Rockwell, who has previously translated works of literary giants like Upendranath Ashk and Krishna Sobti, was in the capital recently to receive the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award for 2023, her first visit to the country since the Booker win.
Arunima Mazumdar, on behalf of The Times of India, caught up with Rockwell on a cold winter morning to chat about the labour and love of translating Shree’s mammoth work, the nuances of linguistic etiquettes, and all things translation. Excerpts from the interview:
1. What drew you to Hindi language translation?
I was 21 when I decided to take up Hindi classes at the University of Chicago which has one of the oldest South Asian study programmes. After a certain level, our teacher decided that everyone should attempt a literary translation. The complication in the US is that there are a lot of second-generation South Asian heritage learners, so they may fully understand Hindi but they can’t speak or write the language. Naturally, the native students who were doing PhDs in Braj Bhasha got the hard stuff, and since I had no background in Hindi, was given Mohan Rakesh’s novel, ‘Andhere Band Kamre’.
I translated only the first page of the novel but I connected with it. I don’t know if it had to be Hindi for me. Life has its paths and I’ve studied different languages (German, French, Latin and Greek), but translating from Hindi felt right to me.
2. How did it go from there?
After I finished the first year, I had the opportunity to come to India on a study abroad programme to the Landour Language School. I spent three months there and it is there where I could really work on my language skills. It was a really effective program as I was able to have one-on-one conversations in Hindi.
3. What were your best and worst moments while translating ‘Tomb of Sand’?
I always do my first drafts without consulting anyone. Even if there is something I don’t comprehend, I keep going, and I do it all by hand. But with ‘Tomb of Sand’, there was a lot I didn’t get because the language is so idiosyncratic. There was a point at which I thought that I needed to go and sit with Geetanjali to discuss it page by page. But then the pandemic happened so all our conversations were over email.
There were times when I thought it was a disaster. I would often have ten questions per page for Geetanjali, and sometimes I’d go back and forth multiple times to finesse a sentence. It was a huge challenge.
There were also times when I thought I’ll never get through to really understanding the book. And then there were some portions that came to me very quickly. Geetanjali of course went over the entire thing. When I was at about draft five, I sent the whole thing to her. She read through it and annotated it extensively.
In total, there were more than 10 drafts – that’s how much work had to go into shaping it. The entire process took two and half years, and it was only after I completed it that I started to realise that this book was a huge prose-poem. That’s why it was so difficult because I had to be thinking about the sound of words all the time.
4. How important was cultural literacy for you as a translator?
‘Tomb of Sand’ is a partition novel and as far as the subject of partition goes, I’ve been reading partition literature since I was 22. I’ve translated few partition novels and that is actually my area of strongest expertise. I know a lot about not just the partition but also things like the architecture in Lahore at the time, what people ate, and what games they played. I love Lahore; it’s a part of my literary image.
5. Your comments on the role of translation as an act of activism
When I first started translating, my activism was more literary. Over time I realised how a translator has this gift where they can raise voices that are not heard clearly enough. So, in 2016 I decided to translate only women. And not just translation, I also only wanted to read women authors. I have gradually grown accustomed to it and now it’s difficult for me to read male authors.
As a translator, when you do such in-depth reading of a text, you’re so much more aware the way women writers give space to women’s thoughts and feelings without compromising the male characters either. For example, when I translated Khadija Mastur’s ‘The Woman’s Courtyard’ (‘Aangan’ in Hindi), a novel about a Muslim family near Aligarh, set right before the partition, all the characters, male and female, sit in the courtyard of the house. The story is set in this interior aangan that’s dominated by women, but the male family members too inhabit the same space. You have a perfectly good view of how they’re feeling and what they’re doing, and they’re speaking all the time but we also hear the women and see how they perceive the men.
Male authors don’t do that; their objectification of women and the lack of space for women’s voices and experiences is apparent.
6. Do you have favourite word in Hindi or Urdu?
I love so many but the one I like to bring up is khargosh – a bunny – because even though it is a silly little word or silly little animal, it sounds so grand and dramatic. Especially when you write it in Urdu!
7. What if ‘Tomb of Sand’ were to be adapted into a TV series or film?
Even though ‘Tomb of Sand’ is very multilingual in Hindi, it is unnaturally monolingual. My translation is also unnaturally monolingual, especially in a setting like Delhi where people are constantly searching for languages within their sentences. It’s never one language ever and there’s an overflow of languages where there’s Hindi and English, and Punjabi and Urdu, just swimming around together. And then, when the book moves to Lahore, there is a shift in landscape.
If the book were to come alive on screen, ideally it should be a screenplay that could reflect those shifts in linguistic landscapes accurately.
8. Your thoughts on writers becoming detached to their older works…
When I met Krishna Sobti ji, I had this huge list of questions regarding ‘A Gujarat There, A Gujarat Here’ (Gujarat Pakistan Se Gujarat Hindustan), but somehow, she wasn’t interested in engaging with it. I was trying to systematically ask questions about it but she simply wanted me to hang out with her. It was a joy knowing her but she did not seem interested in the book anymore.
With ‘Ret Samadhi’, it was different. Geetanjali was in a way very defensive and it was hard for her to let the novel move into English. She was very attached to the original language. It was an emotional experience seeing her words leaving. Probably because it was a fairly newer book. With her older works that I’ve been translating (‘Humara Sheher Us Baras’), she is more easy-going and slightly removed.
It shows that authors and their relationships with their old works evolve over time.
9. What is the perception of Hindi to English translations outside India
‘Tomb of Sand’ comes out in the US only by the end of January 2023, so it’s going to be while until it reaches bookstores there. The perception is only just beginning to surface; it’s a tiny little crack of light right now but it is of course our hope as translators is that the work that gets done here, should go out and of the subcontinent into the world.
In India, of course, people are reading the book all over the country, and there is a lot of demand for the book in Pakistan too.
10. Do English translations enhance the English-language supremacy or does it preserve language plurality?
English is a problem not just in this country but all around the world. It has this hegemonic entity; it is THE lingua franca and has the potential to crush out local languages, even big ones. When it comes to the context of the Indian subcontinent, there is also the long, problematic colonial history between English and other Indic languages.
As a translator, it’s really important to use English to draw people back into the source language. One way to do that is to retain a lot of words in the original languages, for instance in ‘Tomb of Sand’ I’ve retained the lines of poetry from the original. This seems to be working because people are constantly telling me that they’re reading the Hindi and English versions side by side.
I’d like my translations to be a path back to retrieval and not stamp out the complexity of the linguistic environment.
11. What is your fantasy translation project?
Qurratulain Hyder’s ‘River of Fire’ (‘Aag Ka Darya’), a book that she translated herself and one that I’ll never get permission to translate. I’m against self-translation because an author can’t help but continue to write and edit. Hyder changed the book in some ways quite dramatically.
I have this heartfelt wish to see that book restored because her version is a recreation, but it’s not really a translation. It’s much shorter and she abridged it quite a lot, so I would love to retranslate it.
But during her lifetime, she was very vehement about not allowing anyone else to translate her works, her literary heirs are sticking to her wishes.
12. What are you currently working on?
One of Geetanjali Shree’s most political novels— ‘Humara Sheher Us Baras’ —a novel set in a city much like Surat during the riots following the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. Another book that I’m excited about is Pakistani novelist Nisar Aziz Butt’s first work of fiction published in 1955 and set in a sanatorium in the North West Frontier Province.
(Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram.)
