Poetry
اژدهای خودی
Not translated into English
Sayed Bahauddin Majrouh · 1973
Synopsis
A Midnight Traveller leaves a prosperous city for a desert plain and a menacing cave: he wants to warn the inhabitants of a danger. This danger has a name, Ego, a Great Conqueror who kills a doe, imposes an order of forced labour and raises a temple to his idol, half human, half dragon. Having become the Monster, he spreads a sickness made of boredom, anger and fear. To this power the Traveller opposes love, poetry and freedom, carried by female figures, the Goddess of Spring and the Queen of the Living Springs.
Context
The work, begun around 1970, first appears in Persian, then in Pashto in 1977; it has five cycles, the last of which remains unfinished. The Persian text of the third is lost during its author's clandestine crossing into Pakistan in 1980, and survives only in the French translation that he had made of it word for word. Revised with the poet Serge Sautreau, the French version appears posthumously from Phébus, in two books, in 1989 and 1991, then in one volume from Libretto in 2022. The Dari text is published in Kabul in 2006, in three volumes.
Who it is for
A long allegorical poem, in verses and in prose, read in French. It asks the reader to follow the figures without looking for a historical key, term for term.
Prizes and reception
His American publisher regards it as the major poetic work of twentieth-century Afghan literature. No prize found.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.