‘This one line is my bible – every footnote is a confession of failure’: Translator Daisy Rockwell
· Scroll
Look closely at International Booker Prize winner Daisy Rockwell’s work, and you will see a pattern emerging across the books that she has translated from Hindi and Urdu into English.
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Religious extremism and sectarian violence are recurring themes in Once Elephants Lived Here, her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s short story collection Yahan Hathi Rahte The, and in the novels Tomb of Sand and Our City That Year, which Rockwell translated from Shree’s Ret Samadhi and Hamara Shahar Us Baras, respectively. The former has an 80-year-old woman “confronting the unresolved trauma” of Partition by travelling from India to Pakistan, and the latter is based on riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid “along fault lines of faith and ideology”.
Previously, Rockwell translated Bhisham Sahni’s novel Tamas, which bears witness to “an orgy of bloodlust” in undivided Punjab, and Krishna Sobti’s Gujarat Pakistan se Gujarat Hindustan (A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There), grieving the “loss and dislocation” after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. The same themes appear in The Women’s Courtyard, Rockwell’s translation of Khadija Mastur’s Aangan, dealing with “the claustrophobic lives of women” in the 1940s with “Partition looming on the horizon”, and The Promised Land, a translation of Mastur’s Zameen examining the lives of Partition refugees “swept up in a welter of chaos and deprivation”.
Her pet themes also find their way into in The Little Book of Terror, which fights...