Translation as rewriting: image of Jack London in Kazakh literature

Between 1925 and 1926, the Kazakh writer and Alash Movement member Jusipbek Aimauytuly translated two short stories by Jack London – ‘The Strength of the Strong’ (1911) and ‘The Unparalleled Invasion’ (1910) – into Kazakh through Russian, at a moment when the Bolsheviks were dismantling the Kazakh national-liberal government and London was being promoted across the USSR as a socialist writer. Drawing on rewriting theory, this article analyses these translations as products of ‘very concrete factors’ (Lefevere Citation1992, 2) – ideology, poetics and the translator’s institutional position – rather than as neutral linguistic transfer. Comparing the Russian source texts with Aimauytuly’s Kazakh versions, it shows how shifts in vocabulary and poetic form reshaped both the stories and the image of their author: London emerges in Kazakh not as an advocate of socialism but as a defender of national independence, in what amounted to a quiet protest against Communist Party policy. The article argues that a translator’s poetics and institutional entanglement jointly reshape the image of a foreign author, and it offers the first systematic account of London’s reception in early Soviet Kazakhstan.