A Siberian Apprenticeship
“Immersed in the Altai culture, ancient and modern, I came to discover what vitality there may be in words that emerge from pure connection to purpose, land and kin.”
Altai Pilgrim was born of an extended journey through the Altai Republic, southern Siberia. Here I lived for a decade with an Altai herding community and earned my living as an interpreter.
Embracing Worldviews
I lived within the borders of a nature park, which was a pristine bio-cultural landscape, home to Turkic herding communities and their pasturelands, snow leopards, and a lattice network of rock art sanctuaries, standing stones and Scythian frozen tomb burials.
As interpreter I was responsible for facilitating communication on behalf of: indigenous nature park personnel, archaeologists, the United Nations team for the conservation of biodiversity, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Altai Zapovednik snow leopard expeditions and endangered species census projects, pilgrimage groups, and the Standing on Sacred Ground film crew.
So often while interpreting, I witnessed that the barrier to leveraging ecological expertise, intellectual and spiritual knowledge was not a matter of language alone; a far greater obstacle was the matter of worldview — different ways of thinking and interacting with the earth; the particular lens made up of myths and beliefs, ideas and aspirations that is unique to each culture.
Overcoming differences in worldview often required collaborators to travel a great distance in the mind and the heart, to undertake a pilgrimage of sorts, and yet it was in these vistas, beyond the limits and certainty of any one cultural understanding, that fresh perspectives and creative solutions lay. Embracing cultural worldviews is central to the values that inform all my work with authors and text.
Immersed in oral traditions
Immersed in the Altai culture, I encountered forms of language use that were very different to anything I had encountered in my formal education (a degree in Modern & Medieval Languages, Russian & German, at Cambridge University): words were used to codify and manage creative forces; throat singers would recount epic tales over five thousand lines long, a length surely impossible to commit to memory; gratitude was expressed in extended blessings composed entirely of rhyming couplets.
Interpreting for elders and knowledge carriers at sacred sites, my understanding of the very meaning of the word ‘communication’ changed, coming to embrace ‘talking’ Iron Age barrows; visual text such as the symbols in ancient rock art, the negotiations that may take place between bird and shaman, and ritual as an instrument of punctuation in prayer.
Russian Literary Translation
Previously editor for the prehistoric art section of Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia, I have since translated a number of publications devoted to the cultural heritage and worldviews of minority peoples in the Russian Federation and the Turkic peoples of Eurasia: Spiritual Wisdom from the Altai Mountains, Last of the Shor Shamans, At the Source, (short story) by Nivkh writer Vladimir Sangi, and Gold of the Great Steppe, a Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition catalogue devoted to Saka-Scythian Art.
Writings
My articles on pilgrimage and cross-cultural communication have featured in Kindred Spirit Magazine, Terralingua Magazine, The British-Russian Journal, The Calvert Journal, The Guardian newspaper, IUCN publication Protecting Sacred Natural Sites and a number of Russian-language platforms. I am currently writing a memoir which is both a response to the powerful imagery within the Altai landscape and an account of my experiences working as an interpreter in the Altai Republic. On the basis of writings in the early stage of this project, I was awarded a place on the London Library Emerging Writers Programme (2020 cohort). read a sample here.
Scythian Art & Rock Art of Eurasia
Scythian Animal Style Art refers to the art of the early nomads who, throughout the Iron Age, occupied lands extending from Kyiv (present-day Ukraine), in the west to Mongolia in the East. Highly stylised depictions of animals, predator and prey, predominate. I specialise in the translation from Russian to English of academic studies and museum catalogues devoted to Scythian Art as well as the rock art of Eurasia.
I also paint contemporary interpretations of rock art compositions and Scythian artefacts. I authored the Altai-based ‘Painting for preservation’ Project — an extracurricular activity for school children run in collaboration with local schools and museums, and ran collaborative workshops at rock art sites for young theatre students. More recently, contracted by the Fitzwilliam Museum to translate articles for the Gold of the Great Steppe Exhibition devoted to Scythian Gold artefacts from East Kazakhstan, I developed a range of gift cards as merchandise for the museum shop.
An Extraordinary Apprenticeship
I think of the years I spent living among the Altai people as an extraordinary apprenticeship that both determined my translation specialisations (sustainability, art history, indigenous literature) and left me changed, shaping my values and worldview.
