Daisy Rockwell’s Mixed Metaphors: The Art of Translation is a whimsical little book that declares itself to be about the art of translation. But the little book is also about the blood, the sweat and the tears that are translation’s companions. With the critical acclaim she has garnered and her solid body of work, Rockwell is eminently qualified to think expansively about these matters and share her insights with admirers, colleagues and anyone else interested in the mysteries of this essentially alchemical process.
Rockwell is smart and funny. She is very well-read and educated in many languages. She is also a wonderful artist. All this and more shows to advantage in a highly idiosyncratic book that tries to find metaphors for the symbiotic relationship between the source language and its text, the target language and its text, and the translator which holds them both together. The first part of her book swoops and soars through metaphors that can suggest, if not sum up, these relations. Among those metaphors are Lego, Fred and Ginger, a Bridge, a Genie in a Bottle, a Monster, a Phantom Limb, and a Three-legged Race. The middle of the book is a series of Kafkaesque nightmares as Rockwell narrates her own experiences of trying to secure the rights to translate the works of various ‘great’ living (but almost dead) writers. This is, of course, a tale of caution and truer words—secure the rights before you start work—have never been spoken. In the last section of the book, Rockwell remembers her teachers and friends and fellow travellers.
If you’re looking for a ‘how-to-translate’ manual, this is not the book to read. If you’re looking for an insight into the tricks and techniques and processes of an award-winning translator, this is also not the book to read. If you want the simple pleasure of a beautifully produced book that is littered with witticisms and punctuated with quirky, charming illustrations, this is the book for you.
The problem is, we don’t consciously know what we are doing when we translate. We trust something inside of us—a combination of the languages we know, the books we’ve read, the lives we have lived, the feelings we’ve had—to lead us to re-present a world as fully as we can. In the first few pages of this book, Rockwell speaks of translating as jugaad, of making something work anew by assembling things we find around us and by putting them together with our own intuition. Each translator is unique, each of us has our own voice, none of us will translate the same passage in the same way. Yes, we all love our dictionaries and thesaurus, we count on our remembered conversations and the language classes in which we sweated and toiled and wept as we parsed long sentences and memorized irregular conjugations. But beyond all of that, translation is, quite simply, magic.
Arshia Sattar works with the epics and storytelling traditions of the Indian sub-continent. She has a PhD from the University of Chicago and has translated the Valmiki Ramayana from Sanskrit into English. Arshia writes, speaks and teaches about classical Indian literatures at home and abroad. Along with DW Gibson, she founded and runs the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency Program in Bangalore, India.