Introduction

by sabrina jaszi and ena selimović 

This issue marks some big changes in the journey of our nearly-five-year-old translation collective. It features a tighter editorial team and a tighter collection of deeply introspective works. This was our first time working as a duo, without co-founder Mirgul Kali or a guest poetry editor, so we set out with the goal of ensuring we could attend to each accepted submission without feeling like we were paddling with insufficient oars. To that end, putting out an issue with fewer pieces was crucial. We anchored ourselves throughout this process by taking on our first co-translation (of Suhbat Aflatuni’s “The Mistle Thrush”), included in this issue. 

The eight authors in Issue 3 likewise put eight different languages into play: Altai, BCMS (Croatian), Uzbek, and five different Russians. The variations on Russian include that of: 1) Iosif Pavlovich Utkin's revolutionary poem set in Moldova, 2) Osip Mandelstam’s Stalin-era Voronezh Notebooks, 3) Chingiz Aitmatov's Childhood, which presents Russian as a language wielding the power to transcend borders, 4) Suhbat Aflatuni's short story, which challenges the dominance of Russian through non-Russian words and phrases within a Russian framework, and 5) Brontoy Bedyurov's self-translation of his poem from Altai to Russian, which served as the bridge for Elena Koroleva’s translation into English—another instance of Russian subsuming but also working jointly with a so-called smaller language. Rather than an argument for  Russian as a singular language reserved for the powerful, these pieces are a collective testament to the language’s immense capacities—failed and realized. Though these may be categorized as “Jewish” Russian or “non-Russian” Russian, such labels quickly come to seem superficial or simply wrong. A mash-up of Russians wouldn’t be complete, perhaps, without the mash-up that has become of BCMS (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian)—in this case, with Marko Pogačar’s piece. We all make sense of the language we speak and write in—whether by choice, circumstance, or both—for ourselves.

Just as with its variety of Russians, the issue stumbled upon an emphasis on life-writing. Marko Pogačar’s multilingual autofiction piece tells the story of four blades across multiple generations, an allegory for rising nationalisms and Yugoslavia’s transition from socialism to capitalism. Counterposed to one another are reminiscences by, on the one hand, perhaps the best known writer of modern Central Asia, Chingiz Aitmatov, reflecting on his successes in Russian, and on the other hand, the anguished Uzbek-language work of poet and fiction writer Saida Zunnunova, whose professional and personal lives faced extreme hardship under Stalin when her more famous husband was imprisoned as an “enemy of the people.” The issue places the works of these two Central Asian greats—one celebrated, and one largely overshadowed—appropriately beside one another and in conversation. Joining them are the poems of Janga Todosh Bedyurov, father of Brontoy Bedyurov, from the southern Siberian Altai region. Written as personal letters to the poet’s family while he fought in the Second World War, Bedyurov’s pro-Soviet, anti-fascist poems reflect Altain aesthetics through their understandings of nature, spirituality, and the self. Two seemingly contradictory worldviews meld and coexist. All three works offer their own wrenchingly personal takes on what it meant to be Soviet and non-Russian. 

Another welcome stumbling point: while researching the ever-challenging phrase “malo morgen”—yet another (!) mash-up (of Serbo-Croatian and German) which communicates an unlikelihood of something happening, we came across Hanna Priemetzhofer’s print titled—you might have guessed—“malo morgen.” We were elated when Hanna agreed to contribute graphic designs for this issue. Hanna not only created the visual art accompanying the pieces, but also read them enthusiastically. Her experimentation with text and typeface visualizes the issue’s myriad forms of multilingualism. You can learn more about her work here.

We hope you enjoy Issue 3, and we remain grateful to everyone who made it possible:

donohon abdugafurova, suhbat aflatuni, chingiz aitmatov, brontoy bedyurov, janga todosh bedyurov, john high, elena koroleva, osip mandelstam, marko pogačar, hanna priemetzhofer, mirza purić, dan szetela, iosif pavlovich utkin, matvei yankelevich, katherine e. young, and saida zunnunova.