AI doesn’t worry me: Daisy Rockwell

The NEA Fellowship for translating the Urdu book by Pakistani author Nisar Aziz Butt has been granted to you. What is the subject matter of the book?

Although Nisar Aziz Butt eventually acquired Urdu, he was originally Pashtun. The Traveler Wandered from Town to Town is an autobiographical tale in parts. It tells the story of a little orphan who is moved about between her uncles’ homes and ends up in a sanatorium after receiving a tuberculosis diagnosis. After her recovery, she travels to Lahore, but her schedule prevents her from taking tests. She receives tutoring and finally earns a BA, but throughout it all, she reads Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and Dostoevsky books out of desperation. Though all the males don’t measure up, she really wants to fall in love. Not to give anything away, but there’s a happy ending.

Why did you decide to study Urdu?

I had a lot of Urdu writers I wanted to read. In addition, the majority of my students at the time were first- and second-generation immigrants from Pakistan and India, where I was teaching Hindi at a university in Chicago. They seemed to be rather unaware of the parallels between Urdu and Hindi. I so made the decision to study Urdu writing and teach it alongside Hindi. That gave me ideas right away.

There have been rumors that AI will eventually replace human translators. How do you feel?

I want to remark, “Fiddlesticks!” Though this is just a small portion of what a literary translator performs, AI is capable of translating across languages. Robots are unable to comprehend the many layers of meaning that surround words due to factors like association, history, culture, and intuition. That’s the reason I don’t worry.

You and the other translators issued a statement denouncing the genocide against the Palestinian people. However, why are these discussions absent from the literary festival circuit?

There are certain contentious subjects that writers will support and affirm with statements like “Yes, this is what I believe.” This, however, is not the same. Speaking up for the Palestinian people is frowned upon due to the widespread belief that doing so would make them seem anti-Semitic.

Do you have any writers you’d want to translate but haven’t yet?

My dream, which has been continually derailed, is to retranslate Qurratulain Hyder’s Aag Ka Dariya, which she reduced to be 200 pages less than the original translation. She also tempered her stance against colonialism. She reportedly didn’t want to insult her British acquaintances. She is much more frank in Urdu, but she didn’t want anybody else to interpret.