My Last Post in Kazakhstan

Today is my official COS date. That means tomorrow, I'll no longer be a Peace Corps Volunteer. I haven't posted much in the last month because I've been so preoccupied with saying goodbyes. Saying goodbye is hard, and there are so many people in Kokshetau and Kazakhstan that I love and will miss very much.

I may continue to post as I continue to write about Kazakhstan to help me remember things and sort out what this all meant. However, for my last post as a volunteer and my last post from the actual territory of Kazakhstan, I want to give you a translation and recording of my favorite Kazakh song, which happens to be apropos my situation.

My tutor and I spent many hours translating this. Our routine was this - she would read a sentence and translate it in its entirety into Russian or English. We would then translate each individual word and identify its conjugation or declination. Then the final and laborous part would be trying to put them all together to see how the meaning was connected to the actual words. Many times, the words combine in ways that seem to an American to completely depart from their individual meanings, and the grammar, which is both poetic and antiquated, ties them together in ways that has to be worked out more like an equation than a sentence. Of course, these difficulties are not a feature of Kazakh, but of the difference between Kazakh and English. Trying to cast English phrases like “if we’d had the run of the place, we’d have shown them what’s up” into a Kazakh framework would be equally cryptic.

After going through the Kazakh word by word, I sat down and tried to make it sound good in English. Unfortunately, one is stuck translating single, elegant Kazakh words with long, unweildly English phrases. Consider the song’s emotional “демесін”, which ambiguously means either “let it not be said” and “let them not say”, and “мұндайда” which is best translated with the clunky English “in situations like these”. And there are phrases like “Әкеңнің осы сағыныш күйін шерте бар, шерте бар”, which is literally something like “your father’s missing-ness dombra-song-without-words strumming exists, strumming exists”. The whole phrase is an idiom and has to be translated as an entire sentence, but the music puts extra emphasis on the “strumming exists” part, and that repitition has to be translated. What should go instead of it? Also, how can you translate into English cultural words like “жөн”, meaning a good man who knows Muslim prayers to be said at the grave of a relative, or “сыбаға”, meaning the special parts of the sheep that are reserved for the most honored guests at a Kazakh feast? I don’t think I ever really grasped the ambiguities of “аралау”, (and it shows in the translation). Even the main theme of the song, “ауылыңа туған барып қайт” (“return to your village where you were born”), simply cannot be translated into English retaining both the elegance and the meaning, since the “your” and “to” are translated as a single suffix, and the entire English clause “where you were born” is compressed into a single aspect of the Kazakh verb “to be born”.

In a word, this was great fun. Exactly these difficulties are what makes learning Kazakh so rewarding. I hope you enjoy it. I know some Kazakh speakers read this blog, and if you find errors or want to suggest improvements, I would be very glad if you let me know.