Daisy Rockwell | Lecture | What's Art Got to Do with It: Translation as Illustration as Translation

Please join the South Asia Center for a lecture by Daisy Rockwell, International Book Prize-winning translator and artist, in conversation with Rakhee Balaram (global art history, SUNY Albany).

We think of literary translation as something that exists only in the domain of words, but translators must also make use of all their senses to bring a text alive. This lecture explores artist translator Daisy Rockwell's use of visualization in her translation of Hindi and Urdu texts, and translation in her art and illustration.

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.

Rakhee Balaram is a writer and art historian. She is associate professor of global art and art history at the University at Albany-SUNY. She previously taught at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. She is the author of Counterpractice: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Art of French Feminism (Manchester University Press, 2021) which explores women artists and writers in France after May '68.

She is co-editor of Twentieth Century Indian Art, named a Financial Times "Book of the Year" in 2022. She served on the jury of the JCB Prize for Literature in India in 2022. In 2023-2024, Balaram held a fellowship at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachussetts, and was an invited scholar at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris. She is currently working on a book about two pioneer modern artists in India, Amrita Sher-Gil and Rabindranath Tagore.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the departments of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Art and Music Histories, and English and Creative Writing, in addition to the SU Art Museum, CODE^SHIFT, The Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation, and Syracuse University’s Humanities Center.