The Dastardly Things a Translator Might Do: An Interview with Shelley Fairweather Vega

My advice is to simply get started. Pick up anything from the region and go.

The enormously prolific Uzbek writer, Hamid Ismailov, is one of the vanishingly small number of Central Asian authors to crack the code of being translated into English. He experiments in virtually every literary form and genre—from the novel to the play, from translation to poetry; has lived in exile from Uzbekistan since 1992; and continues to build on the wealth of Central Asian culture and memory.

The breadth of history that informs his work can be felt in “Trinity”—a dramatic scene excerpted from a sprawling, six-book novel (Russian Matryoshka) that follows a peasant as he harvests a field of wheat only to have the yield stolen, again and again, when the wider world forces its way into his life. Published in Asymptote’s Summer 2024 issue, “Trinity” is a fragment of a fragmented text, a scene from an unfinished play embedded within an unpublished novel. In many ways, it is emblematic of the whole, knotted process that is translation. The short, dramatic scene is ripe with pungent symbols of the past, yet also exhibits a linguistic dexterity such that each word seems to impose its own gravity on the text. Longtime Ismailov collaborator Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s sensitive translation of “Trinity” achieves an exquisite balance between intimacy and distance, accessibility and mystery. I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with her about staging this piece, the influence translators exert on a text (and each other), and much more.

Willem Marx (WM): Your translations of Hamid Ismailov’s writing have introduced him to many English readers, myself included, so I’d like to start off by asking: how did you discover his work? And what set you on the path to become one of his principal English translators? 

Shelley Fairweather-Vega (SFV): Willem, that might be the most gratifying thing a translator can hear, that our work introduced a reader to a great author they might not have discovered otherwise. I’m so happy to hear it.

The story of my collaboration with Hamid Ismailov began more than a decade ago, when he happened across a pro bono translation I did of an essay by an Uzbek political prisoner. He contacted me through the organization who published that translation, looking to add to his very small list of people who could translate from Uzbek to English. Within a short time, he had convinced me to try translating his short story, “Tosh mehmoni,” which Words Without Borders published as “The Stone Guest” in September 2014. That story is so sad and powerful, and working with the author was such a good experience, that I was instantly, permanently hooked. So, you could say I also discovered Ismailov through my translations. You and I have that in common.

After translating several more of Ismailov’s short stories and essays, and now four of his novels, I’m nowhere near tired of his work and will always jump at the chance to translate it—but I do have competition, especially in the UK where he was first published in English, and where American translators sometimes aren’t eligible for the funding Ismailov applies for. A forthcoming short story collection combines work translated by me and several others. Ismailov did a very good job building that collection of translators.

WM: It’s telling to hear how tenacious an author must be in order to have their work translated into English. To shift slightly, I wonder if you ever find that your work is influenced by the way other translators have approached his writing. Do you notice different emphases or ways of tackling an aspect of voice among your fellow Ismailov translators?  

SFV: I’m a little shy to discuss this in detail, but I think attentive readers will find some differences. These might be attributable to our different genders or generations, and there’s a difference between the “British Ismailov” and the “American Ismailov” that we’ve created, despite all of us probably knowing better. I suspect most translators are aware of which aspects they try to maintain or recreate while translating, and these trends in our attention get reinforced over time if we work with any author more than once or twice. For me, in Ismailov, it’s the emotional hue of his work—a joy and an awe at life, tinged with sadness, spiced with irony and often outright silliness—that resonates most with me. Then it’s the playfulness of his style, his willingness to even go overboard with wordplay, rhyme, and so on, which I really want to convey well to readers in English. I don’t notice the playfulness as often in the work of other translators. On the other hand, there might be a difference in the work Ismailov is sending to me. Maybe only I get the silly stuff. I should ask him one day.I don’t think my own translations have been influenced by those of other Ismailov translators. His books do differ quite a bit, so the translation style for one would almost never be appropriate for another, even if I were inclined to copy. But sometimes this issue comes to the fore. I translated the first four books of Russian Matryoshka, frequent Ismailov translator John Farndon translated Book Five, and a story translated by Sophie Lockey became Book Six. But there’s one poem that appeared both in my part and John’s. For the purposes of the novel, we needed the translations to be identical, but our versions were quite far apart. Negotiating a compromise version took some time, but the results were good.

WM: It’s so interesting how the negotiation with Farndon becomes almost a third layer of filtration that Ismailov’s text passes through. Given that Ismailov is a translator in his own right, does he ever weigh in on your process or the final version of a text? What kind of dialogues do you have with each other? I’m also intrigued by the fact that Ismailov chooses what texts to send you—can you describe how that works a little bit?

SFV: I would tell you how it works if I knew. I prefer to see every Ismailov text I get as a gift from the heavens, beyond the power of reason to comprehend. On a more serious note, though, you mentioned above that getting oneself translated into English is a job for the tenacious, and that’s true in the case of all literature from Central Asia, maybe more so than other regions, I think; there’s just no real track record proving that readers want to read novels or poems from Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. Ismailov is by far the most successful author from the region in this regard, but he has a lot of natural advantages in the game of getting his work before translators and publishers: he’s lived and worked in Western Europe for decades, he speaks English well, he’s won prizes, he gets invited to festivals. None of the other Central Asian writers I work with have any of those things going for them, so their road is much more difficult. But maintaining good relationships with several translators is part of his strategy, and probably connecting each of us with the right texts is part of it as well.

Ismailov frequently says in interviews that the translators working on his books are adoptive parents to those texts. We promise to raise them responsibly in our own language and culture, and then we take them away, so that to a certain extent, the translations are no longer his children or even any of his business. This is a great formula for signaling to us translators that we have freedom, that he trusts us. It’s also a great way for him to maintain serenity around the translations, which are essentially out of his control. Surely most authors must experience some serious anxiety imagining the dastardly things a translator/traitor might do to their work, but Ismailov has found a way to quell that anxiety in himself—lucky for us translators. Still, he is very helpful during the translation process, always willing to answer questions about themes or phrases, and very encouraging.

WM: I can’t help but ask, what dastardly acts of translation do you have mind?

 SFV: Oh, there’s so much casual violence a translator can inflict during the act of translation. I could leave out a sentence I don’t like or massage it into something I do like. I could misinterpret some reference that’s vital to the author’s whole sense of the text. I could yield too easily to an editor who wants to switch things around. I could translate lines of dialogue in such a way that characters sound more racist, less intelligent, or more aggressive in translation than in the original. All these things are in my power and often, there’s even a way to justify them! (Except for the last part, about mischaracterization through dialogue. That’s inexcusable.)

WM: Of the main literary forms, dramatic writing is surely one of the least read—after all, dramas are largely intended for performance. Given that “Trinity” is part of a novel, I wonder if you could explain how it fits into the book. Do you see it as intended for performance, or is this the rare work of dramatic writing that is meant to live on the page?

SFV: I can imagine “Trinity” being performed on stage, certainly. It would need a minimalistic set and maybe some very spare music, and a stern procession of slightly ridiculous bad guys delivering their bombastic monologues. But the complicated part is that “Trinity” is just one scene (Act I, Scene III) of a play that Ismailov started to write in the late Soviet era. Most of that play is about the life and death of Amir Timur, the conqueror we know best as Tamerlane. When the country gained its independence in 1991 and began seeking a cornerstone for the new national identity was suddenly needed in Uzbekistan, Timur became a national hero—but discussing the Central Asian tyrants of old was taboo during Soviet times. Ismailov has always been a rule-breaker, and he was experimenting with all kinds of poetry and writing at the time, so he started on this dramatic opus, but then filed it away.

That unfinished script, in turn, is just one element of the big Book One of his yet-unpublished novel, Russian Matryoshka. Like the famous matryoshka nesting dolls, it consists of a big story (Book One) with a smaller one (Book Two) inside it, and so on, for a total of six books of diminishing size nestled one inside the other. Each one is set in a different time and place in the Russian, Soviet, or post-Soviet empire—from a Central Asian point of view—and each is written in a different style, though the stories are connected. But Book One is Ismailov’s retrospective of his own work as a young man, gathered from notebooks and diaries covering 1,001 days in Soviet Tashkent in the 1970s; it includes this unfinished Tamerlane play, a piece of performance art he staged then called the Lorciana, stubs of different essays and short stories, and many, many disjointed journal entries about his studies, work, friends, and meeting Bella Akhmadulina.

At this point, I’d guess that Ismailov would want his play read, more than anything, and recognized as part of an exciting, vibrant, but mostly unappreciated and forgotten creative era in Uzbekistan, as well as an interesting landmark in his own development as an artist. But a performance would be amazing to see.

WM: I’m intrigued by the process of translating a such a gathering of disparate works by a single author. Is there a special challenge involved in working on different genres and texts written decades ago, all by a single author and collected in one book, Russian Matryoshka? In fact, to add another question, how do you approach Ismailov’s voice when it’s filtered through so many varied writing styles?

SFV: I’ve mentioned how different every Hamid Ismailov novel is from every other Hamid Ismailov novel, and the two I’d translated previously (Gaia, Queen of Ants and Of Strangers and Bees) also incorporated several storylines apiece, with their own styles and voices. So that experience was good preparation for translating Russian Matryoshka. The difference here was the sheer volume of the work. The translation on my computer is 785 pages in Word, 331,886 English words. I worked on my part more or less full-time for eight solid months. That’s longer than I’ve spent on any other book, and of course that’s just the translation and the first round of editing. When we eventually find a press with the courage and wherewithal to publish it, I’ll have more work ahead of me as we go through the in-house editing process. But it will be fun to get back to Matryoshka.

Finding a voice in translation that works for all Ismailov’s styles, and in this case for all the eras in which he has written, and his own phases of creative development. . . Well, it’s just something that’s demanded by the text. Ismailov has been writing for decades in diverse genres, and it wouldn’t be fair or honest not to acknowledge that in translation. So, whether he’s giving me literary criticism, dirty jokes, drama, bad poetry, good poetry, epic poetry, or angst-ridden diary entries to translate, they all need to come out sounding exactly like those things in English. They’ll all sound like Ismailov, too, if I’m doing my job correctly. If I’ve been successful, there are two reasons: first, I was a professional translator long before I began translating fiction or poetry, so I had plenty of experience adopting the right style and voice for a rental contract, online roulette game, or business forum lecture; once you’ve mastered those things, once you can switch from one to the other in the course of a workday, no type of literary writing seems quite so out of reach. Second, I’ve got great source material to work with, thanks to this author’s virtuosity. If he can channel all those voices, then I will do it, too.

WM: One aspect of Trinity that I want to make sure we get to mention is the fact that the Peasant, the short scene’s central character, only has one distinct line of dialogue in the whole piece: “Who is our master now?” The line resonates on many levels, but I was drawn to the fact that the stage directions show the Peasant speaking a prayer throughout, and, although it is buried in paragraphs of description, that prayer becomes a background texture for the whole the scene. I was caught by the way this prioritizes language, separates different types of speech, and builds the character of the Peasant all at once. How did you interpret this aspect of this scene?

SFV: That’s a great observation. The Peasant can easily be interpreted as part of the scenery, a passive element to whom big things happen, one buffeted around (and robbed, naturally) by the powerful men who sweep through on their big-picture business. But he resists this characterization by being so steadfast, so devout. The Peasant is our clue that what is important persists, beneath the tumult and the noise of war and speech.

I also found it interesting that the person to whom he speaks this one distinct line is his wife. In her short time on stage, she brings him food and a child, stereotypically enough, but it’s also her job to know what’s going on in the world outside the wheat field.

WM: As a translator working in a very under-translated language (several, in fact), how do you go about choosing your projects? Beyond financial considerations, if that’s possible, do you consciously try to find work that is “representative” in some way? What other concerns guide your decision to translate a book? 

SFV: It’s only recently that I’ve had the luxury of being able to choose my projects, and I’m enjoying it! Mostly, these books (well, their authors) come to me. Sorting through the factors that go into my decision-making, there are really three that seem the most important. First, would I enjoy translating the piece? Is it mysterious enough, challenging enough, moving enough to make me want to spend time on it and motivated to share it with the world? Second, what’s my relationship with the author or the person commissioning the translation? Ideally, they’ll be my partner in the translation and publication process—will they be a good partner? Do their goals for the work align with mine? Do I trust them, and do they trust me? And lastly, what’s the likelihood that I’ll be able to convince a publisher to love this book and shepherd it into the English-speaking world? The odd success story aside, self-publishing seems like such a dead end, and Central Asian literature in translation desperately needs the legitimacy that good journals and “real” publishers can bestow on it, not to mention the benefits of marketing, distribution, and just being part of that ecosystem. I want “my” books and authors to have those advantages.

Selecting work that is somehow representative of the region hasn’t been a priority of mine. To do that, we’d have to start from earlier in history, and translate or re-translate all the Central Asian epic tales, the old Islamic and pre-Islamic texts, all the Soviet-era stuff that we only have in English through Russian translations or interpretations, build up a corpus for analysis. . . It’s work worth doing, but it’s a job for scholars, and for me personally, translating new work that speaks to this particular moment is much more satisfying.

I’m lucky enough to be married to someone with health insurance, so I have the privilege of not having to make these decisions based solely on financial considerations. But I do translate for a living, and I won’t spend more than a day or two on a project for which I’ll never get paid. I would hate to contribute to the idea that translations are created by starving artists who survive on their love for the art. When I agree to translate a long work, like a novel, I schedule my work on it in such a way that I always have time to take shorter jobs that keep some money coming in consistently. I also try not to translate two books at once. This means there’s a queue, and some authors, but not all of them, understandably, are happy to wait.

WM: If someone came to you and asked, “How should I go about introducing myself to Central Asian literature?” what would you reply?

SFV: The corpus available in English so far (or in any language, really) is so small that there’s no guide yet, no standard syllabus. So my advice is to simply get started. Pick up anything from the region and go. But as you read, keep a few things in mind: when was this piece written, and what was the political situation in that time and place? What did the literary establishment in the Russian Empire or Soviet Union, at the time, think of that author and that text? Who is publishing it now in your language, and why?

The first pre-Ismailov Central Asian author people tend to discover is Chinghiz Aitmatov, from Kyrgyzstan, who began writing in Russian and getting published in the mid-Soviet era. Several of his novels are available in English. Before Aitmatov, in an early twentieth-century era of intellectual optimism, there was a school of reformist writers and thinkers known as the Jadids who produced some novels before Stalin had them shot; they are slowly being translated into English (especially Abdulhamid Cholpon). One favorite of mine, from much later, is another Chinghiz: Chinghiz Gusseinov from Azerbaijan (not technically Central Asia, but culturally and linguistically quite close).

To go deeper back in time, start with works from the ancient Persian world, all the poetry and long epics, and remind yourself how much of it was written or set in places now located in the countries called Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan. Those cultural and literary connections were mostly severed once the Russian Empire moved in, but they do exist.

Shelley Fairweather-Vega lives in Seattle, Washington, and has translated, to date, nearly four of Hamid Ismailov’s novels from Russian and Uzbek into English. Other translations of hers have been published in World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, The Critical Flame, and more.

Willem Marx is a contributing editor at Electric Literature, assistant fiction editor at Asymptote, and a judge for NYC Midnight. His writing can be found in Asymptote, Electric Literature, Necessary Fiction, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog: