Editor Ram Sadasiv spoke to translator Daisy Rockwell.
Shukla died in October 2011.
At the time, an editor in India asked me to write a piece on him. I asked for
some time, as I felt I hadn't read enough of his work. It's now two and a half
years later, and I've yet to write the piece. Instead, I've been diligently
reading Shukla ever since; I still don't feel like enough of an expert to write
an article about him, but I've been enjoying every minute of it. This story in
particular I enjoyed for the beautiful imagery and for the violence. I felt the
parallel between the hunters and the villagers in search of the bride was
neatly drawn, as was the complicity of the narrator in the violence, as a
participant observer. Shukla is good at that: there are rarely any perfect good
guys in his writing and this device has a nice way of drawing the reader in and
making her feel complicit as well. Progressivist writing at its finest!
This is not your first work of translation. Previously, you have
published Hats And Doctors, a
translation of Upendranath Ashk stories. As a translator, how would you compare
the two authors?
Ashk is from Punjab, although
he later settled in UP, where Shukla spent his life. Ashk was fifteen years
older than Shukla, and is considered to be from a different generation. I've
never seen anything by either of them commenting on the other, but what they do
have in common is a wry sense of humor. Ashk loathed clerks and bureaucrats,
and Shukla was a bureaucrat, so I assume this means he'd have loathed him as
well. Shukla, for his part, doesn't seem to have had much time for narcissism,
a prominent trait of Ashk's, so I could imagine this would have turned him off
as well. Ultimately, however, I think the two have much in common and should be
studied side by side for their satire and humorous ways of pursuing
progressivist ideals.
Recently you have been promoting a novel, Taste. Do you have any
upcoming readings/events we should know about?
Nothing outside of New
England, although I will be reading from Taste at the Goa Festival of Arts and
Literature in December.
I just finished reading Taste – it is a wonderful novel and I do want to
discuss it some more, but before we get into that I wanted to ask you about the
video trailer. That was my first exposure to the novel and I thought it
was very interesting that you chose to use a different medium to introduce the
book. Can you tell us a little bit about how the video came to be?
Since I am mostly known as a
painter and a Hindi scholar/translator, I felt like I needed to do something
for publicity for my novel that would make it clear what this book was like.
There's so much competing noise on the internet. It needed to be something
attention-grabbing, and it also needed to make clear that this novel was coming
from a different place from my other work. The trailer was made by friends
and family, so I was very lucky to be able to see this idea come to fruition.
Daniel, the protagonist of Taste, has a highly developed aesthetic sense
that is in many ways at odds with the modern world. Many of the funniest parts
of the book are the ‘fish out of water’ riffs where Daniel is dropped into the
maelstrom of contemporary culture and has to figure out how to cope with the
world (and vice versa). A visit to Graceland is a crucial plot point, which
also made me laugh out loud. Were there any other places you thought of
dropping him into? At a certain point I was hoping that Pottery Barn would come
out with a model of his fruit table and that he would have to go into the store
and argue with the store manager.
Hah-- Pottery Barn: the sequel, what a good idea! For some people,
leaving one's comfort zone can lead to greater understanding of the world, more
tolerance, etc. For Daniel, that way lies madness, and each subsequent
encounter drives him closer to the edge. I was less thinking of where I could
place him to prove that point, and more imagining each point on his journeys
that he would have to interact with unfamiliar people and cultural phenomena. I
realized when I was looking at Amtrak schedules that he would have to spend the
entire day in Chicago, both ways, and that's how those sections were born.
You are also an artist. I thought the little sketches at the beginning
of each chapter were quite charming. You have a book of artwork, The Little Book Of Terror. Have you been doing any painting recently?
I've been working more on translation lately (Upendranath Ashk's Hindi
novel Falling Walls, which will be
out from Penguin India in 2015), but I'm gearing up to work on a new painting
project called Odalisque. (*smiles mysteriously*)
*
