Chapter 5 - Recognitions

Summary

This chapter argues that from late Stalinism to the Khrushchev Thaw (1941–1964), Eastern poets and orientalist translators inflected multinational and international translation with a distinctively Persianate ethics of love and hospitality. The chapter develops an account of a mid-century internationalist sentimentality grounded in translation, which prefigures subsequent attempts in feminist theory to reconfigure the patriarchal idea of translation as possessive love into a more receptive model of translation. The opening section challenges the established Soviet and Russian studies narrative in which multinational literature is said to have been invented in Russian translation, showing Eastern poets’ active involvement in programming their own reception. A series of case studies follow. One section considers the collaborations of Uzbek and Russian poets on bilingual poems of hospitality for the Jewish refugees flooding Tashkent during the Second World War. Another shows how the embedded sonnets of Romeo and Juliet were brought into the ghazal mode in Tajik translation. Another shows how the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s theater adaptation of the classical romance Farhad and Shirin sparked Thaw literature debates in Russian and Turkic translations. Poets discussed include Ghafur Ghulam, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Simonov, and Zhala Isfahani.