In part one of this interview, translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega spoke to Willem Marx regarding the complex, genre-traversing works of Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, whose dramatic work, “Trinity,” was featured in our Spring 2024 issue. Today, we continue the conversation with an extended discussion of Central Asian literature—including the collection Amanat, a pioneering compilation of contemporary Kazakh women’s writing, edited by Fairweather-Vega and author Zaure Batayeva; the importance of raising women’s voices; shaking off old Soviet literary hierarchies; the complexities of working from pivot languages; and the links between colonialism and ecological disaster in Central Asia.
Sarah Gear (SG): You translate from Russian and Uzbek, and also work from Kazakh. How did you come to learn these languages, and what have the main challenges been?
Shelley Fairweather-Vega (SFV): That’s right, and in the past year, I’ve made it through a Kyrgyz book, as well as an Uzbek text that includes Turkmen and Tajik—so my collection of major Central Asian languages is now pretty much complete. I know Russian very well, having studied it and worked in it for the longest by far, and having lived and worked in Russia for two years. I often tell people that I began learning Uzbek to pay my way through graduate school, which is the truth: fellowships for Uzbek paid for an intensive summer course and the last year of my master’s degree. Of course, I didn’t do it just for the money; I was studying the politics and recent history of the region, and had the sense that only knowing Russian would give me an incomplete picture of Central Asian society, not to mention its literature. When I began translating more work from Kazakhstan, I signed up for another intensive summer course, this time for Kazakh. The grammar and a lot of the vocabulary was very familiar to me from Uzbek, and now I’ve got a big Turkic section of my brain where Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz words all jumble together. This means I can’t speak or write very well in any of those languages, but reading and translating them works out quite well, if I’m careful—and I try to be careful.
SG: You worked with Kazakh author and translator Zaure Batayeva on Amanat, a collection of Kazakh women’s fiction published in 2022. Why did you decide to focus on contemporary women’s writing?
SFV: Until Amanat, the only Kazakhstani authors who were getting published in English —with very few exceptions—were elderly men who wrote in Russian and who had been well-established in the Soviet writing world. The women, especially those who wrote in Kazakh or were of younger generations, had been sorely neglected. Zaure first contacted me to help her in translating an excerpt of Aigul Kemelbayeva’s novel, and then we tackled an excerpt of her own novel and Zira Nauryzbai’s essay “The Beskempir.” When Words Without Borders eagerly snapped them up, we felt encouraged to go on with the work. More stories we translated were published in other magazines and anthologies, and by the time we won a contract with publisher Gaudy Boy for Amanat, we had nearly the whole book ready to go. People are still discovering it and seem to appreciate the variety of styles and voices in the collection, a variety we feel is characteristic of Kazakhstan today.
SG: In the introduction to Amanat, you write that you were careful to select an equal number of Russophone and Kazakh texts for the collection, and mentioned that some in Kazakhstan see a divide between those who read and write in Russian, and those who work in Kazakh. Do you agree that this divide exists, and did you find any evidence of this in the stories you selected?
SFV: Yes, although the good news is that the divide is shrinking. In the last several years, there have been new efforts in Kazakhstan to join the two linguistic halves of the writing community, bringing them together for conferences, workshops, and publications—and there have been more translations between Russian and Kazakh, and more reviews of the works. It’s very encouraging. I don’t think the divide was as apparent in the work we included in Amanat, because, again, the variety of experiences and worldviews and styles is there in both the Russian-language and Kazakh-language selections, and that’s one of the aspects we hoped to highlight.
SG: Many of the women who contributed to Amanat are also translators themselves. Do you see any effect of this in their fiction, and did this influence your work with them?
SFV: I’ll always believe that translators are some of the best, most empathetic, most insightful writers and people. Certainly, translating translators has advantages; these authors know what translation means, where the difficulties lie, and they’ll never, ever accuse their own translators of not being literal enough, for example.
SG: The translators’ introduction to Amanat contextualizes the collection with a really interesting overview of Kazakh history. To what extent do you think the authors in Amanat are writing as a way of assessing, and coming to terms with their country’s past?
SFV: From what I’ve read, I do think that history is a driving factor for a lot of Kazakhstani authors. Many of them will tell you that Kazakhstan—as a political entity and as a cultural community—has not done a thorough job of evaluating its own history, especially the history of the Soviet era, in a way that is helpful in forging a new national identity or charting a path forward. Some stories in Amanat do this quite explicitly, such as the two by Asel Omar. Her “Black Snow of December” is a narrative about a few chaotic days in the 1980s when Kazakhstanis were seemingly able to assert their own political priorities as separate from Moscow’s priorities for the first time, and the consequences that brought for relationships between ethnic groups and various generations. Her “French Beret” is very different stylistically, but it’s also an attempt to re-imagine some part of the Kazakh experience—this time of Stalinist repressions and their lasting legacy. Other stories do their historical work more by recounting a tale that’s tied to a particular era; or touching on a particular political, cultural, or economic issue that readers can’t quite ignore; or by giving us portraits of characters doing their best in those circumstances.
Amanat’s publisher encouraged us to include that historical overview as a guide for readers who wouldn’t be familiar with even the broad strokes of Kazakhstan’s history, and it was a good idea. Kazakhstanis are fully and painfully aware of how much a mystery they remain to the larger world. Naturally, authors are working to solve that puzzle, trying to decide what story to tell the world about themselves. Authors in better-explored places don’t feel that responsibility so keenly.
SG: I have just had the absolute pleasure of reading your latest translation, Mothersland by Tajik author Shahzoda Samarqandi. The novel was originally written in Persian, and you based your text on the Russian translation by Yutlan Sadykova. Mothersland has a strong ecological theme; its heroine Mahtab is from a family of cotton pickers, and has a strong connection to the Uzbek land. She has nightmares about the Aral Sea, which was drained by the Soviets in the 1960s to provide water to the cotton fields in central Asia, an act universally recognized as an ecological disaster. Is the environment a common theme in Uzbek literature, and was it a factor in your decision to translate the novel?
SFV: In my experience, Kazakhstani literature has been more eager to address environmental themes, whether the destruction of the Aral Sea or the poisoning of the air, land, and people’s bodies from Soviet nuclear testing. There is just more openness in Kazakhstan than in Uzbekistan, lately, to discussing topics that might imply criticism of government policy. So other than Hamid Ismailov’s The Dead Lake, in which the plot revolves around a boy who can’t grow up because of his exposure to an environmental catastrophe, Mothersland is the first book from an author from Uzbekistan I’ve come across that addresses these topics. But in it, the Aral Sea represents much more than ecological ruin. Discovering the drained sea and the ships stranded in the sand opens the protagonists’ eyes to the ramifications of the Soviet ideals; it is a story about Mahtab recovering from amnesia, and as she does so, she and her mother have to find a new way to process their memories about history—both their own and their nation’s. But reimagining the late-twentieth-century history of Uzbekistan is a theme that is mostly avoided there today.
Shahzoda Samarqandi is a remarkably brave writer. My theory is that her freedom to address the topic might partially be because she’s not ethnically Uzbek, but Tajik, so she might feel less patriotic responsibility to portray the best aspects of Uzbekistan’s history and culture. And she doesn’t live in Uzbekistan, just like every other Uzbekistani writer whose work I’ve translated to date.
SG: As well as, and indeed linked to, the ecological theme, there is also a strong sense of Russia as a colonial power in Mothersland. Do you see this as one of the novel’s themes?
SFV: Absolutely, yes. And that’s another topic that most Uzbek writers who are more beholden to the state seem inclined to steer clear of, wary of incurring Putin’s wrath. But to me, it seems so vital, even more so in light of the obviously imperial Russian aggression that’s still going on today.
SG: In a journal that focuses on translations from Turkic and Slavic languages, you wrote about the historically imperial nature of translation from Central Asia. In the past, the Soviet state dominated decisions over what texts to bring into Russian, and the resulting translations were not always culturally sensitive. How much influence do today’s Central Asian governments have over which texts are translated? And what challenges do translators face when bringing texts from the region to the Western reader?
SFV: In many respects, the Central Asian governments have carried on the Soviet tradition of centrally controlling literary production. The Soviet-era Writers’ Unions are still alive and well throughout Central Asia, but competition is springing up—certainly in Kazakhstan, where there are more independent literary journals and writers’ associations all the time, and also in Central Asian émigré writing. And because the Central Asian governments make little effort to get good books translated, there has been room for market forces to take over the decision-making, for better or for worse. Now authors can take the initiative to get any kind of book translated if they can afford it, regardless of quality or marketability outside its home country. Obviously, this has some positive results and some unfortunate results. The lingering influence that Russia has on translations of Central Asian literature comes from the translations that are based on sloppy Russian renditions of the original text, or from English-language translators who are only familiar with Russian stereotypes about Central Asian culture and Central Asian people. Those translators unwittingly apply those stereotypes directly in their translations, perpetuating all the problems of cultural colonialism we ought to be trying to fight.
Yultan Sadykova’s Russian version of Mothersland is emphatically not a sloppy rendering. It was perfectly crafted to be a beautiful work in its own right, a really well-done literary translation. So I had the pleasure of translating a lovely work of literature in Russian, rather than a weirdly contorted, literal, self-censored text that traditionally serves as a bridge to the “real” translation in English. I also had the benefit of the author’s assistance any time I wondered about the Tajik behind the Russian. She could help me make sure I wasn’t Russifying anything unnecessarily or missing any cultural elements that the Russian didn’t fully convey. Aside from perpetuating stereotypes and foregrounding the wrong culture, the third sin that translations through Russian have historically committed is erasing the name and the labor of the “bridge” translator. We’ve made sure not to do that with Mothersland. Sadykova’s name and bio appears beside mine in the “About the Translators” section of the book.
SG: You conclude your essay in Turkoslavia with a call to translate more Central Asian literature into English. What practical steps should be taken to achieve this?
SFV: I’m very envious of those governments that actively promote their country’s literature in a smart way, and of well-funded campaigns—like the SALT project—that celebrate and promote translations of South Asian literature. I don’t see much potential, just yet, for similar efforts regarding Central Asian literature, so for now, it remains up to us translators, and to the talented, ambitious writers from the region who have the vision, financial capacity, and patience to get their work translated and shopped to publishers, readers, and reviewers. As long, expensive, and difficult as that process can seem to me, it must be even more excruciating for the authors and the estates looking after their legacies. If the burden is going to be on the translators, there will need to be more of us. That means more and better language training for English speakers, better training and feedback for non-native-English translators of Central Asian literature, and more support for this work from institutions in the English-speaking world. Finally, we need to redirect attention away from work produced by visiting Russian or Soviet writers and onto work produced by people of any ethnicity who call Central Asia home; it’s the equivalent of reading and publishing less Rudyard Kipling and more of the many South Asian authors who are being celebrated today in English. In the context of India and Pakistan, that seems so obvious, doesn’t it? But it hasn’t caught on for this other formerly-colonized part of the continent.
We also desperately need a breakout book that will draw attention to Central Asian literature and make people demand more, an Uzbek Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the Kazakh equivalent of The Vegetarian. But waiting for that book to show up is not a practical plan.
SG: What other Central Asian authors should we be looking out for, and who would you like to translate next?
SFV: At this point in my career, I prefer to interpret this question as “which Central Asian authors are you translating who deserve more attention?” Every author who contributed to Amanat has other work that needs to be translated and read in English. I think that Lilya Kalaus’s “post-colonial romance” novel, The Last Hope Foundation, could be a huge hit; it’s a love story, a ghost story, and a sendup of the international nonprofit world, set within a tense environment where a single Russian man has outsize influence over a quirky, multiracial cast in a made-up Central Asian city. I have a Kazakhstani crime thriller with queer themes in my to-be-translated queue, written by the talented Sabina Tusupova. I’m also waiting for peer reviews on my translation of an astoundingly bizarre novel by Sultan Rayev, from Kyrgyzstan, which explores the absurdities of the Soviet collapse through an allegory about seven patients who escape from a mental hospital, and are stuck wandering the desert. And the great Hamid Ismailov, who produces another brilliant book every year, each completely different from the others, has written his own particular take on the Great Russian Novel, the first from the perspective of Tashkent rather than Moscow or St. Petersburg. That book alone could fuel discussion in any literature class for an entire semester or more, and it really needs to come out in English. Meanwhile, look for his collected short stories from Glagoslav soon, and his post-modern novel on artificial intelligence and the nature of poetry and authorship will be out next year in my translation from Yale University Press.
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.
Sarah Gear is an assistant interview editor at Asymptote. She holds a PhD based on research into the influence of political bias on the translation of contemporary Russian fiction into English. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Language Review, Full Stop, the Glasgow Review of Books, and Rights in Russia. She is based in Scotland.
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