Today from 12 noon until 3pm, all are welcome to visit the Lecturers’ Common Room in the Raised Faculty Building (details below) to see a display of UL books from and about Central Asia curated by visiting fellow Dr Ainur Akhmetova. There will also be a 30-minute talk by Dr Akhmetova in the room starting at 1pm and followed by a Q&A.
Continue reading “TODAY: Central Asian book display and talk (10 May 2024)”
March has already finished? This blog post is late?? It is not so easy to tell at the moment… The subject of this post, the early geneticist William Bateson (1861-1926), might have considered my disorganisation a “trait”. What must he have thought of the avant-garde when he visited Soviet Russia?
Continue reading “The geneticist in Russia : the March 2020 Slavonic item of the month”
The latest CamCREES notes cover the panel session on 4 February at which four anthropologists discussed being published in different languages and countries – a fascinating insight into linguistic practicalities and also into something rather deeper: the different worlds that anthropology inhabits in different places. The notes then consider acquisitions of translations and regional publications.
The CamCREES panel session ‘Anthropology in the Russian language’ started with Tatiana Safonova and Istvan Santha, Cambridge anthropologists from Russia and Hungary respectively, telling the story of the book they wrote about the Evenki people who live in the region of the great Siberian Lake Baikal. It was first drafted by Tania in English, but the opportunity to publish it first came up in Hungary, so Istvan translated it and it was published first there. A UK publisher then took an interest, but Tania’s English version was re-worked by a native speaker (the Haddon Library holds a copy; record here). Finally, a Russian publisher also took interest, and Tania produced a version in Russian. Among the examples Tania and Istvan gave of the differences in terms of approaches in anthropology in different countries, a simple one was the way in which the identity of the human subjects of their research was treated. While it is absolutely standard in the west to anonymise subjects by giving them false names, the Russian approach is that you MUST use real names in order to make your research real!
The latest set of CamCREES bibliographical notes look at Hamid Ismailov’s talk on 21 January 2014 about his novel Doroga k smerti bol’she, chem smert’ which has recently been published in translation (as A poet and Bin-Laden). They look at some confusion for cataloguers caused by the book, and end on the subject of otherness.
The first CamCREES seminar of 2014 saw the return of a very popular speaker, Hamid Ismailov, the Uzbek poet and novelist. Mr Ismailov had previously come to speak in 2011 on Soviet novels and Soviet reality, which included discussion of his own novel Zheleznaia doroga (9008.c.7320; the 2007 English translation (as The railway) is at C202.c.5616).
The 2014 seminar revolved around another work by Mr Ismailov which has recently been published in translation. The Russian original was published in the UK in 2005, as Doroga k smerti bol’she, chem smert’ (The road to death is greater than death, C202.d.3553). The novel tells the story of Belgi, an Uzbek poet who is radicalised by the Uzbek government crackdown in response to the 1999 bombings, and who ends up meeting Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan (the title of the translation is A poet and Bin-Laden).
Continue reading “‘A Poet and Bin Laden’, or Islamic militancy in Central Asia and Afghanistan”
Languages across Borders 