A Note on the Translation

In the speech of the valleys, a single suffix, -ptyr, tells the listener that the speaker did not see a thing with her own eyes but has it from others: he came back, they say. The herders and the old women of these stories use it constantly. The author uses it at the moments when nobody in Irad can be sure what happened. English needs a whole clause to do what Iradi does in two letters, and I have not always found room for one. Where you feel a story stepping back from what it is telling you, that is usually where the suffix was.

The stories are written in the standard Iradi of the Talas valley, but the characters do not all speak it. Valentina Kravchenko speaks Russian; her granddaughter speaks the mixture of Iradi, Russian and English that Nurzhan calls Russocha. The herders of the Moiynkum say sh where Talas says ch. The people of the Fergana rim season their Iradi with Uzbek. Vera Kim thinks in Korean. I have not tried to reproduce any of this with accents or misspellings. Where it matters, the author tells you who is speaking which language, and I have left it to her.

I have kept a few words in Iradi because English has nothing that will stand in for them: kuda, kalym, bata, malka, toi. They are in the glossary. I have kept the patronymics as Iradis write them, -uulu for a son and -kyzy for a daughter, and the Russian-style surnames as the forms of the ISEZ write them. More than one story turns on the difference.

Where the author quotes a public document, such as the legend of a map, the terms of the ceasefire or a letter printed in the Talas Herald, I have used the English of the period where it exists, and my own where it does not.

I was in Chicago in 2007, where my family had gone in the territorial years, and I followed the war on a laptop, refreshing the Talas Herald website at three in the morning. Translating this book, I have learned a great deal about my own city that nobody had told me. I am grateful to the author for her patience with my questions, and for her answers, which were never what I expected.

Aidana Mukash kyzy
Talas, 2016