A leopard cannot change its spots

A radio show was also how I got to understand a lot of Americana.  Between watching late night shows and reruns and listening to radio programs, it is a surprise that I had any time at all to earn a PhD.  But, hey, the curiosity to understand society has always been a part of who I am.

The program on radio was Paul Harvey with his signature line "and now you know...the rest of the story."  Of course, there was only so much right-wing commentary that I could digest and I stopped listening to his show.  Despite my distaste for his politics, I liked the tagline "and now you know...the rest of the story."  It summarized my own curiosity to know the rest of the story and, later when I started teaching, what I hoped for in students.

The fact that my career was derailed by a layoff does not mean that I have changed.  It is not that I am no longer curious.  "I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam," to quote the spinach-powered philosopher Popeye the Sailor Man.  The world continues to fascinate me.  I now have more free time than ever before to follow up on anything that makes me want to know more.  The blog posts are getting longer as a result!

So, on to today's version of the rest of the story.

A week ago, I ended the post about the flood of female authors whose works I am now reading with this:

 "The winner of the International Booker Prize is, yep, a woman.  A woman from India.  It is for a work of fiction in Hindi that has been translated into English."

Daisy Rockwell is the translator.  It was time to know who Daisy Rockwell is.

I had assumed that she is from the UK because of the old colonial connections.  There are plenty of Britons who are deeply attached to the Subcontinent and their emotions are far different from the white supremacy that drove the older generations to colonize the brown lands.  I would not be surprised, therefore, if a Briton had fallen in love with Hindi and its literature, and had engaged in translating the best works into English.

I am surprised that Daisy Rockwell is not from the UK.

Daisy Rockwell is an American.

Now that you also know she is an American, perhaps you think about the last name and wonder if she is related to a Rockwell that we are all familiar with.  You know, Norman Rockwell.

She is.

Daisy Rockwell comes from a family of artists — some of whose work may be displayed on your kitchen calendar, or the surfaces of your chinaware, or hanging on the walls at your local doctors office.

Rockwell is the granddaughter of Norman Rockwell, who spent his later years living in Arlington, Vermont. She learned to use a paintbrush before a pencil.

How did the granddaughter of Norman Rockwell get interested in Hindi?

I started off being interested in translation in graduate school, when I began my doctorate in South Asian studies. Before studying Hindi, I had studied Latin for many years, as well as French, and some German and ancient Greek. Classical languages really teach you to break down language into microscopic bits, and that is how I first started translating, although not with the purpose of publication.

My advisor in graduate school at the University of Chicago encouraged me, and I also had the great good fortune to take a translation seminar with AK Ramanujan, perhaps the best known and most talented translator from South Asian languages. My subsequent experiences in academia discouraged me from pursuing translation, as it is not currently considered an academically rigorous form of scholarship, at least not in the US. It was not until I turned my back on academia altogether that I returned to translation.

Academia is a strange world.  What academics value and do not value as scholarship will amaze and amuse the vast majority who live outside the ivory towers.

Daisy Rockwell now mostly translates works of female authors.  Why so?  She explained in this interview in 2018:

I decided two years ago that I wanted to focus on translating women authors. I realised suddenly that I’d only been translating men (Ashk, Bhisham Sahni, and Shrilal Shukla), and I felt fed up with the male gaze. It’s a bit of a Twitter truism to say this, but there are many interesting stories being told by women, and I was tired of translating detailed descriptions of male desire and women’s breasts. All of my most recent translations, therefore, are of works by women, and the stories really are much more diverse.

As a reader, I feel the difference in the storytelling between male and female authors, which is why I am now more inclined to read books by women.  The difference in the storytelling is also why I am feasting on books authored by non-whites.

The interviewer asked Rockwell, "what would you to say to readers who think reading in translation feels like it’s “difficult”?"

Daisy Rockwell's reply?  "Expand your mind! The language is alive! Translation brings you the world!"

Soon I will get on to Daisy Rockwell's translation of Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree--this year's International Booker winner.