{"id":862,"date":"2026-06-29T20:55:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T20:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/LD\/?p=862"},"modified":"2026-06-29T20:55:03","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T20:55:03","slug":"nine-questions-for-lit-div-member-shelley-fairweather-vega","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/LD\/2026\/06\/29\/nine-questions-for-lit-div-member-shelley-fairweather-vega\/","title":{"rendered":"Nine Questions for Lit Div Member Shelley Fairweather-Vega"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


Lit Div members already know Shelley Fairweather-Vega<\/strong> as our tireless former administrator and as the translator of We Computers<\/em> by Hamid Ismailov, which was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Jen Mendez<\/strong> spoke with her about a range of topics, including the Uzbek language, her award nomination, going on a book tour, and tackling translating over-the-top love poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Jen Mendez: What is your connection to Uzbek and what initially drew you to the language and the culture?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Shelley Fairweather-Vega:<\/strong> The first foreign language I studied thoroughly was Russian. I was in the Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies program at the University of Washington for my Masters degree and before that I had had a series of jobs working either in Russia or with the Russian language, so I was using the language all the time and translating as part of those jobs. But during my Masters program, I had run out of Russian classes to take and I noticed they were offering Uzbek, which I had never studied before. And not only were they offering Uzbek, but they were offering FLAS [Foreign Language and Area Studies] scholarships to study it. I had already had one for Russian for the first year of my Masters, but I didn\u2019t think they would give me another one because Russian is a language everyone used to study, so I applied for Uzbek instead. So I spent the spring of the first year of my Masters and all that summer in intensive Uzbek, and the other Uzbek classes in my second year were Uzbek literature. So I started studying Uzbek through translation, which is basically what we did in these little seminar classes. We\u2019d sit there with a short story and kind of figure it out sentence by sentence together. So that\u2019s how I started translating Uzbek as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


JM: Did you have any knowledge of the language before that?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


SF-V:<\/strong> No, not at all. Uzbek\u2019s a Turkic language, which is a completely different set of vocabulary and different grammar, different sentence structure, than the Romance languages and Slavic languages I had studied before. So there were a lot of unfamiliar things to it. But the Uzbek professor at UW basically gave me private lessons at first. Her first courses with me were just crash courses in Uzbek grammar, so I learned everything about the grammar and sentence structure before I started learning the vocabulary\u2014which is a really backwards way of learning a language and not the way that anybody teaches, but it worked for me at that time [laughs]. I started translating Uzbek\u2014legal documents and simple things\u2014and then I started translating essays and short stories and novels. I had never visited the country and I don\u2019t have a family connection or anything like that, so words on a page are what Uzbek is to me. That\u2019s what I\u2019m used to working with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n


JM: And this led to you being shortlisted for <\/strong>We Computers. <\/strong><\/em>Can you tell me about how you found out? Did the emotions hit you right away?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


SF-V:<\/strong> Oh yeah, it was crazy. There\u2019s no clue ahead of time that you\u2019ve been longlisted for the National Book Awards. The book came out at the end of August and for the first few weeks after it came out, I would Google the book everyday to see if there were reviews or if there was anything new on Goodreads. I was Googling one morning, waiting for my kid to go to school, and I saw a link that said \u201cNational Book Awards Longlist\u201d or something, [and I saw] \u201cWe Computers <\/em>by Hamid Ismailov, translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega.\u201d And I was like, \u201cWhat?!\u201d I tried to click on the link, but there was a paywall and I couldn\u2019t see anything, so I tried to search other ways. And I remember saying out loud to my husband, \u201cI think I\u2019ve been longlisted for a prize?\u201d But I didn\u2019t know. A few minutes later, people started texting me, \u201cOh my God, congratulations!\u201d And I was like, \u201cOh, it\u2019s true, and it\u2019s a big deal, it turns out.\u201d I didn’t really know what was coming. I didn\u2019t know that I was supposed to be really excited about it. But other people told me that it was really exciting, so I believed them, and eventually, I got all the details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


About a month later, the shortlist was due to come out, I think on October 8th, and on the evening of October 7th, they actually called me from New York and said, \u201cI have some good news to share!\u201d So I was a little more prepared for that. It was really interesting to see how people\u2019s opinions shifted toward the book all of a sudden. I\u2019ve translated a lot of books and none of them had been longlisted for a prize before, and it comes with all kinds of attention I wasn\u2019t used to getting. Even the author, Ismailov, he\u2019d had one book win the EBRD prize, but that wasn\u2019t one that I translated. The books I had translated for him got good reviews, but not a lot of attention, so this was a new experience for us as a team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


JM: How did the accolade impact your work? Did you see an uptick in demand for Uzbek translations?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


I did notice\u2014I\u2019ve been submitting manuscripts to publishers as I always do and I got a really nice rejection from one instead of just not answering my e-mail at all [laughs]. I think maybe the editor had recognized my name and looked me up and thought, \u201cOh, I should be really nice to her when I reject this one.\u201d So that\u2019s a perk, I guess! She gave me feedback and said some nice things about the translation. That\u2019s a nice change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


SF-V:<\/strong> I wish! I was hoping for immediate fame and fortune and tempting job offers for all these books. What did change is that people started asking me to speak more often. I have all these new invitations to write essays and travel and do talks, so that\u2019s nice. It helped with sales for the book, for sure. It\u2019s now my bestselling book ever, even though it\u2019s also one of the weirdest and strangest books I\u2019ve ever translated. But it didn\u2019t result in a bunch of new translation contracts, and the reason for that is that the same problem exists as before, which is no one knows about what\u2019s being written in Uzbek\u2014or Kazakh or Kyrgyz. I find out about these books when the authors or somebody I know from the region writes to me and says, \u201cThere\u2019s this cool novel, you should look at it.\u201d And then I\u2019m the one who has to tell American publishers about it and try to convince them to pay attention and give it a chance. So everyone may think that I\u2019m an award-winning translator now\u2014or at least an award-nominated translator\u2014but they\u2019re not saying, \u201cI have a lot of books that she would be great at translating.\u201d They\u2019re just waiting for me to bring them more, so I have to continue the work that I was doing before of finding the books and trying to talk publishers into [publishing] them. So that part has stayed the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The exception is Yale University Press, which published We Computers. <\/em>Even before the awards ceremony, they had already signed another novel by Ismailov for me to translate, so that\u2019s one. But that\u2019s the home publisher, the publisher who\u2019s excited about their book and selling more copies of it and getting more attention. They wanted to follow up right away. I suppose that\u2019s one job I got because of the nomination. I\u2019m not sure it would have come so quickly if it hadn\u2019t gotten that attention from the National Book Awards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


JM:<\/strong> I was doing some research and saw that the novel is based on the poetic form of the ghazal<\/strong>. <\/strong><\/em>From a translation perspective, that would be very difficult to work with. How did you navigate the challenges of maintaining the integrity of the poetic form while adapting it for an English-speaking audience?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


SF-V:<\/strong> Thanks for asking. I also read up a lot on ghazal when I realized I was going to have to deal with them in this book\u2014because I wasn\u2019t very familiar with the form\u2014and the first thing you find when you search \u201ctranslating ghazals\u201d is an article by Dick Davis, who\u2019s a very famous translator of Persian into English. He wrote an article called \u201cOn the Impossibility of Translating the Ghazal\u201d [laughs]. And then he translated a lot of them. He translated the whole collection by Hafez. Everyone loves his translations\u2014they rhyme and they\u2019re pretty, and it\u2019s nice. But he claimed that it was impossible. The form is alien to English and it doesn\u2019t work with the sentence structure\u2014and the imagery is too repetitive and seems too stale and too clich\u00e9 for an English ear. All these different stylistic and structural problems. But obviously he thought he could do it, and he did it, and I have also done it in my own way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The fortunate part for what I had to work on is that I didn\u2019t have to start from a blank slate. I had my ghazals already in a novel\u2014a novel that is about those ghazals. And the novel has things to say about the ghazals and interprets them in a certain way, so that was my guide. Like, \u201cthis ghazal has to be pretty in this way, and it has to be ironic in this way, and this imagery is really important, so I\u2019m going to keep the prettiness and the irony and this particular image. Even if I think it\u2019s corny or whatever, we\u2019re gonna do it because it\u2019s important for the plot of the novel.\u201d So I was translating the poems according to the plot and then trying to make sure they all fit together the way that they do in Uzbek. It\u2019s amazing how the poetry and the storylines interweave with each other in the book. So that was my task: I had to translate them in a way that would respect those particular constraints presented by the book itself. That made my job easier because then I had rules to follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


JM: I was reading that ghazals are used to express an almost supernatural love, so it makes sense that it would be very over-the-top and maybe a little bit cheesy for an English-speaking audience.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


SF-V:<\/strong> Absolutely. They\u2019ve always been love songs, not just poetry. Even in English, love songs are not subtle and understated. They have to gush. I was thinking of soft rock from the 70s and 80s\u2014those things rhyme, unashamedly, and they\u2019re about desperate love and everyone wants to sing along. They\u2019ve got some magic and it works, and we can do that with these ghazals as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Hamid Ismailov, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Sunil Sharma at Brookline Booksmith<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


JM: You did a tour to promote <\/strong>We Computers <\/strong><\/em>with Hamid Ismailov. What was your role as translator on the tour?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


SF-V:<\/strong> Well, my first role was that I had to set it up [laughs]. The press said they didn\u2019t have the resources to do anything and Ismailov really wanted to come. He had been here once before and we spent part of that time touring around together. We talked together in Seattle and Portland a couple years ago, and that was fun. So I started e-mailing mostly professors from different universities because we also needed to be paid to do it. We needed to be able to buy our plane tickets and things, and the publisher wasn\u2019t able to help. So we cobbled together a tour of five different universities, some of which would pay for a couple nights in a hotel, plus a plane ticket to the next place. Then the next person would pay for another night in a hotel and buy us dinner and breakfast and another plane ticket. So eventually we cobbled together this whole strange itinerary. It was three weeks in total with the ALTA [American Literary Translators Association] conference on one end and an Area Studies conference in Washington DC on the other end\u2014and in the middle was the prize ceremony, as it turned out. We started planning the tour before we knew we were nominated for the prize and before we knew we\u2019d have to be in New York for the ceremony. We canceled an appearance at George Washington University and went to the prize ceremony in Manhattan instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


For most of our appearances, we appeared together and people would ask questions about how he wrote the book and what it means to him, and ask me questions about what it was like to translate it, and so on. It was fun, and I hope it was good for audiences, too, to be able to talk to the author and translator at the same time and hear both of our stories. Plus, we can do awesome readings. He\u2019s a great reader in Uzbek and I can read the English. Teamwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


JM: Did you get a lot of questions about your translation process?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


SF-V:<\/strong> A few, yeah. I always want more [laughs]. And sometimes they\u2019re really elementary questions like, \u201cHow do you translate tone?\u201d Or, \u201cHow do you translate humor?\u201d They\u2019re good questions, but not something you can just sit down and reveal the secret of. And sometimes they\u2019re more specific, like people who knew one of the languages or knew something about the history of the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


JM: You are going to be a judge for the prize that you were shortlisted for. Can you talk a little about how that came to be?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


SF-V:<\/strong> The same people who always coordinate the prize, who I kind of knew already, e-mailed me and said, \u201cWe\u2019d like to invite you to be a judge this year.\u201d And I suspected I might get recruited to do this. I\u2019ve talked to other translators who have won prizes and they\u2019ve told me, \u201cand then you have to be a judge, you have to pay it forward.\u201d But it sounded like fun to me, and it has been fun so far. We\u2019re completely sworn to secrecy about the process\u2014I can\u2019t even say what books I\u2019m reading or what\u2019s been nominated or not nominated, nothing about how we make decisions. But I can tell you that there\u2019s five of us\u2014writers, professors, literary people, there\u2019s a bookstore guy. That\u2019s public, our bios are online. We\u2019ve had a couple meetings so far and we talk about books. It\u2019s really fun. I\u2019m looking forward to it. I\u2019ve got a big pile of them already\u2014they\u2019re trickling in from publishers now, so almost every night, I get to sit down with a translated book and check it out. And then I get to go to the black-tie awards ceremony again this November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
We Computers<\/em>\u00a0featured as a staff pick at a bookstore.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


JM: Do you have any closing words of inspiration for your fellow literary translators or people who are aspiring to be where you are now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


SF-V:<\/strong> It did occur to me that I should encourage all literary translators to judge a prize, if they can. I think it would be worth it for lots of them. ALTA needs extra readers in different languages for their awards. They send out an e-mail asking people to step forward if you know German, for example\u2014\u201cwe need someone to read 20 pages of German and compare it to the translation, this book is under consideration, we need expert readers to report on the translation quality.\u201d ATA has their literary prizes that need readers every year. As a translator, it\u2019s so much fun to read what your colleagues are doing, even if it\u2019s not a language that you work in or a genre that you usually work in, just to see what people come up with as translators and what they can do to a text in English. It\u2019s so educational and it\u2019s so much fun\u2014and most of what you read is pretty good because not a lot of bad translations get published [laughs]. So you\u2019re not going to run into a lot of really painful mistakes or terrible prose. But if you do, that\u2019s educational, too. I would encourage everyone to do that if you get a chance. It\u2019s good for your volunteer karma and it\u2019s good for your translator\u2019s brain, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Bios:<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Shelley Fairweather-Vega<\/strong>
is a past administrator of the ATA Literary Division and a co-founder of the Northwest Literary Translators, part of the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society, an ATA chapter, in Seattle, Washington. Shelley teaches translation workshops, runs training and networking events for translators, and is a professional translator of Russian and Uzbek, specializing in poetry, fiction, and scholarly publications, with a focus on new literature from Central Asia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n


Jen Mendez<\/strong>
is the vice president of the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society, a regional chapter of the ATA. Jen plans and coordinates professional events for translators and interpreters and is an active member of the Northwest Literary Translators. They are a Portland-based German to English translator of literature, songs, and poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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