When Abdulla came out into the yard, he looked up at the heavens. The October sky was covered with black clouds, but gusts of wind off the Caiman mountains were tearing through the layers of cloud and in the gaps that opened up he could see a little cluster of stars, like a bunch of grapes peering out when you part the thick foliage. Abdulla’s eyes stung with frustration when he recalled his vineyards, the late-season grapes, as golden and warm as these stars, hiding underneath palm-shaped leaves.
‘Hurry up, get into the van,’ Sunnat yelled in Russian. Abdulla took a deep breath of the autumnal air before climbing into the zinc-lined cabin. Fitrat, Cho’lpon, Beregin and Anqaboy were already sitting on the Black Maria’s metal seats. Old Moshe was immediately noticeable, because he was wearing his white gown. Are we really going to have a haircut and a shave before we’re shot? Abdulla couldn’t help wondering. But a closer look told him that the barber was also handcuffed. Moshe wasn’t panting, snuffling or rasping any more: he sat in silent misery. As he made his way towards Cho’lpon, Abdulla accidentally jogged Moshe’s knee: he looked up at him gloomily and said, ‘We’ve been fooled, too.’ Abdulla gave his shoulder an encouraging squeeze before moving to hug Cho’lpon, awkwardly, because of the handcuffs. Behind the pebble-lensed spectacles, tears were streaming from Cho’lpon’s eyes.
‘My weeping poet,’ said Abdulla, embracing Cho’lpon tightly.
‘My pride, my brave hero,’ said Cho’lpon, unable to control himself.
The Black Maria’s doors were slammed shut. All the prisoners sat down. The van moved off. They sat clinging tightly to one another’s arms, as tight as their handcuffs would allow. Abdulla turned to Fitrat:
‘Professor, they…’ he began to say before Fitrat interrupted him:
‘I know, I know, but I never did trust them. They’ve played that trick on all of us.’ Abdulla relaxed. The van turned out of the gates onto the road: it raced down the asphalt streets of the new town. They all knew where they were being taken. For a long time, silence reigned in the van.
Then Abdulla leaned over to speak to Cho’lpon. ‘For some reason,’ he whispered, ‘I remembered my vineyards today: the stakes, the leaves, the bunches of grapes.’
Cho’lpon’s response was a heavy, pensive sigh. His lips began to move:
Softly, dawn breeze steals from the sky
To kiss the blooms of the apricot flower.
But the peach blossom turns her head away, shy:
‘Go rot, you shan’t kiss me at this early hour!’
Old mother vine creeps from the frame
To wake her tender, green leaf girl
And, as the day begins, she will
Bestow on her the utmost skill –
And with the sweetest tendrils’ curl,
Mother entwines each passerby
To fall in love with her girl and sigh…
At this point Abdulla joined in, and they began reciting in chorus:
But now she’s been rudely plucked, this young maid;
Just wrapped around mince and tossed in the pot.
Lovers of dolmas demand their mince hot –
But think how old mother vine feels then!
Now Fitrat and Anqaboy added their voices:
And when the wedding march is played
And the bridegroom is led into view,
Please remember the girl who’s deep in the stew:
No, don’t forget, unbelievers, again!
Their voices were now so loud that they were ordered to shut up: a rifle butt was banged against the metal of the speeding van. But still the poem rose towards its climax.
As nightingales kiss the sweet gentle breeze
They are thinking of nothing but flowers.
And though they sing with such wondrous ease,
Blooms alone fill their warbling hours.
Fitrat and Cho’lpon leaned their heads on Abdulla’s shoulders; the tears flowing from their eyes were like bunches of late autumn grapes. But these tears came not from fear of death, but joy of life.
And the breeze that caresses one leaf today
Doffs his cap to others tomorrow,
And flirts with never a hint of sorrow;
That’s the only way he can play.
The noise coming from the depths of the Black Maria was like the cries of migrating birds, swirling into the air and then swelling again for a final uproar. What seemed to be a simple poem had become the language of birds, the song of a nation, the sorrow of their land. The van braked sharply and stopped. Like winged birds, the prisoners tumbled off their perches. Outside, dogs started barking, chains rattled, soldiers yelled. But Cho’lpon, however hoarse, did not stop reciting:
“It is a leaf’s destiny to fall;
That is how it must be,” they say.
But mighty Life, which makes rules for all,
Makes thousands more every day.
As he got out of the Black Maria and drew the fresh air into his lungs, Abdulla had time for one final thought: what a pity: only one of my stories has an ending.
Translators’ Afterwords
This Uzbek novel gives the reader two for the price of one. The ‘frame’ novel is documentary fiction, a reconstruction of the last months of its main protagonist, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy, as he spend most of 1938 in an NKVD prison during Stalin’s Great Terror, in which three quarters of a million innocent citizens were shot, and several million sent to be worked to death in the Gulags. In Uzbekistan, as in other republics of the USSR, the terror was even worse than in Moscow, for it virtually eliminated, on spurious charges of spying and counter-revolution, not just the Communist Party and local government elite, but much of the country’s intelligentsia and trained professionals.
Abdulla Qodiriy was twentiethth-century Uzbekistan’s most popular novelist. His Past Days of 1921–5 – the first modern full-length novel in Uzbek – was so popular that it was recited to gatherings in tea-houses: legend has it that a shepherd drove a flock of sheep 200 miles to exchange each one for a copy of the novel. His The Scorpion Under the Altar was equally loved: parents named their daughters after Qodiriy’s heroines.
Born in 1894, Qodiriy was formed by the Pan-Turkic modernising movement of jadidism, and his efforts in the early 1930s to write works of socialist realism could not save him from Stalin’s repressions. The son of the fourth wife of an elderly illiterate gardener, Qodiriy had a breathtakingly wide experience of life in Tashkent, working for a wood merchant, then as a Russian-language secretary. Like many Uzbeks, he was fluent in both Farsi and Russian; he was educated at a secular Russian school and at a madrasa (where he perfected his Arabic). He established himself as a writer in a country where literacy was still low (for a twentieth-century Uzbek, reading did not come easily, as the population went through five changes of alphabet – from standard to simplified Arabic, then to Soviet Latin, then Stalin’s Cyrillic and, most recently, a new Latin alphabet). Qodiriy’s love of satire (his article ‘A Collection of Rumours’) had him arrested in 1926, but his popularity and the patronage of the Communist leader Akmal Ikromov gave him one more decade of freedom.
The title of this novel comes from an early short story by Qodiriy, which Ismailov has integrated into his text. But it is Qodiriy’s third and non-existent novel, Emir Umar’s Slave Girl, that forms the core of Ismailov’s Devils’ Dance. Emir Umar’s Slave Girl is rumoured to have been completed in the mid-1930s, but disappeared without trace, presumably burnt by the NKVD. Here it is re-imagined, along lines similar to Qodiriy’s earlier work (which could be characterised as modernised Walter Scott) – the conflict of private love and public tyranny a century earlier, in an Uzbekistan that then consisted of antagonistic Khanates and Emirates, while the British and Russian empires watched, like hungry hyenas, for a pretext to intervene. What unites the core and frame novels becomes steadily clearer, as striking parallels em
erge between Qodiriy awaiting his fate in prison and the beautiful Oyxon forced to marry the Khan of Kokand and then the Khan’s doomed heir.
—
Poetry, unlike prose fiction, has been the mainstay of Uzbek culture for six hundred years; in the structure and tone of this novel it plays a key role. Qodiriy often recalls the lyrics of Cho’lpon, Uzbekistan’s great poet, a man of the same stature as Europe’s best twentieth-century poets. Cho’lpon (who also appears in the novel) shared the same fate as Qodiriy, but his later poetry showed that he foresaw their common tragedy.
In a similar way, a hundred years earlier, poetry flourished at the courts – and particularly in the harems – of Uzbek khans and emirs. Here, women found their voice, and it is the poetry of Uvaysiy, a close friend of the Khan of Kokand’s first wife Nodira (who was herself a poet) that expresses, sometime with the modernity of a Marina Tsvetaeva, the frustrations and despair of a woman under a ruthless Islamic tyranny.
—
As an academic, primarily qualified in Russian and Georgian, I should explain why, with little Turkish and less Farsi, I have translated this novel from its original Uzbek. I first encountered the novel in Russian translation; it was clear that, in the worst old Soviet Orientalist traditions, the verse quotations had been travestied, not translated, and would have to be re-translated from the Uzbek. (In any case, I believe that bridge translation, no matter how competent the translators, is a game of Chinese whispers which exsanguinates or even cripples the original author’s work.) After studying the Russian version of this novel, I found whole pages of the original Uzbek missing, and many passages glossed over, while pithy, even fruity Uzbek phrases were replaced by bland cliches.
Fortunately, the resources available to me – the Akobirov Uzbek-Russian Dictionary, the internet corpus of Uzbek, Redhouse’s Ottoman, and Steingass’s Persian dictionaries, but above all the patience of Hamid Ismailov himself in answering questions and correcting errors – have, I hope, been sufficient to mitigate the arrogance of my translating the novel from an initial position of deplorable incompetence.
Oddly enough, in some ways Uzbek is closer to English than to Russian. Just as English is a hybrid of Germanic Anglo-Saxon with Romance Norman French, so Uzbek is a hybrid of Central Asian Turkic with Farsi. Both languages, unlike, say, French, have the luxury of choice between ‘low’ or ‘high’ synonyms and styles. Uzbek, like English, has a wide range of verb tenses, aided by an extensive range of auxiliary verbs, all of which facilitates the translator’s work. But Uzbek, even more so than English, has a wide range of dialects. In Ismailov’s original, particularly in the dialogues that take place in a crowded cell, where men from all over the country exchange views and informations, we meet every variety of Uzbek, from Jewish Bukhara to Afghan Uzbek. No translator can reproduce these variations in another language. All I could do was to enforce a standard language on the prisoners – allowing some local colour just in the proverbs that the cell elder comes out with.
In spelling the names of persons and places, I have tried to follow a principle: nearly all countries using the Latin script (the exceptions are Latvia and Croatia) reproduce letter-for-letter the spelling of foreign languages that also use the Latin script. Since Uzbek has, since 1995, had a stable and sensible Latin script, I have kept to the original spelling of Uzbek names. The pronunciation is self evident (even ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ have the same value as English). But there are two peculiarities the reader should note. One is that the letter [x] is pronounced as a Scottish or German [ch] – the heroine Oyxon is pronounced more like ‘Oyhon’, but not ‘Oykson’. The other quirk in Uzbek is the odd use of the apostrophe. A [g’] is the voiced form of [x], i.e. it is pronounced a little like a guttural French [r]; an [o’] is usually pronounced like the [u] in southern English ‘put’. In all other cases, the apostrophe is just a transliteration of an Arabic glottal stop [‘ayn] and is not usually pronounced. As is usual, however, where the spelling of an international place name is established, we keep that spelling: so Bukhara, not Buxoro; Kokand, not Qo’qon; Fergana, not Farg’ona, and so on. Utter consistency is elusive: for example, Ghazi is the international term for a fighter for Islam, but we use the Uzbek spelling G’ozi when it is a person’s name.
Donald Rayfield
The Devils’ Dance is filled with the poetry of Uzbekistan, including the work of Cho’lpon, one of the nation’s most revered poets. Rhythm and metre are hugely important to Uzbek poetry, and to give any sense of what the original is like, it is crucial for an English translator to try and replicate this. That’s of course quite a challenge, since Uzbek verse forms don’t always sit comfortably with English words.
You might think that replicating metre and rhyme would tempt the translator to stray from the original. In fact, I found the opposite to be true since in order to phrase with clarity in English, rather than poetic obfuscation, I needed to work hard to get to the heart of the precise meaning and the way the original worked. It involved cross-referencing multiple translations again and again, with the help of Hamid Ismailov, Donald Rayfield and T. Mansurjon, all of whose help was invaluable. My versions, of course, are but shadows of the originals, but I hope that, at very least, they give a clear impression of them.
John Farndon
Copyright
© Hamid Ismailov 2016
Translation copyright © Donald Rayfield 2017
Verse translations copyright © John Farndon 2018
This edition published in the United Kingdom by Tilted Axis Press in 2017. This translation was funded by Arts Council England.
tiltedaxispress.com
First published in Uzbek by Akademnashr as Jinlar basmi yoxud katta o’yin in Tashkent, 2016, ISBN 9789943472969.
The rights of Hamid Ismailov to be identified as the author, Donald Rayfield as the translator of this work, and John Farndon as the co-translator of the verses in this work have been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN (paperback)9781911284130
ISBN (ebook)9781911284123
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Edited by Deborah Smith
Cover design by Soraya Gilanni Viljoen
Typesetting and ebook production by Simon Collinson
About Tilted Axis Press
Founded in 2015 and based in Sheffield and London, Tilted Axis is a not-for-profit press on a mission to shake up contemporary international literature.
Tilted Axis publishes the books that might not otherwise make it into English, for the very reasons that make them exciting to us – artistic originality, radical vision, the sense that here is something new.
Tilting the axis of world literature from the centre to the margins allows us to challenge that very division. These margins are spaces of compelling innovation, where multiple traditions spark new forms and translation plays a crucial role.
As part of carving out a new direction in the publishing industry, Tilted Axis is also dedicated to improving access. We’re proud to pay our translators the proper rate, and to operate without unpaid interns.
We hope you find this fantastic book as thrilling and beguiling as we do, and if you do, we’d love to know.
tiltedaxispress.com
@TiltedAxisPress
lter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
The Devils' Dance Page 37
