ABOUT WORKSHOP
'STYQ Online
The MÄTIL translation workshop is an experiment and an attempt to start a dialogue between contemporary literatures in Kazakh and Russian in Kazakhstan. We invited living and working Kazakhstani poets to translate each other. The participants were: Abzal Suleimen, Anastasia Belousova, Victoria Rusakova, Ramil Niyazov and Tilek Yrysbek.
In order to give them an international experience, we also invited a poet from Poland who lives in Birmingham (UK) – Bogdan Piasecki.
The workshop was moderated by Mariya Deykute (USA), a poet, translator, teacher and screenwriter who currently works at Nazarbayev University.
We protected six days of our participants' lives from other worries (as far as possible) and during this time we talked about translation, about different approaches, about the peculiarities of languages; asked each other questions, immersed ourselves in each other's texts, learned the joy of recognition and enjoyed interesting coincidences.
The workshop was held in three languages (Kazakh, English and Russian) and resulted in a series of mutual translations of the participating poets. We present to your attention these texts.
МАРИЯ ДЕЙКУТЕ
Workshop mediator, English and Russian translation editor
Maria Deikute is a poet, translator, teacher and screenwriter, and an organizer of art projects aimed at a dialogue between poetry, music, theater and the visual arts. She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Massachusetts University: Boston and the Department of Anthropology at Brooklyn College. Author of essays, poems and librettos in Russian and English, participant of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and Gallup Theater Festival. Recent publications in Rust+Moth, Dos Gatos Press, Cholla Needles, Incessant Pipe. Currently, he works at the Nazarbayev University in Astana.
АРДАК НУРГАЗЫ
Kazakh translation editor
Ardak Nurgazy is a poet, novelist, and literary critic. Born in 1972 in Xinjiang, Toli County, China. Author of books of poems "The Book of False Freedom", 2009, "Hummingbird", in Chinese and Kazakh, 2011, "Accuracy and Transparency", in English, Chinese and Kazakh, 2014, "A Garden of Trees and Other Poems", 2016, "Pebbles, Eggs and the Fence: A Collection of Poetry from Central Asia", Puncher & Wattmann Publishing house, Australia, 2020, monographs "Modern Kazakh Poetry" (2010), "Cognition and Taste", 2018, short story books "Lines and Dots", 2010. The poems were translated into English, Chinese, and Russian.
