I am a literary translator from Russian, and I translate the greatest living author of the country of Azerbaijan. Akram Aylisli is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and one of the most stubborn and courageous writers—and human beings—I know. But I don’t speak a word of any of the languages of Azerbaijan. How could a Russian speaker who has never been to Azerbaijan, who is not a specialist on the country or even the region, become the English language voice of Azerbaijan’s most important writer? The answer, of course, lies in a single, fraught word: colonialism.
I came to translating through area studies. Like most “Soviet scholars” trained in the last century, I was taught to focus on the “European” and “Russian” part of the USSR (meaning Moscow) as the place where most meaningful political, social, and especially cultural action took place. Few of us learned the languages spoken by the more than one hundred other ethnic groups of the USSR; we fully expected that we would always be able to communicate in Russian. Thirty-plus years after the fall of the USSR, the area studies community is just now starting to critically engage with the legacy of colonialism on our own thinking and explore ways to decolonize our practice. But while these developments are welcome—and long overdue—those of us who work with writers from post-Soviet spaces are in many ways still constrained by the everyday realities of that colonial legacy.
Before we can even consider the broader sociocultural effects of Soviet rule on non-Russian-language writers, effects that range from the forced imposition of alphabets that sundered writers from cultural source texts to the violent suppression of writers, writing, and other literary forms—not to mention the suppression of language itself—today’s translators encounter challenges at the most basic, practical level. Too few of us speak the local languages of the former Soviet republics, too few of the people who speak local languages can translate into literary English, and too few financial and other incentives support the translation and publication of literary works written in those languages. To the extent that English-language translators are working with non-Russian-language literary communities in countries that were once part of the Soviet empire—and we are not doing much of it—many of us necessarily still do so via the colonial language of Russian (Ukraine and the Baltic nations are obvious exceptions).
If you were searching for a case study to illustrate the interconnectedness of Russian and Soviet colonialism with the life and work of a single writer, you probably couldn’t find a better example than Azerbaijan’s Akram Aylisli. Born in 1937 at the height of the Stalin purges, Akram Najaf oglu Naibov took his pen name of Akram Aylisli to honor his native village in the Caucasus mountains, Aylis. The village, situated along the Silk Road, has a rich, multicultural history, and most of Aylisli’s fiction is set there. The promising young writer eventually landed in Moscow, where he studied at the famed Gorky Literary Institute—in the colonial language of Russian, of course—alongside such future Soviet luminaries as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina, and Gennady Rusakov. The connections Aylisli forged in Moscow during this period have turned out to be some of the most important and enduring ones of his life.
Back home in Azerbaijan, Aylisli, who writes in Azerbaijani (Azeri), began publishing and editing in several genres, including fiction and drama. Through the gateway language of Russian, his first trilogy of novellas, People and Trees, sold literally millions of copies during the 1970s in the former Eastern Bloc (it is now finally available in English in my translation). In addition to his other literary work, he has translated writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Heinrich Böll, and Salman Rushdie into Azeri. He has also translated some of his own work into Russian. Aylisli has obviously benefitted from his association with Russian language and culture; how else could an author from a tiny Muslim country who writes in a Turkic language sell millions of books all over the world?
Aylisli eventually became something of a Soviet-era literary grandee, traveling around the USSR and abroad as a representative of Soviet letters. But it is his connection to his home village of Aylis, with its multiethnic, multicultural history involving Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Turks, Iranians, and others, that has most influenced his fate. Even before the Soviet Union broke apart, tensions flared between what were to become independent Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Aylisli used his professional position in the Azerbaijani Writers Union to speak out against anti-Armenian hatred. Aylisli knew Heydar Aliyev, independent Azerbaijan’s third president, from his home region of Nakhchivan, and he personally lobbied Aliyev to stop the ongoing destruction of Armenian churches, cemeteries, and cultural monuments in the region. In 2005, Aylisli himself was elected to the National Assembly of Azerbaijan; he apparently stopped attending sessions to protest the bulldozing of Armenian cultural monuments in Nakhchivan.
It was during this post-independence period that Aylisli wrote his controversial novella Stone Dreams. Set against the backdrop of anti-Armenian atrocities and the deliberate erasure of centuries of Armenian culture in Azerbaijan, Stone Dreams rejects violence and nationalism based on ethnicity, expressing sympathy for Armenian characters and respect for Armenian history. The novella also contains a fictionalized account of the real-life 1919 anti-Armenian pogram in Aylis witnessed by Aylisli’s mother. During this same period, Aylisli also wrote a second novella on contemporary political themes: A Fantastical Traffic Jam tells the story of a corrupt, oil-rich nation run by a dictator who bears more than a passing resemblance to Heydar Aliyev. Aylisli didn’t intend to publish either novella during his lifetime, but political events in Azerbaijan in 2012 caused him to reconsider. Unable to publish the novellas in his own country, Aylisli himself translated both into Russian and turned to his old connections in Russian literary circles. Both novellas were accepted by the Russian literary journal Druzhba narodov, but in the event, only Stone Dreams was published in late 2012.
The reaction in Azerbaijan was swift and violent. President Ilham Aliyev, son of Heydar, stripped Aylisli of his title of “People’s Writer” and the presidential pension that went with it. Aylisli’s books were withdrawn from schools and libraries and his plays banned from theaters. He was expelled from the Writers Union and branded an “apostate” by religious authorities. An opposition political party put out a bounty of around $13,000 for anyone who would cut off Aylisli’s ear. His books were burned in several Azerbaijani cities, including Aylis.
Once again, Aylisli found support in Russia. An international group of scholars nominated him for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize “[f]or courage shown in his efforts to reconcile Azerbaijani and Armenian people.” And it was Russian publisher Natasha Perova who emailed me in 2014, saying in essence, “Here’s a book that needs to be translated into English!” In 2016, Aylisli was arrested at the Baku airport on his way to an Italian literary festival; additional charges were later filed against him and are still pending. The 86-year-old writer currently lives under de facto house arrest in Baku. Aylisli’s case has received international support from numerous human rights organizations, including PEN International, PEN America, and Human Rights Watch, again thanks in part to his champions in Russia.
As a practical matter, decentering the colonial legacy of Russia in Aylisli’s personal journey is well-nigh impossible, not least because Aylisli himself has so skillfully used his contacts in post-Soviet Russia to sustain his literary career on the world stage and provide himself with some measure of protection against Azerbaijan’s repressive government. Without the active support of Russian publishers and literati, Aylisli’s later political novellas might still be sitting in his desk drawer. But when we turn to the content of his writing, none of the six Aylisli novellas I’ve translated—those written in the Soviet era and those written post-independence—engage overtly with themes of colonialism or Russian culture per se, although those set in the 1940s touch on the local effects of collectivization, industrialization, famine, and the loss of a generation of men to war. The novella Yemen, perhaps the most thematically “Soviet” of Aylisli’s novellas, is set in late 1989; the novella’s flashbacks memorably evoke the Cold War and Soviet-era careerism, but the central drama is firmly set in Azerbaijan, among Azerbaijanis.
Prior to the 2018 publication of my translation of Aylisli’s Farewell, Aylis, the most recent work of modern fiction associated with Azerbaijan published in English was 1937’s Ali and Nino (many scholars believe, however, that the book’s pseudonymous writer, “Kurban Said,” was not from Azerbaijan at all, but a Jewish man from Kyiv). To my knowledge, only a few translators work from Azeri to English—and most are academics. But the personal danger to any Azerbaijani citizen and the possibility of professional retaliation against any international scholar who might want to translate Aylisli’s work are very effective deterrents to engaging with his work—or even to reviewing his work in translation, as some journal editors have discovered when looking for people to review my translations.
Indeed, it is precisely my own professional distance from Azerbaijan that permits me to translate its most important writer. Aylisli and I communicate in Russian, which I believe is the norm with all his translators. It’s probably safe to say that without the gateway language of Russian, his works could not have been translated into Italian, German, Spanish, or the many other languages in which they now exist. In Aylisli’s case, the post-Soviet, Russian-speaking world, paradoxically, has offered a freer and more welcoming literary space for a writer whose local—I’m not sure we can call it “decolonized”—space has proved too confining.
Honored as I am to translate the words of this wonderful writer into English, I’m always cognizant of the possibilities for misunderstanding that can arise when working through a gateway/relay language. Fortunately for me, Aylisli himself translated Stone Dreams and A Fantastical Traffic Jam into Russian—he once said cryptically that he prefers his Russian-language version of Stone Dreams to the version he wrote in Azeri—meaning that for those works, at least, the author’s own words serve as the relay text. Additionally, the titular autobiographical essay from Farewell, Aylis, in which Aylisli meditates on his own situation after his books were burned, is something of a hybrid text, with various elements contributed in Azeri and English, mediated by Russian.But the majority of Aylisli’s writing originates in Azeri, and I look forward to the day when there will be multiple translations of his work made directly from the language in which he writes. The colonial experience will always be part of Akram Aylisli’s story, of course, but the colonial language—and the constraints a colonial language inevitably impose on a writer—need not always speak for him.
This essay was adapted from remarks delivered at the November 2023 conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).
Katherine E. Young‘s latest publication in translation is Akram Aylisli’s People and Trees (Plamen Press, 2024). She has also translated work by Anna Starobinets (memoir), Akram Aylisli (fiction), and numerous Russian-language poets from Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. Awards include the Granum Foundation Translation Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. Young is also the author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist) and the editor of Written in Arlington. From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.
Dear Katherine, thank you so much for opening our eyes to this author, your work translating his writing, and this cogent, clear discussion of the imposition of colonial languages on writers. So proud of you! I will share widely.
Dear Katherine, I am so proud of you for your work, your decision to write about this all-important topic. I will share this widely.