Translators love to use
metaphors to capture the nature of their work, yet every metaphor seems
to fall short, resulting in a great, unusable tangle of mixed metaphors.
In this lecture, Daisy Rockwell shared some of her own handcrafted
metaphors for translation and explored the many dimensions of the art.
Daisy Rockwell
is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. She
has translated numerous classic and contemporary literary works from
Hindi and Urdu into English. Her translations have been awarded the
International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation,
the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary
Work, the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation, and the Vani
Foundation Distinguished Translator Award. Her translations have been
honored with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
National Endowment for the Humanities, and PEN Translates. Her novel Alice Sees Ghosts, and Mixed Metaphors, her collection of poems about translation, are both forthcoming from Bloomsbury India in 2025 and 2026. Her memoir Our Friend, Art is forthcoming from Pushkin Press in 2027.
The Rabindranath Tagore Lecture Series in Modern Indian Literature
is made possible by a gift from the late Cornell Professor Emeritus
Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife, Sumi Prabhu. Inspired by
Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive imagination, unbounded by geopolitical
boundaries, the series has regularly featured prominent writers from
across South Asia and its diasporas.