Nomadic Fashioning: Translation as Kazakh/Kazakhstani Mediation in the Kim- Auezov Encounter

• In Event: Songs of Cotton and Nomads: Invented Traditions in Soviet and Post-Soviet Central Asia

Abstract

The commissioning in 2007 of the Shymkent-born prose writer Anatolii Andreevich Kim (b.1939) to produce a new translation of Mukhtar Auezov’s epic dulogy, Abai and Put’ Abaya, came as a surprise to many. Kim, with little knowledge of the Kazakh language, was chosen over a number of bilingual candidates, including the prominent philologist Gerold Belger. This paper considers how this case reflects the politics of differentiating between civic and ethnonational identities in the Republic of Kazakhstan. It looks at the debates within Kazakh media contemporaneous to the publication of the translations around the apparent privileging of aesthetic merits over cultural ‘authenticity,’ as well as Kim’s own invocation of a certain nomadic personal history in order to construct a more legibly Kazakh authorial identity.

Author

• Sophie Lee, UC Berkeley