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We Computers: A Ghazal Novel is a multilayered exploration of poetry, authorship, and digital intelligence. The book follows French poet and psychologist Jon-Perse who, inspired by what his translation partner Abdulhamid Ismail teaches him about Persian poetry, builds a computer program capable of generating literature. In this interview, we talk with author Hamid Ismailov and translator Shelley Fairweather-Vega about the novel’s ghazal form, the process of translation, and writing in exile.
This novel is a beautiful and innovative interpretation of the ghazal. Could you expand on how the structure of the novel mimics the ghazal’s lyrical form?
HI: The Oriental ghazal, like the European sonnet, is a universal poetic form. What makes it so universal? First and foremost, its structure. First of all, a ghazal, like this novel, is a love song. Every ghazal consists of two poles: ‘I’ and ‘she’ or ‘lover’ and ‘beloved’. However, because there is no gender in Persian or Turkic languages, ‘she’ can always be interpreted as the Absolute or ‘He’. In other words, this relationship of love or even Love between ‘I’ and ‘she’ can be understood in both human and divine ways. This kind of scintillating ambiguity can be found at every level of the ghazal: its meter, rhyming, subject, composition, aesthetics, philosophy, and more.
Typically, these two poles of the ghazal exist in a state of separation, which imparts tension to this lyrical love construct. There are also two types of forces: ‘well-wishers’, such as the ‘wind’, ‘healer’, and ‘wine-bearer’, who aid in overcoming the separation and bring love, and opposing forces, such as ‘rival’, ‘destiny’, and ‘death’.
Similarly, the novel reflects the same structure and discourse on many levels. The two poles might be Jon-Perse and the women in his life, Jon-Perse and AI, or Jon-Perse and Hafez. Others might suggest different poles, such as Hafez and AI or a human (be it Jon-Perse or Hafez) and AI, which occupies the place of the Absolute or Divinity.
Now, understanding the structure of a classic ghazal, one can easily identify the love and separations between all these poles, as well as the ‘well-wishing’ forces like Abdulhamid Ismail, Muzaffar, etc., and the ‘rivals’, which could be Saint John Perse or others.
There are many other parallels; both the ghazal and the novel are lyrical, non-linear forms that primarily characterize inner states rather than external actions, thus representing more of a statement about being rather than becoming, yet even this may help explain why the novel is called ‘a ghazal novel’.
You have translated several of Ismailov’s novels and stories over the past decade. What originally sparked your interest in translating his work?
SFV: The first Hamid Ismailov text that I read was his long short story, The Stone Guest, about the disconcerting experience of an Uzbek emigree in Moscow trying and failing to take care of his less fortunate, and very irritating, fellow countrymen. There were a few aspects of that story that caught my attention. First, the unapologetic foregrounding of the Uzbek experience, against the backdrop of the dominant culture (in this case, the early post-Soviet Russian culture). The characters and circumstances absolutely develop in response to that dominant culture but refuse to let themselves be seen as passive products of it or quaint deviations from it, as happens in too much of the writing from this region. Second, in a sort of in-your-face to that Russian culture, Ismailov stole the name of a Pushkin play to use to title his work. And third, the writing is just exquisite, deliberate but playful, and heartfelt, so that you instantly fall for all the characters and can find a turn of phrase to revel in anywhere you look. After translating that story, I read more, and was hooked. I think Andrew Bromfield’s translation of The Dead Lake is what finally made me a dedicated Ismailov fan. And I have never lost interest. He has a unique talent for putting together slices of neglected histories and cultures to craft stories that are incredibly engaging and provide brand-new (to most of us!) perspectives, always with warmth and humor.
There are several excerpts and poems from The Arabian Nights throughout the novel, all of which are translated from Ismailov’s Uzbek versions. What was your approach to interpreting such an ancient and frequently translated text?
SFV: Yes, the 1001 Nights is often a more or less visible foundation to Ismailov’s work—if you ask, he’ll tell you the story of having to read out loud from it to his grandmother when he was little and would rather have been playing outside with his friends. In We Computers, it’s right at the surface, and he provides Uzbek translations of some of the stories and poems that Scheherazade tells the king to save her life, one night at a time. One character in the novel even plays the role of Scheherazade, treating the protagonist, Jon-Perse, to a never-ending string of stories about the life of Hafez.
I was anxious at first about translating such a classic, until I realized a few things. First, my job was to convey, in English, Ismailov’s sense of those stories in Uzbek. So I had a real justification for doing something that’s usually taboo in translation: translating from a translation, treating the Uzbek version in front of me as a fundamental source text rather than something that might be distorting a “true” original. Second, because those tales have been translated and retranslated so often, there’s more room, I think, for any number of new interpretations. We know that individual translators and compilers in different centuries and different countries added or removed stories, altered details big and small, and so on, so that no two collections are alike and it’s difficult to call any version faithful to the original. That means any good translation of Ismailov’s translation has an equal right to exist among them. That realization freed me to just translate those texts in a way that fits their purpose in the larger narrative: they had to sound old-fashioned, magical, and dangerously or suspensefully sexy.
Honestly, though, deciding how to translate the Arabian Nights stories was just a warmup to translating the biggest body of frequently-translated texts in We Computers, which is the ghazals of Hafez. Most of the same factors applied in my decision making for those. The biggest difference was that the Hafez in We Computers was not a translation by Ismailov, so that extra buffer of deniability, of getting to be loyal to his interpretation rather than to the Original, was removed.
Jon-Perse has a friend whom the author refers to as AI. Describe the significance of shifting from the character’s full name, Abdulhamid Ismail, to the initials AI. How is this motif intentionally integrated throughout the rest of the narrative?
HI: As I mentioned earlier, one of the most fascinating features of a classic ghazal—of which Hafez, one of the main characters of the novel, was the greatest master—is its scintillating ambiguity on every level. Following the same principle, I made a living, real person—Abdulhamid Ismail—as if equal to, or rather a duplicate, a double of AI: a virtual Artificial Intelligence. Let’s not forget that AI (in the second sense) was created by people like AI in the first.
And here’s what Chat GPT answered the same question: “The shift from using the full name “Abdulhamid Ismail” to the initials “AI” is a deliberate and symbolic move by the author. This transformation reflects the narrative’s central theme of ambiguity and doubling—a motif inspired by the structure of the classical ghazal, where meaning often exists on multiple levels simultaneously. By referring to Abdulhamid Ismail simply as “AI,” the author blurs the line between the real, human character and the concept of Artificial Intelligence.
This abbreviation functions as a literary device that allows the character to exist in both the tangible and virtual realms. It raises questions about identity, authorship, and creation—especially since the artificial AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a product of human minds like Abdulhamid Ismail’s. Throughout the rest of the narrative, this motif reappears in subtle ways: AI becomes both a companion to Jon-Perse and a kind of mirror, a double or echo of the narrator’s thoughts, much like how AI technologies reflect or simulate human cognition.
In essence, the shift to “AI” collapses the boundary between the human and the digital, the original and the duplicate. It deepens the text’s exploration of what it means to be a creator, a copy, or a consciousness—making the name itself a thematic anchor for the narrative’s philosophical inquiry’.”
SFV: I’d add that Jon-Perse uses his friend, the human AI, as a reference as he learns all he can about Persian and Uzbek poetry, pestering him with queries the way we might do with ChatGPT or some other AI tool today. Also, it’s funny to be able to confuse a human being with a computer tool. The computers who narrate the novel never tire of pointing out how funny it is, a behavior which I found to be funnier than the joke itself.
After and along of your prose and poetry writing, you had an extensive career in journalism. Did it influence your creative writing?
HI: I’ve become more economical and ‘Hemingwayan’ in both my writing and style—but whether that’s due to my journalistic experience, where you tell a story in a three-minute package (or, if needed, a one-minute dispatch), or simply a result of age—I’m not sure. I also don’t know whether this change has made my writing better or worse.
Sometimes, I revisit early examples of my prose and am amazed at how complex—how ‘Faulknerian’—they were. Lately, in search of balance, I’ve begun mixing up my earlier texts with my current ones in the same piece.
It reminds me of an anecdote from our nomadic life. Once, in Paris, we went to a Georgian restaurant and first of all asked for their wine list. “We have the best Georgian red wines—like Akhasheni, Kindzmarauli—and the best of the Georgian whites, like Saperavi,” the proud restaurateur offered. But somehow, on that romantic day, my wife didn’t want red or white—she wanted rosé. “Do you have any rosé wine?” she asked. “We could make it!” came the immediate reply.
You have been exiled from Uzbekistan since 1992. In a previous interview, you shared the following sentiment about writing in exile: “You are no longer required to play the consensual games that writers are expected to play in their mainland: to write about this or that, to follow the rules of a particular aesthetic. […] it has opened new horizons, new ways of looking at the world, because you get to observe other people dealing differently with basically similar situations.” How has your exile contributed to the concept of this book?
HI: One of the longstanding hallmarks of global literature—only recently being challenged—has been its monoethnic outlook. I’ve often said that the Uzbek books I read throughout my life were composed solely of Uzbek characters. The same held true for Russian, Kazakh, Turkish, English, German, and virtually every other national literature I encountered—until quite recently.
The emigration of writers, regardless of its cause, introduces new experiences—and especially, new characters. The main character of this novel is a French poet named Jon-Perse, whose central object of fascination is the Persian poet Hafez (along with many other poets of various nationalities). The only Uzbek character, Abdulhamid Ismail, plays a secondary role—a “supporting act,” as they say—appearing on the periphery of the novel, even though it is written in Uzbek and intended for an Uzbek readership.
Ask nationalists, and they will offer 1001 reasons why, for instance, Americans want to “make America great again.” Ask globalists, and they will provide another 1001 reasons why America can only become great again in cooperation with other nations.
Let me give just one example that connects America and Uzbekistan within this broader framework: Today, global scientific knowledge is primarily advancing in a handful of languages—perhaps a dozen at most. The rest of the world’s languages are increasingly unable to keep up with the rapid pace of scientific and technological development. If, as an Uzbek, you don’t read the latest scientific books or articles in English—or perhaps Chinese or Russian—you risk being stuck with knowledge rooted in the 20th century.
This creates a growing divide: the rich (the 5% with access to current science) grow richer, while the poor (the remaining 95%) fall further behind. The consequences include brain drain, growing religiosity, and the radicalization of those left out, etc. The only hope, perhaps, is that AI might help close this gap.
But there’s another side to this issue. Human knowledge is not limited to scientific understanding. There is also emotional, aesthetic, psychological, inner, and mystical knowledge. In this realm, the “scientifically rich” might have something to learn from the so-called “poor” cultures. Isn’t this novel, in a way, about that as well?
When reflecting on the translation process, you claim that it is “the single most challenging piece of literature I have ever had the honor to translate.” Tell us more about the challenges and joys of translating We Computers.
SVG: I absolutely stand by that description. We’ve talked about some of the challenges already, specifically about navigating classic texts originally written in many different languages and diverse eras, and deciding how to translate them in a way that reflects the role they play in this novel while also honoring those texts’ own histories, not to mention the history of their translation. The whole exercise was as scintillatingly ambiguous as any good ghazal, as Hamid described in response to the question above.
The ghazals are central to the plot of the novel, and required extremely delicate handling. How do they sound in the Persian, and what feelings do they arouse? How will Ismailov’s Uzbek readers have understood and experienced them in the context of this novel? How is Ismailov interpreting them in relation to his larger plot? How can I convey any of that in English, in a way that won’t offend readers who are already familiar with that body of poetry? It was a serious test of my balance and courage, and I’ve never had to translate through such a sustained adrenaline rush.
Yet another challenge was that not all of the poetry in this novel is very beautiful, by design. There’s a long poem, allegedly by a young Hafez, that failed to win a prize. How do I translate it into something properly adolescent and clumsy without letting readers think I’m just a clumsy translator? How do I translate a bad machine translation of a lovely poem, without making readers think those mistakes are mine? It felt very risky.
The editorial process pared the novel down quite a bit for English-language readers. Originally, there was more attention paid to French poets and the history of French poetry, and long stories from the lives of Chinese poets, Spanish artists, and more. Translating all of that properly required a lot of research, the kind we usually do for works of nonfiction, rather than creative fiction.
The joy came in when I began to feel like I was handling those challenges successfully. Every time a rhyme fell into place or I could feel a joke land, I was able to step off the high wire for a second to catch my breath and grin. There are so many moments of light, wit, and playfulness in the novel to enjoy, whether reading or translating. With Ismailov, I’m always trying to translate both the words on the page and the gleam in his eye. That’s pure pleasure.
Hamid Ismailov, born in Kyrgyzstan and raised in Uzbekistan, is considered Central Asia’s foremost living author. His novels include The Railway, The Dead Lake, and The Underground. He lives in Hertz, UK. Shelley Fairweather-Vega is a translator who specializes in prose and poetry from Central Asia. She lives in Seattle, WA.
The post We Computers: A Conversation with Hamid Ismailov and Shelley Fairweather-Vega appeared first on Yale University Press.
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