindset, I just scrawl it in there and leave it.

I know. I do the same: ‘Verse: 4 lines’, move forward!

Yeah, because I don’t want to break my momentum. So yes, the first draft is about momentum and rudimentary transformation into another language.

In which draft does the Frankenstein truly start moving?

[Laughs] I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve been mentoring an emerging Hindi translator. I think it’s maybe the fifth or sixth draft when I start to feel, ‘Oh, this might not turn out so badly.’ Tomb of Sand was particularly bad because Shree’s language is so experimental, and I had no idea what she was saying some of the time. So it’s just all question marks, and it was a hot mess for at least five drafts.

I recall you telling me that, while translating, you form the sentence or the phrase in your mind in English before you put it down.

That sometimes is a problem. I translate things in my head so fast. For example, if I just had a funny conversation with somebody in Urdu, and I want to tell you about it, I won’t be able to remember what was said because I’ve already translated the whole thing. But sometimes that doesn’t work. Then you have to translate little chunks at a time. But even if I translate it before I write it down, I find that by the fourth or fifth draft I’ve flipped almost all the clauses in every sentence because the syntax is backwards. And when that happens, you [may] have to fuss with the whole paragraph because the information is coming in the wrong direction.

I translate the classical texts, and writers were more conscious of what they were doing.

Right. They must have had a more purposeful type of process, although Ashk self-published and was obsessed with editing. His works were edited by himself, which has some disadvantages, but still a lot of polishing has gone in, whereas I find for a lot of other writers, at least in Hindi, nobody edits at all so it’s not just typos, it’s continuity errors and things like that.

Are there any personal projects, any other works you’re looking forward to translating in the coming years, or in the short term?

I’d like to translate the works of Hijab Imtiaz Ali, because she has such a unique style and I haven’t read anything quite like the style in which she writes. She creates a fantasy location for all her works [and] it’s always the same location — sort of pre-Partition Hyderabad [India], but also a bit like the Middle East. The same characters appear in every book: there’s a glamorous, domineering grandmother and a sort of shady doctor. There’s a fascinating dream-world vibe about it, even though it’s melodramatic at the same time.

Are these short works?

Some are. I think we would call them longish novellas. I’m always translating really long books, so I’m attracted to the idea of shorter works.

I totally understand, that’s why I have switched to translating qissas. I’m taking a break from Hoshruba, because I realised that, after publishing The Adventures of Amir Hamza in 2006, if I’d just translated qissas, I could have translated by now all available qissas in Urdu, the whole body. And it is good to change from one writing mood to another.

That’s what I did, actually. Right after the Booker, I needed a change of mindset and that’s when I translated Azra Abbas’s prose poem Neend Ki Musaafatain [Sleep Journeys]. It was great because even though it’s a whole book, it’s not that long, maybe 45 pages, with generous margins. So it was very gratifying to pull together an entire work. Currently I’m translating a longish novel, Nagri Nagri Phira Musaafir [A Wandering Voyage] by Nisar Aziz Butt. Her first language was Pashto and she used very long sentences and Persianised Urdu vocabulary.

How are you handling this new syntax?

They’re really long sentences. They’re not that hard, but you have to go over each part of the sentence and make sure the translation is correct because of all this Persianised language. I mean, it’s Urdu, but it’s just a more Persianised version than I’m used to. [Laughs]

You’ll manage.

Yeah. And I hope to learn many new words!

The interviewer is an author, translator and columnist. He tweets @MicroMAF