Translators rarely get their due: Daisy Rockwell

She has won the world’s biggest prize for translation, and when she says translators rarely get their due, we must pay attention. Daisy Rockwell, who won the International Booker Prize for her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi book Tomb of Sand, admits people like her are often taken for granted.

“I think the International Booker is actually somewhat responsible for translators getting more recognition,” Rockwell, a speaker at the Kerala Literature Festival, told The Hindu here on Saturday (January 24). “The movement to have the name on the cover was started by Jennifer Croft, who also won the [Booker] award for translating. She had made an aggressive push.”

Rockwell said even she had to fight to have her name on the book’s cover. “Croft would point out, “We wrote every word in the book,” she said. “You know, you will see even now a lot of times if an author and translator are on stage together at a festival, the moderator will talk more to the author.”

Rockwell does not just translate. Her latest novel, Alice Sees Ghosts, was released last year.

“I actually wrote the first draft a long time ago, over ten years ago,” she said. “So people might think that, you know, she won a Booker’s, so she thought she’d write a novel. But actually that isn’t the case. You know, I had only translated one book when I started writing this.”

Her next book is a translation of Shree’s short stories. She is impressed by the fact that Malayalam has had a strong tradition in translation.

“In the early 90s, when I was in India, translations of regional books started to show up in English,” she said. “There were just a handful, but I read them all. I became really obsessed. And I still remember the novel Yakshi by Malayattoor Ramakrishnan. I just loved that book. I had also read some short stories by O.V. Vijayan.”

Ms. Rockwell has learnt a bit of Malayalam, too. “I can read a bit,” she said. “And I wish that I was a Malayalam translator.”