Daisy Rockwell

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Daisy Rockwell (born 1969) is an American Hindi and Urdu language translator and artist. She has translated a number of classic works of Hindi and Urdu literature, including Upendranath Ashk's Falling Walls, Bhisham Sahni's Tamas, and Khadija Mastur's The Women's Courtyard. Her 2021 translation of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand was the first South Asian book to win the International Booker Prize. Rockwell was awarded the 2023 Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award by the Vani Foundation and Teamwork Arts, during the 2023 edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Tomb of Sand also won her the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

Quotes

...Translation is a lonely activity...
...America absolutely is a multiracial, diverse, society, but because of that, people don’t feel like they need to expand, because they feel like they’re already reading from other races or cultures...
...Word-by-word accuracy is only one factor of the equation, and accuracy of feeling and aesthetic experience is also important. Sometimes you have to end up slightly changing a semantic meaning just to get the feeling right, so I can’t obsess too much about whether or not I am wrong...
...For me, languages can be like people. Some of them you love, some of them you hate, some of them you just don’t gel with...
...translators are used to being in the shadows, and they’re coming out...
- Interview with Daisy Rockwell by CJLC
...a translator has this gift where they can raise voices that are not heard clearly enough...
...As a translator, when you do such in-depth reading of a text, you're so much more aware the way woman writers give space to women's thoughts and feelings without compromising the male characters either...
- Interview with Daisy Rockwell by The Times of India