Anatoly Vorobey posts (in Russian) about another of those odd figures on the margin of literature that so fascinate me; here’s the start of his post (my translation):
It turns out that a significant portion of Japanese science fiction translated and published in the USSR was translated by a single person, a certain Zeya Rahim. I came across this name in the edition notice [colophon? I’m not sure how to render выпускные данные] of a novel and found it intriguing because of its oddity. Behind it hides the shadow of a mysterious man.
It is known that he spent many years in the same cell with Daniil Andreev (the author of Rose of the World, who was in prison from 1947 to 1957), who became attached to him. In the ’60s he moved in literary circles; Nina Voronel described meeting him in her memoirs. He gave his full name as Harun ibn Qahar, Sheikh ul-Muluk, Emir al-Qairi; according to his passport he was Zeya Rahim, a Tatar from Mukden, but he claimed that this name was imposed on him by the Soviet authorities, and that in fact he was an Arab who grew up in Alexandria, studied in Japan, owned factories in Manchuria, was arrested after the USSR drove the Japanese out of Manchuria, and received a long sentence for spying for Japan.
Regarding his translations, Voronel writes (though it should be taken into account that there have been many complaints about the reliability of her memoirs):
As a result, we became friends and, of course, immediately took him to the Daniels. They listened to him with curiosity and then promptly forgot about him, moving on to some new object of interest. However, he didn’t let himself be dropped, but clung to Seryozha Khmelnitsky, with whom he started a small business translating Japanese prose into Russian: he made interlinear translations, and Seryozha, a poet and a gifted literary man, polished them and turned them into good Russian prose.
The post continues with the murky details of his association with the KGB and other bad behavior; then Anatoly says:
But I learned what is to me the most interesting point in all this from the comments to a LiveJournal post quoting surviving references to Rahim (by Voronel and others). His granddaughter left a comment saying that Zeya Rahim himself died of cancer in 1998 and his daughter Svetlana died relatively recently in 2017. But most importantly, even his family didn’t know what to believe about his life-legend, because “grandfather communicated with his loved ones in the same mysterious way.”
Anatoly is amazed that anyone wouldn’t want to tell their nearest and dearest the truth about their life even as it is nearing its end. At any rate, it all reminds me of the life-legends of Lev Nussimbaum, alias Kurban Said, and Fëdor Emin.
With a backstory like that, it seems like “Rahim” could have been a colorful-if-villainous pro wrestling personality, and it seems a shame to waste that on a humdrum vocation like SF translator.
Is Andreev worth reading?
Hell if I know. I was once enamored of a Russian gal who absolutely adored Rose of the World, so naturally I gave it a try, but I bounced right off it. Not my kettle of mysticism.
See here, and my response.
I recall reading somewhere that you need a solid ballast of cynicism, if not philistinism, to be able to dabble safely in mysticism. Otherwise, you might not make it back …
Not that I would know either. I, too, lack the equipment for it. I admire at least some* of those who do have it (like my late aunt) but I cannot follow them.
* Like “spiritual”, “mystical” is by no means coterminous with “good”, of course. I dare say that that may be the first thing that aspiring mystics need to learn …
I’ve read Rose of the World in a succession of bored mornings, evenings, and the occasional afternoon over a long kayaking trip in (probably) 2003.
I loved it at the time, but I also couldn’t understand most of it, I was 11 years old so naturally a bit impressionable, my reading speed was already ridiculous back then, and I was really bored. (And even then some of the sections were really hard to get through… but there were enough interesting bits to be mostly worth it.)
I think the part that stuck the longest with me was the elaborate descriptions of the assorted layers of hell (listed as “purgatories” in the description at the link; I don’t recall if they were described as permanent or temporary, which seems to be the main distinction), but even that had mostly left me so many years later.
As I understand it the closest thing to выпускные данные is copyright page. It is possible that avva meant выходные сведения, which includes more information and is close to English Impressum.
More information on Zeya Rahim from Mikhail Gorelik. Zeya is a minor character somewhere in the middle of a very long story.
Harun ibn Qahar, Sheikh ul-Muluk, Emir al-Qairi
That’s almost fake enough to make him a Shriner. Or perhaps a Duke from Huckleberry Finn.
D.O.: Thanks for both the выпускные данные suggestions and the Mikhail Gorelik link; he says “Нина Воронель в воспоминаниях с большой живостью рассказывает о знакомстве с Зеёй Рахимом (1922?–?) вскоре после выхода его из тюремного замка” — so nobody knows when the mysterious maybe-Arab died, if he even did!
I think we also need a followup explaining that his reportedly-now-deceased daughter “Svetlana” was not really named Svetlana, but actually [something very long and complex and exotic].
Perhaps Astrid Pouppez de Ketteris de Hollaeken, la baronne Laetitia de Villenfagne de Vogelsanck.
Astrid P. de K. de H. etc.! What a coincidence! I lost track of her thereafter, but she was my prom date back when I was a senior (enrolled under a pseudonym, of course) at Mukden Vo-Tech H.S., which was at the time the only secondary school in Manchuria that used a Turkic language as the medium of instruction.
I should say that I find this banter about the Manchu-Kuo expat community wildly inappropriate. The “Russians” lived under an increasingly totalitarian control of the Japanese occupying forces, with every facet of their lives being watched and cooperation being coerced, and then Stalin killed almost of everyone who didn’t run, with the rest going to the Gulag. It was a wild and exotic place in many ways, but not THAT funny.
The Japanese counterintelligence files I got on some distant family living there tell of rampant suspicion of involvement with the NKVD (both plain espionage and even more smuggling of the counterfeit Manchu-Kuo currency, mass-produced by the Soviets) and hellish, Stasi-level snitching. (Those relatives survived by fleeing to Australia).
“Tatars” in the pre-revolutionary years included Azerbaijanis who have plenty of wild legends of Arab origin of their notable clans, and I suspect that Rakhim’s story might have grown out of those folk and family tales of his ancestors…
Oh, final stress on Zeya. I wouldn’t have guessed. (Does seem Turkic, though.)
Ziya is a relatively common Turkic name, ultimately of Arabic origin so found among other Muslims too. A Pakistani strongman had it spelled Zia.
In Russian of course Ziya and Zeya are indistinguishable from one another
The name Zi(y)a comes from Arabic ضياء Ḍiyā’ “lights”, but I’ve never come across an Arabic speaker bearing the name; in Arabic, grammatically plural names like that are usually for women, not men. It seems to be primarily a Persianate thing.
Descendants.
I guess I should have normalized his name in transcription to Zia Rahim, the way I did Harun ibn Qahar. But of course when I wrote the post I hadn’t realized “Zeya” was just good old Zia.
@Lameen
https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/arabic-v/
Persian seems to delete final t optionally in some words ending -at. What happens with -ad, i.e., what would the male Arabic name Ziad look like in Persian?
It doesn’t seem to exist as a name in Persian, but the identically spelled adjective is زیاد /zi.ˈjaːd/ (‘much; many’).