Untitled - Azam Abidov - poet and translator

forces me to read small passages at a time and ponder the depths of
their meanings.
One area where Navoi can be used to speak out is in the realm
of Western misconception of Central Asia. Western perception of
Central Asia, as with most of our perceptions of other nations and
societies, is not nearly whole enough. For me to address this sort
of reductionism requires that I be like my mentor Navoi, that I be
a ‘translator poet’ who speaks against a categorized system and
provide a translation that challenges the status quo for an audience
that can hear it.
What often happens in my field of literary translation is that
the ‘bestseller’ mentality guides the translation process. The text
is illusively made as fluent as possible so it doesn’t come across as
foreign at all.
This guarantees not only that the foreign text will reach the
widest possible domestic audience, but that the text will undergo an
extensive domestication, an inscription with cultural and political
values that currently prevail in the domestic situation – including
those values according to which the foreign culture is represented…
often stereotypes that permit easy recognition. 3
These kind of translations of foreign literature keep alive the
misconceptions that the reader’s domestic culture has against the
culture and values of a different land. I want to be a ‘translator poet’
of Navoi who keeps what challenges the Western misconceptions
of Central Asia, what will add to its worldview, and yet be sensitive
to what differences of Navoi it can handle. I want to push the
limits, but I don’t want to go so far that the Eastern Navoi cannot
be understood by the Western mind.
For example, when translating my first Navoi book, my Uzbek
co-translator and I took some liberties and made some changes in
the English so that the story would make some sense to the average
reader. We sought to make the Middle Ages story come alive in
the English language in its own unique way. The native English
person with some interest in Central Asian literature was our target
culture. However, we made sure that the foreignism of our ancient
3
Venuti, Lawerence. The Scandals of Translation. London; Routledge, 1998, p.
87,161.
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