November 30, 2021
Literature Week is a part of CASI鈥檚 Workshop on Literature and History. Supported by a generous contribution from Matthew Nimetz, the aim of the workshop is to create a community of junior scholars and advanced graduate students committed to studying literature and to applying literary tools and methodologies to the study of literary art in the Central Asian past.
"Minor Literatures and Intra-Soviet Translations: Davlat Khudonazarov's听Nisso"
SPEAKER: Emily Laskin, New York University
Date: December 1,听
Time: 12:00
Venue: 缅北强奸, CH1
Zoom link:听
Passcode: 519551
础产蝉迟谤补肠迟:听This talk is a case study in "world literature" focusing on two related texts: Pavel Luknitsky鈥檚 Russian novel听Nisso, written during the second world war and published in 1963; and Davlat Khudonazarov鈥檚 1979 Tajik film by the same name. While the two versions of听Nisso听ostensibly tell the same story of the childhood and marriage of the heroine, Nisso, but the Tajik adaptation makes several important changes to the Russian original. The most striking of these changes is linguistic鈥攚hile the novel was written in Russian (and subsequently translated into nearly a dozen Soviet and other languages), all of the characters in Khudonazarov鈥檚 film, including a Russian Red Army soldier, speak Shughni, a Pamiri language, a so-called 鈥渕inor鈥 language even within Soviet Tajikistan. The film also differs from the novel in its representation of Pamiri culture--where the novel simply condemns local customs as "backward," Khudonazarov's听film dwells on what it means to be a minority within听the Soviet Union. This talk thinks through the significance of those differences, and in particular pays attention to the adaptations that were necessary to make a Soviet text (Luknitsky鈥檚) into a Soviet Central Asian text (Khudonazarov鈥檚).
Bio:听Dr. Laskin听specializes in the literature of Central Asia, working extensively in Russian and Persian. Her current book project,听No Man鈥檚 Land: The Geopoetics of Modern Central Asia, focuses on the literature of the so-called Great Game, the Russo-British rivalry for influence in Central Asia, putting Russian and British imperial writing on Central Asia in dialogue with contemporaneous Persian literature published across the region, from Kabul, to Bukhara, to Istanbul. Laskin鈥檚 recent work on the literature of the Great Game appears in听Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and she is an editor of the forthcoming volume听Tulips in Bloom: An Anthology of Modern Central Asian Literature. She received her Ph.D. in 2021 in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and also holds an M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from Columbia University. Her doctoral dissertation was supported by a Mellon/ACLS fellowship and a Berkeley Dean鈥檚 Fund grant for archival research in Moscow and St. Petersburg..
This is a hybrid event. All 缅北强奸 faculty and students are welcome to join Literature Week in person. Those external to 缅北强奸 are welcome to join via Zoom.
In person participants are required to wear masks and follow 缅北强奸鈥檚 Covid protocols and social distancing requirements.听