Talk by Daisy Rockwell (Artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator)

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 will share some of her own handcrafted metaphors for translation and explore 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.

Books will be available for sale and signing after the lecture, from Odyssey Bookstore.

Cornell graduate students can register for two workshops with Daisy Rockwell on Thursday, September 18 and Friday, September 19.

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.

Cosponsored by the Society for the Humanities and the Department of Literature in English