Poetry
Sayohatnoma
Not translated into English
Muqimiy · 1900
Opening lines
Фарёдким, гардуни дун
Айлар юрак-бағримни хун,
Кўрдики, бир аҳли фунун —
Чарх анга кажрафтор экан.
Қолмай шаҳарда тоқатим,
Қишлоқ чиқардим одатим,
Хоҳи яёв, бўлсун отим,
Гаҳ сайр ҳам даркор экан.
Alas, the base heavens
turn my heart and liver into blood;
whenever they see a man of learning,
the wheel of fate goes crooked for him.
My patience in the city gone,
I made a habit of going out to the village;
whether on foot or on my horse,
an outing now and then is needed.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from n.ziyouz.com
Synopsis
The poet sets out from Kokand and takes the road through the valley: Ferghana, Shohimardon, Isfara. At each stage he notes what he sees, the landscapes, the lives of the people he meets and the real state of the country under the administration of his time. The account goes from halt to halt, and the traveller, who has hardly any money, keeps there a satirist's eye on what is happening in the countryside.
Context
His pieces of this kind follow the routes from Kokand towards Ferghana, Isfara and Shohimardon. Scholarship attaches them to the same genre, of which he is considered the initiator. His whole body of work, more than eleven thousand lines, ghazals and five-line stanzas included, first circulated in manuscript, and the texts were altered over the course of copying: specialists are still working to restore their wording. It was collected in Tashkent in two volumes in 1960 and 1961, then in 1974, and a whole study was devoted in 1986 to his travel narratives. Nothing dates these verses precisely.
Who it is for
In Kokand Turkic, with no French version. A sequence of verses written on the road, which can be read in one go. It is better to know that the valley was then under Russian administration.
Prizes and reception
The work is said to have founded the verse travel narrative in Uzbek poetry, and Kokand preserves in a museum the cell where its author wrote.