TAKE HER WORD(S) FOR IT

Meet the translator of the first Hindi novel to be nominated for the Booker Prize

- Aditya Mani Jha

Earlier this month, the longlist for the International Booker Prize was revealed and, for the first time ever, a Hindi-language novel made the cut—Delhi-based writer Geetanjali Shree’s 2019 novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand. The Booker nod is well-deserved not only for Shree, but also for Rockwell, who over the past decade or so has quietly built a formidable body of work as a Hindi and Urdu translator. Rockwell (an American who lives in North Bennington, Vermont, US) has now translated works by titans like Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Sobti, Upendranath Ashk, Usha Priyamvada and, recently, the Pakistani writer Khadija Mastur. These translations, immaculate and elegant at the line-by-line level, are also enhanced by Rockwell’s vast knowledge of the socio-political histories and regional idiosyncrasies of North India, in particular.

During a recent interview over Zoom, Rockwell shared with us the beginnings of her journey as a translator, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s. “It had gotten to the stage where I was pretty good at Hindi,” she says. “But I wasn’t able to make the leap into reading full-length books. A couple of my professors helped—Colin Masica, who was a linguist and my advisor—and the Indian writer A.K. Ramanujan. Masica assigned me a 1,000page book, Yashpal’s Partition novel Jhootha Sach, to begin with!”

PARTITION LITERATURE HAS BEEN A RECURRING THEME IN DAISY ROCKWELL’S TRANSLATIONS. SHE HAS EVEN WRITTEN SCHOLARLY WORKS ON IT