Talking Translation: Review of Daisy Rockwell’s ‘Mixed Metaphors’

Many academic treatises have been written to dissect the practice of translation and its techniques. These offer their own personalised definitions, in convoluted sentences, of what ‘good’ or ‘bad’ translation could be while dishing out advice to translators. But these treatises, arid and pedantic in tone, remain unread by a sizeable readership. Quite contrary to this, Daisy Rockwell, a prolific translator herself, has recently published her book Mixed Metaphors (Bloomsbury India) which crackles with sharp wit, humour and her learnings from years of  experience of translation. Rockwell’s book discusses the ‘puzzling questions’ of translation through metaphors that may bring a droll smile to her readers’ face. Unfolding the whole process of translation—from singling out the text for translation, to the textual challenges and then issues of attaining copyrights, hunt for the publisher and lastly, the book launch—Mixed Metaphors gets down to the brass tracks of translation in a tongue-in-cheek style. 

The book opens with a brief note defining the idea of translation. Rockwell, who is an excellent visual artist, draws a unique analogy of translation with art and proclaims “translation is a form of collage, wherein I search for equivalencies among found objects and wed them together in a surprising way to create illusions”. Borrowing a Urdu-Hindu word, she calls this process of translation as “jugaad” and “bricolage” in French.  In the parlance of digital age, she calls it a “DIY” whereas in a book of spells, it can be understood as “conjuring”. Beneath all these expressions lies the idea of creativity that Rockwell advocated for. But what seems amiss here is that the translator should also be emotionally and aesthetically alert to the text in order to correspond the aesthetic “experience of the its first reader”. So, this “jugaad” must be accompanied by an alertness towards literary and translatory sensibilities. And here, rightly arguing that literary translation is a “deliberate process” that demands “part drudgery” and “part creativity”, Rockwell sets great store by experimentation in the practice of literary translation. While this book itself is no less than a delightful experiment using poems, anecdotes and illustrations unfolding varied strands of translation.

What sets apart Mixed Metaphors is its quintessential playfulness even when dealing with abstruse ideas. Using waggish metaphors in the form of poems, Rockwell unfolds the practical strands of translation. Instead of using theoretical jargon and convoluted academic expressions, she uses inventive and witty metaphors to unravel the nuances of the practice of translation. These metaphors distinctly correspond to the intricate ideas of translation and the intended meaning by the writer. Some of the metaphors refer to various cultural, historical and literary contexts in order to discern the knotty questions of translation. Tracing the characters from Mughal history, another unique metaphor, “Translation as immurement” delves into the dialectic phenomena of translation. The story of this metaphor reads as Anarkali is immured in a wall by the Mughal Emperor Akbar because she fell in love with his son Salim.  Whereas “the collective of the slave girls is a body of texts. The Harem is a library. The love of prince Salim is an act of translation…The walls are English. We know she’s in there. But we can’t see her…We merely rely on the legend to imagine what she looks like, how she moves, how sounds. Is translation immurement?” 

Rockwell compels readers to meditate on such unanswered questions about the prospects of translation and its practice. While some of the metaphors seem to be taking a jibe at the publishing industry and its flurry of literary events and book launches. And some amusingly reflect on the process of translation from choosing the text to publishing and launching the book.  Such is another metaphor: “The Genie in the Bottle” —“the original text is jinn/…you want to carry it elsewhere/and show it to others who have never seen a jinn.”

Although these jibes are witty and sharp, they also bring to the fore the gritty truths about the publishing industry and the challenges a translator face. The mid-section of the book “Five Hair-Raising Copy Right Tales” has heuristic anecdotes—plausibly personal—wrapped in alluring fictionality. These tales caution budding translators about unexpected snags while trying to get copyrights. Mixed Metaphor is not didactic and it doesn’t offer fixed rules and instructions for how to translate. Rather, it focuses on practical and realistic hindrances that a translator should be mindful of.

In the last section of the book titled ‘Conjugations’, Rockwell dwells on her own experiences of translation and shares some illuminating ideas. Her early exposure to translation was through Latin while her journey of translation was destined to be Hindi and Urdu via crossing the canals of Italian and French. And she would have gleaned much from the different grammatical structures of these languages. Yet, she offers practical advice to translators, of not being obsessed with the grammar of language to the extent that “all sense of content can be lost”.  Rockwell doesn’t get into the worn-out discussion of being ‘faithful’ or an ‘infidel’ to the text, instead she ushers in some interesting and fresh perspectives to the discussion about translation.

Mixed Metaphors pleasantly transcends the boundaries of genre; it reads like part poetry, part memoir and part essayistic. This slim volume on the art of translation, due to its playful and witty tone, is a riveting read. 

(Mohammad Farhan is an academic and a writer)