Aug 28, 2026 · 50 min · 13 segments
**Show Notes**: This week, Jake Zawlacki joins Cameron to talk about his translation of Akhmet Baitursynov's *Mosquito*. Although it's appearing in English now for the first time, the collection…
Jake ZawlackiGuest
Cameron LallanaHost
I'm Cameron Lallana, and if you want to learn more about Slavic literature, art, and culture, then you're in the right place.
I think this was our episode about Arseny Tarkovsky, and I joked that our expanding purview would eventually necessitate our second name change to the Slavic and Central Asian podcast, or maybe Slavic and Near Slavic World podcast.
Phil suggested that we just future-proof it and go for the literature podcast.
Well, we aren't quite there yet, but today we'll temporarily become the Central Asian Literature Podcast as we talk about Ahmed Baitersinov's poetry collection, Mosquito.
Baitersinov's most political poems, his hopes and despairs for a Kazakh nation, an attempt at a new literary Kazakh language, and so on.
To help us better understand this collection today, I'm joined by Jake Zalocki, who translated the collection.
Jake here is a writer, translator, and scholar who currently teaches at the University of San Diego.
Zalocki holds degrees from Louisiana State University, University of San Diego, and Stanford University.
His creative work has been published in the Saturday Evening Post, The Journal, Citron Review, and Roanoke Review.
Before we talk about this actual collection in The Poems Within Jake, I was hoping we could start this conversation with a little bit of context for the audience about who Ahmed Baitersinov was.
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I'm Cameron Lallana, and if you want to learn more about Slavic literature, art, and culture, then you're in the right place.
I think this was our episode about Arseny Tarkovsky, and I joked that our expanding purview would eventually necessitate our second name change to the Slavic and Central Asian podcast, or maybe Slavic and Near Slavic World podcast.
Phil suggested that we just future-proof it and go for the literature podcast.
Well, we aren't quite there yet, but today we'll temporarily become the Central Asian Literature Podcast as we talk about Ahmed Baitersinov's poetry collection, Mosquito.
Baitersinov's most political poems, his hopes and despairs for a Kazakh nation, an attempt at a new literary Kazakh language, and so on.
To help us better understand this collection today, I'm joined by Jake Zalocki, who translated the collection.
Jake here is a writer, translator, and scholar who currently teaches at the University of San Diego.
Zalocki holds degrees from Louisiana State University, University of San Diego, and Stanford University.
His creative work has been published in the Saturday Evening Post, The Journal, Citron Review, and Roanoke Review.
Before we talk about this actual collection in The Poems Within Jake, I was hoping we could start this conversation with a little bit of context for the audience about who Ahmed Baitersinov was.
