Slavonic Studies and CamCCEEES present, as part of the Translation Lecture series:

Everything is Translation

Hamid Ismailov & Donald Rayfield

In conversation

Thursday, 28 November, 5:30 pm

Knox Shaw Room

Sidney Sussex College

In this presentation, celebrated Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov will analyze his experiences as a translator, his achievements and failures, the unresolvable challenges that made him stop translating and how he discovered, as he notes, ‘that though formally I stopped my translating practice, in fact, I'm translating myself intrinsically, writing in Uzbek books meant to be written in Russian or vice versa.’

Having learnt Uzbek in order to translate two novels in Ismailov’s recent Central Asian Trilogy (Devils’ Dance and ManaschiI), Donald Rayfield will speak to that experience in the context of his many years as a historian, literary scholar and translator of Russian and Georgian texts.

Hamid Ismailov: Born in 1954 in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist and writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 due to what the state dubbed "unacceptable democratic tendencies." He emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he worked with the BBC World Service for 25 years. His works are banned in Uzbekistan. He is the author of numerous novels in Russian and Uzbek. Several of his Russian-original novels have been published in English translation, including The Railway, The Dead Lake, which was long listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Underground. The Devils’ Dance (2018) is the first of his Uzbek novels to appear in English, and the translation by Donald Rayfield and John Farndon won the 2019 ERBD Literature Prize. The Devils' Dance  forms a trilogy alongside Of Strangers and Bees (2019) and Manaschi (2021)

Donald Rayfield, Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London, was born in 1942. He was educated at Dulwich College and Cambridge (Magdalene), where he studied a number of modern languages. His first translation job was interpreting between the directors of Moscow and London zoo, when the Soviet male giant panda came to London to be introduced to London’s female panda. The pandas refused to mate, but the translator was paid with one female wallaby, which over the next forty years became a herd of wallabies in Hampshire.

He is the author of monographs on Soviet history (Stalin and his Hangmen) and Georgian literature and history, as well as a translator of Russian prose (Gogol, Leskov) and poetry (Mandelshtam). This year he published a history of the Crimean Tatars and their Khanate, ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’.

In 1973 he first visited Georgia, and over the next 40 years translated two major poets (Vazha Pshavela, Galaktion Tabidze) and prose writers, notably two novels by Otar Chiladze, Kvachi by Mkhaill Javakhishvili. Translating problems caused such frustration that he applied for a very large grant to compile as editor-in-chief A Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary. This was published in 2006.  He has published a history of Georgia (Edge of Empires) and a History of Georgian Literature.

Since then he has translated two novels from the Uzbek by Hamid Ismailov, as well as selected poems from Crimean Tatar.