On January 5, 2009, Historic Joy Kogawa House welcomed to Vancouver a young poet from Kazakhstan. Akerke Mussabekova will be hosted until the middle of May in a homestay at the home of Vancouver International Writers Festival artistic director Hal Wake as part of a cultural exchange initiated by Poet in the City in London, England, sponsored by HSBC and supported and hosted by Historic Joy Kogawa House.
Akerke is a third year-student of the Translation Department at al-Farabi Kazakh National University, the country’s largest and premier university, situated in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan. There her interests in poetry, languages and translating come together in the translation of poems from English into Kazakh. In 2007 Akerke took part in an International Congress of Students and Young Scholars and was awarded the main prize for her research on the poems of Byron as translated into Kazakh during the Soviet era.
“I identified many mistakes in the translations,” she says, “because all were translated into Russian before being translated from Russian into Kazakh.” Akerke’s proficiency in English—she has studied the language since the age of seven—allowed her to review the original English poems and translate them into Kazakh with good results.
Here in Vancouver, Akerke studies literary translation as a guest of UBC’s Department of Creative Writing, where she participates Thursday afternoons in a translation workshop led by Dr. Rhea Tregebov. Throughout the week, Akerke improves her English in high-intermediate level classes in SFU’s English Language and Culture Program. Later this winter she will also participate in SFU Writing and Publishing Program courses.
The expected outcome of Akerke’s stay in Vancouver is a collection of 20 to 25 original poems, to be published in Kazakh, English and Russian, but we have asked that she also consider translating some of Canada’s best poets into Kazakh, in order to develop an audience for our literature in this faroff country.