During the Lit For Life session on “Double Distilled Fiction” at The Hindu Lit Fest 2024 on January 27, U.S.-based Hindi-Urdu translator Daisy Rockwell, who won the Booker Prize in 2022 for her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand from Hindi to English, said a translation is successful when it stands on its own.
To be able to engage deeply with another text and create the translated literature as a delightful and evocative read set in the milieu of the original text is a challenge. A Ph.D. in South Asian literature, after Ms. Rockwell strayed into Hindi in college, she never left it and has created greater awareness about the richness of Hindi literature by translating classic literary works such as Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas and Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There.
Conversing with K. Srilata, Ms. Rockwell, a linguaphile who has also studied French, Latin, ancient Greek, and German, said when she started translating Hindi novels, she knew nothing about India. “Translation is like a journey with many stages. My magic number is usually 10 drafts when I reach the stage of the original text becoming a good English text,” she said.
Read more: ‘Translation is like a journey which has many stages’
