Kazakh poet, linguist, politician, educator, and nationalist, Akhmet Baitursynov, wrote Mosquito in 1911 to challenge the Kazakh people to wake up and create a nation together. His poems carry strains of frustration, of hopefulness, of anger, and of pity for a populace he wanted to bring to independent nationhood through Alash Orda, a Kazakh political group that would emerge in the wake of the collapse of the Russian Empire. Although the proto-state would be retaken by the Soviets, Baitursynov worked within the communist government with measured hopes of Kazakh self-governance. However, like many of the educated elite across the USSR, Baitursynov was murdered in 1937 for his nationalist ideology and his work was removed from all public discourse until 1989. However, the political resistance of this pesky mosquito has now flown all the way to Stanford, California some 115 years after its initial publication. This presentation has three aims: to share the masterpiece that is Mosquito; to shed light on the process and production of the translation; and to highlight our responsibility to translate these important works.

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Jake Zawlacki is a writer, translator, and scholar. His essays have appeared in Inks, ImageTexT, The Comics Journal, Canon, and Folklorica, and his translations of the Kazakh poet Akhmet Baitursynov have been published in Guernica, Mantis, and Asymptote. He is the translator of the first English-language edition of Baitursynov’s Mosquito (Academic Studies Press), and the editor of Conversations with Todd McFarlane and Conversations with Denys Cowan (University Press of Mississippi). Zawlacki holds degrees from Louisiana State University, the University of San Diego, and Stanford University, and his creative work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, The Journal, Citron Review, and Roanoke Review. He currently teaches writing and literature at the University of San Diego.