[Tilted Axis Press; 2024]
Tr. from the Kazakh by Mirgul Kali
“Reading Baqytgul’s work often made me wonder if she had somehow read my mind,” explained translator Mirgul Kali in an interview about the Kazakh writer, “so direct and unblinking it is.” To Hell With Poets, Baqytgul Sarmekova’s short story collection newly translated into English by Kali, details the life of Oryngul, an aspiring poet. Like many writers, Oryngul dreams of overnight success and expects her first works to catapult her to fame. In this series of unflinchingly critical vignettes, Sarmekova details the life of Oryngul and other, seemingly random people unrelated to her.
In the titular story, Oryngul listens to a poet perform his works at a wedding in a restaurant adorned with chandeliers. She silently criticizes others in the room for not truly listening to the poet and, with a self-aggrandizing tone, remarks to herself: “These fools will never understand poetry.” Fascinated by the poet, Oryngul believes one of his poems is a masterpiece, and that she, better than anyone, can recognize a good poem. After his reading, Oryngul introduces herself to the poet, Ibtai, and he gives her his business card. When she finds herself in the city again, they meet up and Oryngul reads one of her poems to him: “A Life.” After her reading, Ibtai doesn’t compliment her writing directly but instead says, “The most important thing is that you’ve got heart. And you know what a poem is.” Oryngul cries, and Ibtai promises to get her poems published. They travel to meet a publisher. After reading the poems, the editor smiles and says, “We can definitely fix it.” Reading her poem in the newspaper, Oryngul does not recognize a single word as hers. In her classic sardonic tone, Oryngul declares, “To hell with poets,” after waking up smothered by the stomach of the poet who promised to get her published. In this story, as in “to hell with singers,” Sarmekova’s women castigate the men who have harmed them and then cast them off physically.
Both “to hell with” stories delve into the lives of women who are assaulted and remove these men off of themselves both physically and mentally. Sarmekova depicts how these women handle assault and its immediate aftermath. She portrays the women as desperate for the men’s attention. Yet despite implying that the men see the women’s advances as being financially motivated, the narrator mentions in “to hell with poets” that Oryngul had been working at a hair salon and making a fair, but not huge income. Thus we see that the character’s interactions with men are motivated by something deeper than money. Her characters are women who move to the city and make it on their own but use the advances of men to their advantage—yet sometimes to the detriment of their own self-image.
Sarmekova’s character descriptions are detailed throughout the short story collection. In “Monica,” she foreshadows her depiction of the imperiled title character in her description of the aul, a Kazakh village, of the story: “Soon, the yellowish, moss-grown roofs tucked between drab-colored hills overgrown with squat tamarisk bushes came into view. The squalid aul looked like a sloppy woman’s kitchen.” In “Möldir,” the narrator uses her fake eyelashes to show her former classmates that she is no longer part of the aul and has moved on to life in the city. In “The Night the Rose Wept,” the narrator invites a man she’s long drifted apart from to her home. As she waits for him, she wonders why she’s put so much effort into preparing her home for him. She asks herself if the man even still has any interest in her. When he arrives, she says she was just going to bed, even though she’s wearing pink lipstick. The man doesn’t even seem to notice it, and she spirals into self-doubt. Throughout the collection, women seemed to be seduced by men yet continually disappointed. They are written as characters struggling with their internal self-doubt, fear of rejection, and the pressure to put on appearances in front of others.
Throughout the book, Sarmekova returns to the problem of yearning. A market cobbler is a stranger to everyone, even the woman who works in the next booth selling samsas, triangle-shaped pastries filled with meat. After his shift, he goes to the woman’s booth, buys a samsa, and stands there to eat it. He thanks her, and she replies, “You’re still here?” The remark fills him with joy, because he was noticed by the woman for whom he’s yearned for years, but just like all the narrators in To Hell With Poets, he doesn’t get exactly what he wants: affection. Like the cobbler, Oryngul searches for approval of her writing and the affection of the city dwellers. Monica seeks the approval of Oryngul in vain. Each story is narrated from a third person ranging from a distant voice to a very close omniscient one, especially in the stories with Oryngul. Consistent, however, is each character on a journey with no end.
In the final story of the collection, Oryngul finds herself in Astana. She is searching for a character to base her novel around. She explains that she has been distracted by the life of the city and has lost her way: “My quest in search of a hero or heroine for my next story had ended unsuccessfully. Should I pluck someone out of this suitcase-lugging crowd and throw, like a lasso, someone else’s fate onto their necks?” Eventually, Oryngul meets with an old writer friend who tells her that his characters don’t seem to be taking shape the way he hopes. After he finishes his speech, Oryngul tells him not to bother calling her if he merely means to entertain himself. He then offers Oryngul money to which she replies, “Right now, your pocket is not deep enough to afford me!” The story closes at his funeral, where Oryngul is standing next to his wife. Oryngul’s reaction shows just how much she has changed since the beginning of the story. She’s lost her naïveté and her hope. Her story is tragic and demonstrates how the world can turn even the most hopeful people jaded.
As I read To Hell With Poets, I often struggled to trace the connections between the various characters. At the end of the collection, the narrator says that the entire short story collection was a search for a character for her novels, and she struggles with her own story and the stories of others. My confusion, then, may have been by design to show how developing a story and finding characters for that story can be an excruciating process. The short story collection also seems to reveal itself as autofiction. Oryngul’s search for a protagonist is really Sarmekova’s search for a protagonist. Ultimately, To Hell with Poets is a writer on writing. The collection is full of rejection—both in the world of men and writing—and suggests how rejection affects one’s self-perception for young women in modern Kazakhstan navigating life in the city as a transplants from the countryside.
Dillon Delaune is a writer of fiction, essays, and love letters. They reside in Madrid.
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