At that point, I picked up Hindi again as it fitted my schedule. The life of a Latin scholar seemed boring to me. I must pick up some small thing in Latin and sit in the library all the time. Latin is an ancient language and lot of work has been done. Suzanne used to tell us that she goes to India every two/three year with her husband to do research. At that point of time, I did a political science course of Suzanne Rudolf. In my freshman year, I was learning Latin, German, French and Greek. When I went to Chicago, Hindi was not even in my mind. You did your PhD in Chicago University in South Asian studies. You can say that my friend planted that seed in me. My friend never did any of that, but I started private Hindi tuitions. One of them was to go to India, learn Hindi and we planned to work in an orphanage in India. She used to come up with several ideas for the gap year before college. As they say sometimes, a big story starts from a seed. When everyone is into art, how come you got interested in South Asian literature? How did that happen? My father was an experimental and conceptual artist. My family has a lot of artists on my mother’s side and father’s side. Big names like Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne and my grandfather Norman Rockwell who was a great painter lived here. The interview was recorded on zoom in November 2022 and has been lightly edited for style and clarity. Jey Sushil talked to her about childhood, passion for language, interest in translation and her different works in English. She is now translating Geetanjali Shree’s acclaimed novel Hamara Shehr Us Baras from Hindi and Nisar Aziz Butt’s classic Nagri Nagri Phira Musafir from Urdu. Her translation of Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There ( Gujarat Pakistan Se Gujarat Hindustan ) won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione prize. A PhD in South Asian studies from Chicago University, Daisy has written her thesis on Upendranath Ashk. Before Tomb of Sand, she had already translated Hindi authors Upendranath Ashk, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Sobti, Usha Priyamvada from Hindi and Khadija Mastur’s novels from Urdu to English. Daisy Rockwell was a well-known name in the world of South Asian translators even before she won the International Booker award for Tomb of Sand, the English translation of Gertanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi.
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