from the article:

"Shakarim was a late 19th–early 20th century Kazakh poet, composer, historian, and translator. Despite having no formal education, he was fluent in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, and Russian languages, versed in Middle Eastern literature and Islamic theology, and familiar with the works of Western and Russian writers and philosophers. Though he initially welcomed the changes brought by the October Revolution in Russia, he later became disillusioned with Soviet politics and lived a reclusive life in the mountains of Eastern Kazakhstan. After he was shot by NKVD policemen in 1931, his songs, ballads, and historical narratives continued to be transmitted orally or via hand-written copies among the local population.

Steeped in the lyricism of medieval Arabic and Persian poetry and the realism of the canonical Kazakh poet Abai (his uncle and mentor), Shakarim developed an intimate, impassioned poetic style through which he explored the spiritual, philosophical, and social issues of his time. Many of Shakarim’s poems feature the figure of “жар,” the Beloved, which in Sufi poetry — particularly in the works of Hafez, whom Shakarim translated and took influence from — represents God. While Shakarim’s beloved is a mortal woman, as in Hafez’s ghazals, she is more than a mere object of desire; she is the singular source of the poet’s overwhelming emotion, compelling him to action. In his later works, Shakarim explicitly links the image of the Beloved — rendered in our translation as “truelove” — to the idea of Truth. By extension, he sees his life mission as a search for Truth through learning and writing."

“Ironically enough for a poet who died under Stalin and whose work was banned until the USSR’s dissolution, the process we arrived upon somewhat resembles the way Soviet translations were produced. Mirgul, a Kazakh-born exophonic translator, spent a week translating the poem and researching obsolete Kazakh terms and expressions, using sources from scholarly works on Shakarim to encyclopedias on flora and fauna of Kazakhstan. During our joint translation sessions she additionally narrated the meaning of each line to Ena and Sabrina. The three of us then went about creating a lyrical translation that in some way fit the original both in meaning and sound. We considered such issues as verb tense (mindful of the poet’s energetic use of the present progressive), pronouns (shifting from the “I” of the older narrator to the “you” of his younger self), and Shakarim’s driving rhyme (which we mostly avoided). In the Soviet era, translations from the more than 130 languages spoken in the USSR would often be produced with the aid of a “podstrochnik” (trot) composed by a local translator — poorly paid and rarely credited — and then “smoothed out” and made “literary” by a Russian translator with little or no knowledge of the source language. The difference in our case is that no translator or part of the process goes unmentioned.”