Translators’ Introduction to Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, July 2022)

By Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega

This collection features the stories of women writers from Kazakhstan over the past thirty years, and it is the first anthology of its kind to make the attempt. Their country is the world’s ninth largest by landmass, but it is also a relatively young nation, independently existing as the Republic of Kazakhstan only since December 1991. That is just thirty years ago, a single generation, in a land where tradition dictates that people must know and honor the names of seven generations of their ancestors. One goal of this anthology is to collect what women have written during and about this relatively short period of time, now that the dust has largely settled from the latest cataclysmic change in Kazakh history.

As a title for this diverse collection, we chose Amanat, a Kazakh word with many meanings. An amanat is a promise entwined with hope for the future. It is frequently a task that comes with moral obligation, and often it is a legacy, an item of value, handed down for us to cherish and protect. This collection is our promise, to these writers and the ones who have come before and who will come after them, that their legacy will be honored and continued. Our task as translators is to share their work as well as we can with the wider world. The title is borrowed from Oral Arukenova’s story, of course, but its meaning is fully embodied in the themes of Zira Naurzbayeva’s essay that concludes this collection: a realization that, even in a newly independent country, the present moment never exists independently from the past and the future and that women have a sacred role to play in escorting our families and our nations through times of both joy and sorrow.

**Temirkhan Dariya**, Untitled (2022)
Image description: A sketch-like drawing with the silhouette of an unknown figure with a long shadow before them in the bottom left corner. The rest of the white canvas is filled with giant blue scribbles that have been smudged out.

We know that women writers are underrepresented in translation from all languages into English, and this is certainly true for Kazakhstan. Of the three major translations from Kazakhstan published in the United States in the past several years, two are novels by men of the Soviet generation (Talasbek Asemkulov’s A Life at Noon and Rollan Seisenbayev’s The Dead Wander in the Desert) and one is a poetry collection by a woman (Aigerim Tazhi’s Paper-Thin Skin). The last attempt we know of to collect Central Asian women’s writing, as a matter of fact, was the 2008 Russian-language anthology Solovei v kletke, edited by Lilya Kalaus, an author who contributed several pieces of her own to this volume. The Kazakhstani government has been funding huge volumes of translation into and out of the languages of Kazakhstan lately, but those grants and contracts go overwhelmingly to male authors and to those of older generations who were well entrenched in the official Soviet writing bureaucracy and who remain in those positions today. Those projects also tend to funnel all the writing through Russian translation, even if it was not written in Russian or intended to be read that way. Amanat pays both its Kazakh- and Russian-language stories the respect of translation directly into English. And it spotlights a different kind of writer, the ones passed over for government support and making their own way in a decentralized—but still hierarchical, patriarchal, and occasionally authoritarian—political and cultural system. We want to make sure that writing by women since the end of the Soviet era, from any language and any region, has a chance to be read and considered as part of the ancient and still-evolving culture of Kazakhstan.

One more point on the duality of languages represented in Amanat: we strove to include an equal number of Russian-language and Kazakh-language authors. With the exception of Aya Omirtai, our youngest author and an immigrant to Kazakhstan, both sets of women were mostly educated in the Soviet system, where Russian language and literature held pride of place; with that system officially discarded, they are more free to creatively build on—or disregard entirely—the Russian literary traditions they learned. Kazakhstan is still a bilingual country, though many people, proudly or stubbornly, speak only either Kazakh or Russian; some writers lament a visible divide in the country’s literature between people who read and write in one language or the other. Yet there are cracks in that wall, chiseled out, to a noticeable extent, by women. Fully half the authors in this collection translate literature as well as writing their own, a proportion that would be hard to replicate in any English-speaking country. Translating these stories into English, in turn, is yet another way to honor the work these women do.

A Reader’s History of Kazakhstan

As we assembled and translated the stories in Amanat, we realized that readers who are unfamiliar with the places and events discussed might benefit from a brief introduction to Kazakh history.

Most of the stories in this collection are set in the late Soviet period or since independence, yet Kazakh writers cannot avoid grappling, in one way or another, with a much longer history. People called Kazakhs have inhabited the steppes of Central Asia since at least the sixteenth century. Theirs was a nomadic society organized along family and clan lines, the biggest divisions being between hordes, or jüz, who occupied various areas of the region at different times.

Explorers and military expeditions from the Russian Empire appeared in Kazakhstan early in the eighteenth century and expanded deep into the region for the next hundred years, building forts and forging alliances. Starting in the late nineteenth century, settlers from the European part of the Russian Empire began moving en masse into Kazakh territory, a trend that only intensified after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. After several years of relative autonomy during the Russian Civil War, Kazakhstan was officially incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1920, first as part of the Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic would come into being officially with an administrative reshuffling in 1936, with its capital in Almaty.

The early Soviet years were a time of upheaval, often with disastrous consequences. Soviet economic policies and social engineering projects caused catastrophic famine in the Kazakh steppes, where agricultural collectivization outlawed traditional ways of life, and civil war and arrests (see “The French Beret”) severed family and community ties, frequently beyond repair. Soviet activists and officials moved into the region to supervise economic and educational projects; other ethnic groups were forcibly exiled to various parts of Kazakhstan, some as whole communities (including the population of the village Milochka discovers in “Aslan’s Bride”), some as prisoners in the GULAG system. These huge population shifts resulted in the mix of languages and ethnic groups that coexist in Kazakhstan today. Russian was handed down as the language of power and civilization, demoting the Kazakh language and culture to second-class status; soon new generations were being educated completely in Russian, without seeing a need to learn Kazakh at all. The long essay “The Beskempir” explores the personal stories of several older women who lived through these drastic changes in Kazakh society.

**Temirkhan Dariya**, Untitled (2022)
Image description: A monochromatic painting of a landscape with bare-branched trees outlined in white against the black hills. A white road also stretches across the bottom of the image.

As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the Second World War hit Kazakhstan hard. Men of fighting age were drafted and disappeared, many never to return—“Aslan’s Bride” directly addresses this aspect of the long aftermath of World War II. The start of the Cold War brought nuclear testing to Kazakhstan, centered near Semipalatinsk (Semey in Kazakh), with catastrophic consequences for the environment and human health. As the Soviet economy began to recover during the relative political stability of the 1950s to 1970s, more Kazakhs moved away from rural villages and into the cities, where they received a Soviet education and worked in modern industrial or administrative jobs. This emptying of the villages had its effects, seen in stories like “Romeo and Juliet.” Those who stayed behind in the villages were largely workers at collective farms, as in “Orphan.” City life also had its challenges: “Propiska,” “Hunger,” and “The Lighter” all address the social and economic difficulties faced by Kazakhs who move to or grow up in the big city, while the stories by Zaure Batayeva, Oral Arukenova, Aya Omirtai, and Madina Omarova explore new types of interpersonal relationships generated by apartment living, modern careers, and urban poverty from the late Soviet period to the present day.

As perestroika gathered steam in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, another wave of disruption swept across Central Asia. As the central authorities loosened, then tightened, their grip on Kazakhstani politics, tragedy sometimes resulted. The unrest depicted in “Black Snow of December” brought ethnic tensions in Kazakhstan to the foreground, and resulted in the ethnically Kazakh Nursultan Nazarbayev rising quickly through the ranks of the Soviet government. Nazarbayev was the top official in Kazakhstan when it declared independence on December 16, 1991. Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics to do so, and Nazarbayev personified that tendency to cling to the Soviet past: he remained in power for nearly thirty years, reigning over a system of political cronyism, quashing political dissent, habitually running for reelection almost unopposed, and ordering the construction of a new capital city, Astana (renamed Nur-Sultan in 2019). Although he recently stepped down in favor of his handpicked successor, he retains the title of Leader of the Nation and is considered the de facto top authority, although the protests of January 2022 made his future less certain.

All this political upheaval caused not just an existential crisis for the country, but immediate practical problems for ordinary people, most of all thanks to the collapse of the USSR and Kazakhstan’s abrupt independence in 1991 (see “Hunger”). As the country entered a new post-Soviet era, some writers took the opportunity to revisit Kazakh history and begin a new reckoning with the past (“The Beskempir,” “Operatic Drama,” “Black Snow of December”). Informed and shaped by this history are the big cultural issues Kazakhstan currently faces. Many of our authors comment on the disparities in wealth that erupted with independence (“Hunger”); others focus on the new relationships now being negotiated between the generations (“Amanat”), between the sexes (“An Awkward Conversation,” “18+,” and “A Woman Over Fifty”), and between urban and rural populations.

Mostly, though, the pieces we have included in this anthology are not strictly about the history of Kazakhstan. This is our effort to share some of the most intriguing, memorable, and touching stories and essays written by women there in the past thirty years, regardless of topic. There are authors we would have liked to include but whose work was unavailable; there are certainly authors whose work we’re not even aware of (yet); and there is more being written all the time. Perhaps those stories will find a home in some future anthology in English. But meanwhile, as you read this volume, we hope that you will gain additional insight into the past and present of Kazakhstan, and begin to recognize it through these women’s eyes.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to everyone who contributed wisdom, resources, time, and encouragement to this anthology, which is the fruit of many years of work—first by the authors, then by the translators and editors.

Several of the stories have been published in English in other journals and collections, though sometimes as a different version from the one included here. The always-enthusiastic Susan Harris of Words Without Borders encouraged us to submit stories for a feature on Kazakh women’s writing, a first for that magazine, and published excerpts from “The Beskempir” (here included in full), “School,” and “The Nanny” (another excerpt is published in this collection) in January 2018. The worldwide coronavirus pandemic slowed our efforts starting in 2020, but two of our authors, Lilya Kalaus and Oral Arukenova, saw their pieces about experiencing the pandemic in Kazakhstan published in English that year. Zira Naurzbayeva’s “The Rival” won a place in the volume Best Asian Short Stories 2019. “Romeo and Juliet” was published by the Singapore Unbound blog in January 2021. Drs. Cathy McAteer and Muireann Maguire of the University of Exeter funded the translation of two stories, “Aslan’s Bride” and “Black Snow of December,” as part of the RusTrans project on Russian literature in translation, and published an essay about and excerpts from “Aslan’s Bride” on their blog in June 2021. Olga Zilberbourg and Yelena Furman read the manuscript and asked to feature Olga Mark’s “The Lighter” on their blog, Punctured Lines. Finally, we are grateful to World Literature Today for including Zira Naurzbayeva’s essay “My Eleusinian Mysteries” in their autumn 2021 issue. Thank you to all the editors of those publications who read our translations with interest and saw the beauty in them.

None of the stories here would have turned out as well as they have without feedback from our talented writing and translation colleagues. Shelley had the pleasure of workshopping “Aslan’s Bride” with the Northwest Literary Translators and “The Lighter” at an American Literary Translator’s Association conference in 2019. Both workshops yielded a few just-right turns of phrase for those tales. Author Anne Charnock also read the entire manuscript and provided copious feedback, providing us a valuable non-translatorial point of view on issues of language and culture. All mistakes and unfortunate choices in the translations, however, are ours and ours alone.

Most of all, we thank the twelve Kazakhstani authors who so graciously agreed to have their work translated in Amanat. May this be only the beginning step to sharing their work with the wider world.

Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, July 2022) is available from Ingram, Bookshop, and Amazon in the US and from SGBookshelf in Singapore.

**Temirkhan Dariya,** Untitled (2022)
Image description: A dark cyan blue image with a white silhouette of an unknown figure swimming in the chalky outlines of an ocean. There is also the faint outline of a moon in the top right corner.

Zaure Batayeva is the driving force behind this anthology, the one who dreamed of bringing a collection of Kazakh women’s writing into English. Besides being an author and translator of two pieces included here, and a noted cultural commentator and critic, she is a prolific translator into Kazakh, recently of Sarah Cameron’s groundbreaking historical work, The Hungry Steppe.

Shelley Fairweather-Vega, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Washington, translates fiction, poetry, and screenplays from Russian and Uzbek to English. Aside from extensive work with the authors included in this volume, she has translated short stories and novels by the Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov and the Kazakh musicologist Talasbek Asemkulov, and her translations have been published in Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, Brooklyn Rail, and Translation Review. She has been translating Kazakhstani authors since 2017 and recently completed an intensive course in the Kazakh language.

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Temirkhan Dariya was born 2000 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She grew up in Uralsk and now lives in Almaty. Collages of the young Dariya Temirkhan immerse you in a world of fragments where open memory framing what she saw collects new ideas. The author uses a collage technique by collecting pieces of words and images from magazines and newspapers into her own story. Dariya explores the Kazakh language as a means of creating new archetypes in the young generation, enriching the outcrops with antique plastic.