Uzbek Stories for English Readers: Cold War-Era Translations of Uzbek Literature in the Journal Soviet Literature

• In Event: Provincializing Internationalism: Periodicals, Publishers and Practices I: Translating

Abstract

In 1956, alongside his “Secret Speech,” Nikita Khrushchev announced a Soviet “turn toward the developing world.” One institution tasked with responding to this imperative was the translation journal Soviet Literature; it did so, in part, by presenting works from the “Soviet East” to foreign readers. This paper looks closely at the journal’s translation and presentation of two major Uzbek authors, Abdulla Qahhor and O‘tkir Hoshimov, in light of Cold War internationalism. Published by the Soviet Writers’ Union in English and other foreign languages from 1948–1990, an impressive number of Central Asian authors appeared in the journal’s pages; their work reached both the West and the decolonizing world, to which Central Asians were framed as cultural emissaries. But with its inclusion of Central Asian writers, the journal exercised imaginative geography and chronology over their work, sometimes distancing it from Russian content and sometimes presenting it as integrated or equal, sometimes Orientalizing texts and other times Occidentalizing them to compete with the West. In creating its own mini-canon of Uzbek literature for foreign consumption, the journal necessarily engaged with the shifting rhetoric of Soviet nationalities policy, with various forms of nationalism inherent in the Soviet system, and with trends in Uzbek literature itself.

Author

• Sabrina Jaszi, UC Berkeley