“Wandering in the Worlds” by B. Kairbekov: the Role of Autometatext in the Interpretation of a Translingual Work

Due to its heterogeneous nature, a translingual literary text causes certain difficulties for research. Being created by the author in a language that is not ethnically primary for him, it contains both exophonic elements marking its foreign cultural origin and semiotically “neutral” components, the decipherment of which requires certain interpretative efforts from the researcher. The purpose of this study is to appeal to the autometatextual complex as a hermeneutic field for producing meanings that meaningfully explicate the works of a writer/poet. Autometatext is understood as an author’s text about a text, commenting on and revealing other works of the same author. Thus, the lexemes “sky”, “guest”, “elders”, which are semiotically neutral for the Russian language, acquire sacred symbolism in the lyrics of the Kazakh poet Bakhyt Kairbekov, since they appeal to an alternative denotative space that expands the original field of meanings. The material for the study was the book by Bakhyt Kairbekov “Nomads in the Worlds” and individual poems of the poet. The methods of the study are descriptive; the method of hermeneutic commentary; the method of autometatextual interpretation. The results of the analysis allow us to conclude that turning to the autometatext gives the interpretation of the poet’s lyrical works greater reliability and multidimensionality: in the texts of works written in Russian, motives of the original Kazakh culture begin to sound, such as the nomadic way of life, faith in the supreme deity Tengri, veneration of aruakhs and others. The data obtained can be applied in the practice of interpreting translingual literary text by researchers studying similar issues. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.