Place: Kazakhstan

Vision, Capacity, and Patience: Interview with Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Part II

November 14, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Gear

Kazakhstani [authors] are . . . trying to decide what story to tell the world about themselves.

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?

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Home Country” by Ksenia Rogozhnikova

May 28, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Nina Murray

the thieving babushka / carries her loot / down the freezing streets

This Translation Tuesday, we are honored to present a poem by the Kazakh poet Ksenia Rogozhnikova, deftly translated by the Ukrainian poet Nina Murray. With wry humor and plainspoken kindness, the poem’s unnamed speaker bears witness to the antics of a “little match girl” far more defiant and vivacious than her namesake, and to the theft of a roll of toilet paper by an old woman in a shopping center. Together, these images form a subtly generous portrait of urban life, a flicker of warmth against winter’s chill.

Home Country

the little match girl
sets things on fire
with the tiny bombs
she throws
under people’s feet

I dive into a mall
to get warm
let an elderly woman
ahead
into the bathroom

READ MORE…

Spring 2024: Highlights from the Team

May 6, 2024  |  in News  |  by Alex Tan, Heather Green, Janet Phillips, MARGENTO, Matilde Ribeiro, Matthew Redman, Michelle Chan Schmidt, and Vuslat D. Katsanis

More entrypoints into the glorious Spring Asymptote, courtesy of our generous team!

Aigerim Tazhi’s “Following the Breath of the Earth” is a refreshing reminder of another way of life through Kazakh spirituality—one that treasures the interconnectedness of nature and all of the species in it, where nature stands for truth in an undivided and nonhierarchical ecosystem. The ancestral belief in the gods of the sky (Tengri) and earth (Umai) echos the current calls for decolonial approaches to climate justice. And yet, the critique of the tourists who contaminate glacier lakes in Tibet, or the rise of yurts for camping trips North America, or the odd questions asked of the poet in Rotterdam, gently caution against the performative gestures that appropriate Indigenous beliefs. The story’s motif of nomadic travel and breath fits well in this conception of an interconnected world.

This theme of nature and the interconnected ecosystem for alternative worldbuilding is carried out in several other articles, including Jang Okgwan’s poems (tr. Susan K), with motifs of water and moonlight; and Leeladhar Jagoori’s poems (tr. Matt Reeck), of mountains and terrain.

I also appreciated the attention on language, the limits of the written word, and the rebelliousness of vernacular expression in this issue, especially in Sebastián Sánchez’s interview with Chilean author Diamela Eltit (tr. Fionn Petch) and in the poetry of German-Turkish Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç (tr. Özgecan Kesici). Each provides glimpses into the capacity of language play and hybrid rule-bending for community-building, political resistance, and memorialization.

 —Vuslat D. Katsanis, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Chen Yuhong’s poem “Buddhist Pine” opened my eyes to different ways of being still/degrees of stillness. The way the poem successively transposes metaphors of animal, seasonal, granitic, and athletic stillness on the motionless pine made me understand that things can be still in different ways. That the pine might have a willed, disciplined stillness, or that it might be coiled, or frozen, or at rest, or somehow all at once.

 —Matthew Redman, Digital Editor READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2024

April 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Nestor Gomez, and Willem Marx

New titles from Kazakhstan, South Korea, and The Netherlands!

This month, our editors introduce three incredible new works that delve into family, solitude, and fractured legacy. From the lyrical explorations of family by Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, the delightful oddities of Yun Ko-Eun’s sincere and humorous short stories, and the vivid, compassionate vignettes of Kazkah author Baqytgul Sarmekova, these newly published translations invite reflection, tenderness, and joy.

off

Off-White by Astrid Roemer, translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott and David McKay, Two Lines Press, 2024

Review by Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large

In Off-White, Astrid Roemer weaves a grand, multigenerational narrative around the matriarchical figure of Grandma Bee and her family in Suriname, a South American country on the Caribbean coast. The year is 1966, and each member of the Vanta family is going about their lives in different directions, threatening the bond that is necessary to continue Grandma Bee’s vision of the family’s legacy.

While one part of this narrative is deeply embedded in identity, exploring how structures of race, class, and gender have been encoded within the family, another part is inextricably tied to loss and getting lost, as various characters all reckon with their history (cultural, personal, and traumatic) in different ways. Translators Lucy Scott and David McKay demonstrate remarkable skill and artistry in conveying the story with ease and clarity, relaying the subtle tensions in both the spoken and the unspoken. Through their work, Roemer’s prose enlivens with emotive and physical details (especially that of meals), deeply coloring the multiplicity that threatens the family’s unity while highlighting their diversity of experiences.

Even before beginning the novel, we are immediately confronted with the issue of color in the title: Off-White. The Dutch term, “Gebroken Wit,” is also included in the book’s very first page, and Roemer describes it as having multiple translated meanings, such as “broken white” or “refracted white.” In a conversation with Two Lines Press, Roemer states: “essentially, [gebroken wit] refers to refracted sunlight—a rainbow, for instance—showing a wide range of colors. . . [It] also means that sunlight always finds a way through time and always keeps gathering together.” This imagery of sunlight resonates strongly throughout the novel in the many harrowed struggles of the Vanta family: Heli’s burgeoning relationship with an older married man who teaches at her school, Louise’s ongoing incestuous relationship with her brother, and Laura’s diminishing mental health from the sexual harassment she experienced as a child at the hands of Grandma Bee’s brother, Lèon.  READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Dymov” by Yuri Serebriansky

February 27, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Sarah McEleney

The parachutes activated, and Dymov swung from the cords, examining the lines of the converging rivers below. . .

This Translation Tuesday, a hostile confrontation ensues when an astronaut inadvertently kills a cow—or two—during his Earth-landing. Here is translator Sarah McEleney on Serebriansky’s startling work of imagination: “This short story by Kazakhstani author Yuri Serebriansky reflects upon the indirect costs of space travel. While the story is meant to take place somewhere in Russia, Serebriansky considers it very much connected to Kazakhstan, as it was inspired by his trip to an area near the Baikonur cosmodrome. The author was traveling in the middle of spring when people were tending to their gardens in the countryside, and suddenly, he noticed shiny silvery containers everywhere, which reminded him of the tripods belonging to the aliens in H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. People had gathered parts of rockets that had fallen to the Earth and were using them instead of typical garden containers. At the time, Serebriansky already knew that these pieces of rockets emitted geptil, a rocket propellent hazardous to human health and the environment. With this in mind, a contemplation of the unforeseen consequences of space travel is embedded in “Dymov,” in which the protagonist’s thirst for personal heroism is dashed by his calamitous reentry to Earth.”

I’m a bird in a cuckoo clock. Soon I’ll jump out and say my “cuckoo!” to everyone. No. Not aloud. Because, after all, everything is recorded. The whole country considers you a hero, and you’re the next laboratory mouse in line, and everything is recorded. More important than a dog, of course. Dymov. The “cuckoo!” will be long, since I’ve got something to say. They’ll write: “he conducted experiments.” And really, I conducted them. I beat my heart when I had to, I ran blood through my veins. I was in a spaceship for three days without a spacesuit. Every one of us is the first in something. And what I am is a cuckoo bird, and also, codename “Fog”. Do I want anything else? Yes, I want to go to the moon. I want to climb out of here in a spacesuit, I want to go home. To my daughter. And to church. To Father Anisim, to Anisim.

 “Fog’, we’re going to prepare for descent, put on your spacesuit, we’re checking the telemetry before braking. Everything’s in order here.”

“Got it. I’m getting back into my spacesuit.”

That impossible silence is broken. Come on, speak, guys. I’d listen to your sputtering for a century. In an airplane you at least feel the engine, but here there’s just inertia. Space. It’s a heavy word. But howl. Everything is recorded.

The cabin of the spaceship becomes more claustrophobic in zero-gravity. But what can you do? There’s a lever attached to a cord, flying like they had warned. The planet below looks astonishingly lifeless, no traces of life from here—who says that on the radio? Maybe I didn’t hear it there? The globe above the control panel seems like it was made by Neanderthals. But you have to believe in it. Falling to it out of curiosity, into the clouds, from this, not even height, but rather, void—it’s scary, comrades. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Is That You, Seryozha?” by Mikhail Zemskov

February 13, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Yuliya Gubanova

He exhaled into the receiver one more time and smiled happily. The tip of his nose trembled slightly.

This Translation Tuesday, a short story from Kazakhstani author Mikhail Zemskov, brought into English by Yuliya Gubanova. Alone in his dirty apartment, an oddball takes a creepy enjoyment from cold-calling strangers on his Soviet-era landline. Never speaking, only breathing suggestively into the receiver, he becomes the missing, longed-for person in another family’s domestic drama – a ghost, even – before hanging up and dialing his next victim. A grim prank, inflicting his loneliness on others.

He set his plate aside. The Korean-style carrots from a nearby cooking shop turned out to be just carrots, finely chopped, dusted with red pepper, and drizzled with vinegar. And stale, too. He suspected they would be… but for some reason he craved something spicy today.

He turned on the TV (an old Soviet one, still functioning, so why should he throw it away?). He switched channels, and turned the TV off.

He rubbed his stubble, which was coming up in gray patches. “I’d better shave, or it’ll be harder to do in a few days. Or should I grow the beard again?” But with those specks of gray, the beard – even when washed and carefully brushed – looked shaggy and unkempt.

It would have been nice to clean the flat today. But he was tired and did not want to get up from the deep armchair which had already been sagged by his parents. In fact, it had been a week since he first thought of tidying up. But in previous days, he had been just as reluctant to get out of the deep armchair.

He pulled up an old disc telephone set, also left over from his parents. He took a stack of small bills out of his jeans pocket, pulled one out at random. A ten-ruble bill. He put it on the table next to the telephone. He picked up the receiver. He dialed the numbers from the serial number of the dark green paper carefully and slowly. He cleared his throat.

Three rings, and somebody answered on the other end.

“Hello. Hello?” there was the uncertain voice of a young guy. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Kazakh Culture” by Akhmet Baitursynuly

June 27, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Jake Zawlacki

Alash’s people all known: / Who was not measured?

The influential musings of Kazakh intellectual Akhmet Baitursynuly are sympathetically brought to light by translator Jake Zawlacki this Translation Tuesday. A letter to his people in the form of poignant free verse, Kazakh Culture reflects Baitursynuly’s deep care for Kazakh autonomy and the nationalist ideology that spurred his resounding contributions to Kazakh communities across the globe.

A goose might freeze flying, honking,
Landing in a dry lake, cooling.
A grassfire might break out,
Our bodies burned—what remains?

Alash’s people all known:
Who was not measured?
“I’m well,” they all say,
Wellness confined to themselves.

Chattering, feigning skilled speech,
Rushing, pushing, galloping.
Unbelted, a slack child coming
Like half-pressed felt, unfinished.

Hunched, old hunters seeking meat,
Searching, just one more honorable feast.
Sincere, they’re here and there
Counting few to many, simple but generous.

Unhelping, many rich misers
Like boats on rocking waves.
So many lie silent, sleeping,
Moving without purpose or ambition.

We line up with them, orderly,
Satisfied with sparkling buttons.
What use do you get from your talent,
If not struck in the right places?

These words, this letter I write with sorrow,
No value left, the lost Kazakh.
Rich worry wealth, educated worry rank,
Little worry left for the people.

*Alash encompasses the three historical tribal and territorial divisions of Kazakhs. It was also used in 1917 as the name of the provisional government Alash Orda, of which Baitursynuly was a member. The term is often used synonymously with “Kazakh.”

Translated from the Kazakh by Jake Zawlacki.

READ MORE…

Our Winter 2022 Issue Is Here!

January 20, 2022  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring new work from a record 43 countries!

Shout it from the rooftops: Asymptote turns eleven today! We celebrate our 43rd issue with new work from a record 43 countries in our most bountiful edition yet. Highlights include an exclusive interview with acclaimed poet George Szirtes and a Flemish Literature Special Feature organized in partnership with Flanders Literature, showcasing new translations of International Booker Prize nominee Stefan Hertmans, YA superstar author Bart Moeyaert, and up-and-coming raconteur Rachida Lamrabet.

Our Winter 2022 edition not only puts the “world” in “world literature,” it also interrogates the meaning of it. Take the case of Aaron Zeitlin, the Yiddish poet who was stranded overseas when the Nazis invaded his native Poland and killed his entire family. Written in a language “half of whose speakers had been wiped off the face of the earth,” Zeitlin’s grief-stricken poetry appears to be without a world, and therefore can not, as Yeshua G.B. Tolle argues beautifully, be classified as world literature. In her fiction, Jasna Jasna Žmak imagines a similar apocalyptic fate for the speakers of her language in a thought experiment inspired by Barthes, only to emerge with a newfound appreciation for all the words in her language, including the ones she hates. After all, words can summon entire civilizations—even the bygone ones—as they do in Gesualdo Bufalino’s thrilling list of extinct professions (the lady with the bloodsuckers, among them!). “The disappearing world” is also the subject of visual artist—and the first public figure in Spain to openly discuss his HIV status—Pepe Espaliú’s devastating poems evoking his final days under a sky dense like “the mouth of black clouds.” By contrast, bilingual Kazakh poet Anuar Duisenbinov’s exuberant “overloved, overdosed” narrator “float[s] in exultation” through his “luminous and windy capital,” contemplating “the ability of speech to sprout.” As it turns out, speech does sprout everywhere all over the world. Alongside Duisenbinov, we’re thrilled to debut in English Emil-Iulian Sude, one of the first award-winning writers of Roma ethnicity in Romania; Rachid Djaïdani, a French filmmaker whose 1999 bestselling novel and classic of banlieue writing is only now available, thanks to frequent contributor Matt Reeck; and Kim Su-on, a young Korean writer whose dazzlingly atmospheric story is a masterclass in worldbuilding.

newnew

The tagline of this eleventh anniversary edition is “The Worlds We Live In”—pointedly not “The World We Live In”—meant to express the simultaneity of all our myriad existences, such as those inhabited by George Szirtes, who discusses his new collection of poems, the state of Hungarian literature, and translation in the age of Brexit. Also working from the liminal space of migration is Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte, who explains why Barbados’s recent renouncement of the Queen is only the first of many necessary steps in healing (since, according to him, there is no “post” to colonialism). Neske Beks also performs a necessary act toward healing on behalf of Black women everywhere by centering the story of Ann Lowe, the Black designer responsible for Jackie Kennedy’s bridal gown in 1953, in her retelling of haute couture’s history. Pair her 2020 essay sparked by an exhibition with Charlotte Van den Broeck’s nonfiction excavating the curious real-life case of the Princess Caraboo of Javasu aka Mary Wilcocks—who might very well be the first yellowface captured in any artistic medium (an 1817 oil painting that shared a moment with Van den Broeck at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in her last gallery visit before the pandemic). All of this is illustrated in talented Singaporean guest artist Yeow Su Xian (Shu)’s irresistible palette and forms—I dare you to say hers isn’t the most fun cover we’ve had in a while!

For more Asymptote goodness, subscribe to our newsletter or Book Club, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and our two Instagram accounts, and consider submitting work (Swedish-English translators take note: our recently announced call for submissions to a paid Swedish literature feature ends Mar 1). And of course, we’d be delighted if you’d like to come on board as a team member (apply by Feb 1) or, to honor our eleven full years in world literature perhaps, as one of our generous sustaining members! As always, thank you for your readership and support.

BECOME A SUSTAINING MEMBER TODAY

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

Translation Tuesday: “Whalesong” by Aurélia Lassaque

October 6, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Madeleine Campbell

And her child would have asked her one day why isn’t the Earth called Sea when it’s covered by all that water?

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, a mother’s heartbreak echoes the mournful music of the Earth in Aurélia Lassaque’s hybrid story “Whalesong.” Our protagonist is a prodigious scholar processing a loss so excruciating and traumatic that our narrator frames it via global atrocities and cataclysms. The Earth’s persistent gravity seems absurd, even obscene. Mass extinctions are viewed as unimportant. Through the speaker’s close-third reveries, we witness the massacre of the French Cathars—a gnostic community burned alive by the Church—and meditate upon the world’s cruelty as their ashes are washed away by a seemingly divine rain. Even the sea’s withdrawal evokes a desert’s emptiness. Excerpted from Lassaque’s forthcoming novel, “Whalesong” marries poetry with music, verse with prose—its aural artistry is preserved and accented by Madeleine Campbell’s exquisite translation, which strategically leaves passages in French, Occitan, and Latin to preserve bits of the source language’s sound. Just as our protagonist writes love poems in Occitan (the “language of secrets”), Lassaque’s prose itself reads like verse. A hauntingly beautiful selection by a contemporary troubadour.

She doesn’t know what to pack in her suitcase . . . Toothpaste. A translucent comb with a broken tooth.

When do milk teeth start to grow in? Why this amnesia of our early years? Why don’t our memories reach back to our birth? We are born, and then we step out on a tightrope without a net. We survive infancy. It takes so much effort there’s no room left to remember them. No room either for the future save for the thirst.

What is she to do with all the things they’ve given her? If only she could track the objects passing from nursery to nursery, outgrown in a matter of weeks. Why do people discard them so readily? What would a map of their journey look like?

She has fluoride toothpaste. She thinks it’s silly to deny herself a microwave yet use a toothpaste that causes cancer.

To lose your parents is to become an orphan. To lose your child, what is that? Why is there no word to express it?

*

Outside, it’s pelting down. In the South it rains less than in Paris. The rain is striking. In the tongue of Oc they say it’s raining millstones, raining anvils. A Christian god wouldn’t pelt them with anvils. Mind you . . . He did allow men, women, and children to gather in his temple, be massacred in his temple, even though the stones bleached out, all the blood had dried off centuries ago. That god had let it be known: Kill them all, God will know His own. The river of blood might be flowing still. There may be the odd mistake. A tiny martyr disappears down the river. Does God really welcome all innocents? The god who imposes baptism to save one’s soul, what does he do with the stillborn?

Dehors il pleut à coup de pelles. Plòu a palas.

It’s raining shovels. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Notes of a Writer” by Almaz Myrzakhmet

July 24, 2018  |  in Translations  |  by Mirgul Kali

Don’t writers employ souls of innocent people?

Our Summer 2018 issue launched a few days ago and it is filled with gems from around the world. This Translation Tuesday we bring you another fabulous translation from a language and country never before featured on the blog! Translator Mirgul Kali introduces us to the piece:

Kazakh writer Almaz Myrzakhmet’s brilliant prose is often described as detached, but this is the detachment of a sharp and skillful writer confident in his ability to lure an unsuspecting reader into his story and play with their mind. “The Notes of a Writer,” which follows a young author who is anguished by the visions of his own unwritten story, is both a puzzle and a taste of the joys and struggles of the creative process.

The most delightful and challenging moments in translating this short story concern the old Kazakh expressions which refer to images that might not be easily invoked in an English-language reader’s mind. Yet they offer a rare and intimate glimpse into the culture and history of the nomadic people who had for centuries roamed the steppes of Central Asia. The language of the Kazakhs, who bred horses, maintains that misery can be “the size of a long trough,” evoking an image of an old wooden tub filled with putrid water; that the laughter of happy lovers sounds like a “jingle of coins,” perhaps at a lively, colorful market in a town along the Silk Route; and that fear feels like “a snake coiled in your bosom.” You are invited to discover these expressions, scattered like vintage jewels throughout Myrzakhmet’s striking post-modernist story.

The sound of her heels—like a tongue clicking—would begin at the bottom of a staircase, eventually reach the brown door of my rental apartment on the third floor, reverberate weakly and pause. At this point, she would become unusually still as if she was holding her breath and listening. A moment later she should tap the door timidly with the tips of her fingers.

I would open the door immediately. Acting as if she came to her own place, she barely looked at me and walked in, grazing me with her shoulder. The usual moves. Her, glancing over a picture of a bear playing with cubs, listlessly flipping through scribbled pieces of paper on my desk, walking over to a window and looking out—these actions were her daily routine. A bed would squeak as she sat on it. I would lock the door and take a cigarette from the desk.

READ MORE…