LAHORE (Dunya News) – A session titled “Writers as Translators” brought together voices from across the literary world to examine the craft, challenges and politics of translation on the second day of the Indus Conclave 2025 at Lahore's Alhamra on Saturday.
Moderated by Aneeqa Wattoo, the panel featured American translator and artist Daisy Rockwell, poet and novelist Syed Kashif Raza, and publisher Hoori Noorani. The conversation spanned personal experiences, structural issues in publishing, and the power of translation to open new cultural windows.
CRAFT AND STYLE
Daisy Rockwell described her early collaborative translation practice, where she worked with an Urdu translator on Robert Frost poems and created visual calligraphy of the Urdu renditions. “That was a time when translation literally crossed over into my art,” she recalled, emphasising how visual expression and language often merged in her early experiments.
Syed Kashif Raza compared his translation approach to students in Western museums copying master paintings. For him, rendering texts into Urdu involves replicating “line by line, shade by shade” while carrying over stylistic structures. He cited Mohammad Khalid Akhtar as a key influence, noting his Urdu sentences carried the rhythm of English structures. “In translating writers like Milan Kundera and James Joyce, I try to replicate their structures into Urdu – it helps me learn a great deal,” Raza said.
The panel agreed that translation is more than word-for-word substitution; it requires a deep engagement with the cultural, historical and emotional layers of both the source and target languages. This makes it a process of re-creation rather than simple transfer.
PUBLISHING REALITIES
Publisher Hoori Noorani emphasised the editorial decisions that shape translated works in Pakistan. She noted that translation requires close scrutiny of sentence structures, as English and Urdu differ significantly. “If it’s not put right, it doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t make sense sometimes,” Noorani explained.
She described her press’s long-standing commitment to progressive literature, a tradition founded in 1967 by her late father, linked to the Progressive Writers’ Movement. The publishing house continues to weigh subject matter, translator competence and ideological alignment when considering manuscripts. She stressed that translations are evaluated both for their literary merit and their resonance with local readerships.
Noorani also drew attention to the practical and political challenges publishers face. Censorship, she noted, continues to shape what can or cannot appear in print. “Sometimes we have to negotiate with words and tone to ensure a book survives the press without being silenced,” she said, pointing out that editorial work often becomes an act of resistance.
RECOGNITION AND BARRIERS
Daisy Rockwell spoke about her Booker-winning translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tombs of Sand, which became the first Indian book to receive such recognition. Despite its global acclaim, Rockwell observed the narrow-mindedness of Western publishing: “They want things that are just like Tombs of Sand, which there is nothing like.”
She noted that many South Asian works are overlooked because they do not conform to preconceived notions of “exotic” narratives expected by international publishers. This has created a bottleneck, where only certain styles and stories travel beyond the subcontinent.
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Raza highlighted a contrasting success story, recounting how his novel Char Darvesh Aur Ek Kachhwa [Four Seekers and a Tortoise] was translated into German and launched across nine cities. The translator, Almuth Degener, discovered the work independently and approached him with enthusiasm. “She knows about 15 or 16 languages,” Raza said, admiring her linguistic depth. He found it remarkable to hear his Urdu novel discussed in German by new audiences, reflecting a growing interest in Pakistani fiction abroad.
Yet he also reflected on the invisibility of many Urdu writers within their own country. While his work was celebrated abroad, Raza remarked that local publishing opportunities for Urdu fiction remain limited, with translations into English often needed before Pakistani authors gain recognition.
WOMEN’S VOICES
The panel also explored the gender dynamics of literary translation. Rockwell revealed she had once translated only male authors until the #MeToo era, when she became conscious of how patriarchy shaped narratives. “I went on a women-only diet,” she said, describing her commitment to translating only female authors and amplifying women’s subjectivities.
She stressed that women’s voices were not only underrepresented in global literature but often shaped through patriarchal filters, making translation an act of reclamation. “When you translate women, you allow their voices to stand on their own terms,” she said.
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Noorani added that publishing women writers has long been a political stance in Pakistan, often resisted by conservative audiences. She explained how her press continued to foreground women’s experiences despite pushback, framing it as essential to progressive thought.
TRANSLATION AS POLITICS
Throughout the session, the speakers reinforced that translation is not a neutral activity. It carries political weight – whether in choosing which authors to amplify, which stories to carry across borders, or how to navigate censorship.
For Rockwell, every act of translation is “a negotiation between worlds,” while for Raza, it is also “a way of learning and expanding the possibilities of Urdu.” Noorani concluded that publishers, translators and writers alike share the responsibility of ensuring that literature in translation is both authentic and accessible, without losing its cultural depth.