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| L'Odyssée des Aksakals. (Décor : scéne finale du film 2001 l'Odysée de l'espace de Stanley Kubrick. On reconnaîtra également à droite le dessin Melancholia de Dürer.) |
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| Autostrangulation [le titre est de l'auteur]. Tronc sculpté par les élèves de l'école des Beaux-Arts, jardin botanique. |
Oulipo. The Botanic Park is the lung of Dushanbe. The vegetation is abundant and it is easy to get lost in the labyrinth of its paths. It is possible to visit an orangery and a beautiful Pamirian house, to see magnificent kiosks where the newlyweds pose for pictures. By the side of a path are lying tree trunks carved by the students of the Fine Arts School. Karoumatoullo* accompanies me. He is a great connoisseur of Tajik and French literature and made recently a conference on Oulipo at the Bactria center. I speak to him about my meeting with Salimsho Halimsho.
- I know him, he tells me. He has written widely on the October Revolution and the rural culture transformation in Tajikistan. He also wrote about Avesta, the sacred text of Zoroastrians. Zarathoustra always inspired poets and philosophers.
- You are a translator but are you writing something yourself ?
- I love the poetry, I translate it, I write it, but I never was published.
- How it is like with Tajik publishers ?
- It is actually very simple: the government says that he wants to promote the emergence of Tajik authors but, to be published, you must deal with national editions and it is taking forever. The literature and the publishing are not priorities for the government while economic questions and home security have not been resolved... With the independent publishers, the author has to find the money. However, people are still interested in the literature but the young people now prefer Internet.
- It is a vicious circle. No publishing, no books, no bookshops, no readers. Look at this trunk carved by a pupil of the School of Fine Arts. It seems an old wise person strangling himself. What a metaphor of Tajik literature. We wonder how there are still authors. Do they write in Russian or in Tajik ?
- In Tajik of course, but with the Cyrillic writing.
- When came into being Tajik literature ?
- Rather, we should be talking about Persano-Tajik literature. As you know, the present-day Tajikistan was a part of oriental Persia before being taken over by Turco-Mongols. Rudaki is the father of the persano-Tajik poetry. He was born in Penjikent in 858. There are also Firdausi with The Book of Kings, Omar Khayyâm and Avicenne who wrote at 21 his first book of philosophy. Persians and Tajiks, it is the same culture of Transoxania and Khurasan. The Persian language is like a tree, Farsi, Dari and Tajik are the main branches. There are also lesser-known authors like Saadi, Raffi, Djami, Hafez...
- And what about the contemporaries authors ?
- Above all, there is Sadriddin Ayni, the founder of the modern Tajik literature. He was born in 1878 in a peasant family in Bukhara emirate. It is known for the short story Dokhunda, narrating the story of a young farmer who had to work hard for a rich man to pay the debts of his father. He ran away, felt in love, was sold as a soldier to the Emir of Bukhara, saved by the Red Army. His main work is Yoddoshtho, a big book of childhood memories. Some people blame him for having ignored the roots and the contributions from the Persian and Arabic cultures.
A French poet, who knows the country and had considered the possibility of publishing an anthology of contemporary Tajik poetry in French language, will tell me that many poets continue to write in the quatrains classical form. "They want to imitate Khayyam but they are from reaching his talent. It is always the same mawkish love stories." It is on a Latin-America website that I will discover some examples of the Tajik poetry. Like this Solitude from Gulrukhsor Safieva :
Evening
Evening
Dark sky
A lonely star
At the sky slope
A lonely woman
On the unsteady balcony
Life is passing
http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/en/Diario/04_24_04_09.html
Before leaving, I cannot help asking this important question
- Do we find something about the tapshan in the classical Tajik literature ?
- Of course. Firdousi wrote about the "soufa" in the Book of Kings.
He is silent a moment, dreamy, then continues.
- When I was a child, I lived in a village in Zeravshan valley. I was born there. My father sometimes called me to tell me "Come ! Let's go on soufa [sic]." This meant taking place on a dirt terrace in the garden. Later, it became more modern, of wood like here in the chaykhana. Nowadays, everyone has one. There are also in the fields where farmers have tea and rest. For me, the "kat" is associated with reading and with imagination. Often, I took a book and I laid in the shade of an apricot tree. I liked this quiet environment, in harmony with nature. Even today, I often take place on the kat to write.
- What are your projects, now ?
- To translate Oulipo.
- Is it not the tapshan an Ulipian object ? It too can bee defined by what it is not. It is not a bed, it is not a sofa, it is not a table. Nevertheless we sleep there, we sit there and we take meals there.
- And it opens to everyone that it welcomes the door of the imagination.
* If my interlocutor is real, the name Karoumatoullo is fictional. The first part of the dialogue is fabricated. This text in english is not the faithful translation of the original. The writing in french of the statements made by my interlocutor is dictated by an Ulipian principe : ban on using the letter "e" like in the book La disparition (the disappearance) by Georges Pérec. It is understandable that this principe is difficult to apply in english.
More photos Duchanbe
- I know him, he tells me. He has written widely on the October Revolution and the rural culture transformation in Tajikistan. He also wrote about Avesta, the sacred text of Zoroastrians. Zarathoustra always inspired poets and philosophers.
- You are a translator but are you writing something yourself ?
- I love the poetry, I translate it, I write it, but I never was published.
- How it is like with Tajik publishers ?
- It is actually very simple: the government says that he wants to promote the emergence of Tajik authors but, to be published, you must deal with national editions and it is taking forever. The literature and the publishing are not priorities for the government while economic questions and home security have not been resolved... With the independent publishers, the author has to find the money. However, people are still interested in the literature but the young people now prefer Internet.
- It is a vicious circle. No publishing, no books, no bookshops, no readers. Look at this trunk carved by a pupil of the School of Fine Arts. It seems an old wise person strangling himself. What a metaphor of Tajik literature. We wonder how there are still authors. Do they write in Russian or in Tajik ?
- In Tajik of course, but with the Cyrillic writing.
- When came into being Tajik literature ?
- Rather, we should be talking about Persano-Tajik literature. As you know, the present-day Tajikistan was a part of oriental Persia before being taken over by Turco-Mongols. Rudaki is the father of the persano-Tajik poetry. He was born in Penjikent in 858. There are also Firdausi with The Book of Kings, Omar Khayyâm and Avicenne who wrote at 21 his first book of philosophy. Persians and Tajiks, it is the same culture of Transoxania and Khurasan. The Persian language is like a tree, Farsi, Dari and Tajik are the main branches. There are also lesser-known authors like Saadi, Raffi, Djami, Hafez...
- And what about the contemporaries authors ?
- Above all, there is Sadriddin Ayni, the founder of the modern Tajik literature. He was born in 1878 in a peasant family in Bukhara emirate. It is known for the short story Dokhunda, narrating the story of a young farmer who had to work hard for a rich man to pay the debts of his father. He ran away, felt in love, was sold as a soldier to the Emir of Bukhara, saved by the Red Army. His main work is Yoddoshtho, a big book of childhood memories. Some people blame him for having ignored the roots and the contributions from the Persian and Arabic cultures.
A French poet, who knows the country and had considered the possibility of publishing an anthology of contemporary Tajik poetry in French language, will tell me that many poets continue to write in the quatrains classical form. "They want to imitate Khayyam but they are from reaching his talent. It is always the same mawkish love stories." It is on a Latin-America website that I will discover some examples of the Tajik poetry. Like this Solitude from Gulrukhsor Safieva :
Evening
Evening
Dark sky
A lonely star
At the sky slope
A lonely woman
On the unsteady balcony
Life is passing
http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/en/Diario/04_24_04_09.html
Before leaving, I cannot help asking this important question
- Do we find something about the tapshan in the classical Tajik literature ?
- Of course. Firdousi wrote about the "soufa" in the Book of Kings.
He is silent a moment, dreamy, then continues.
- When I was a child, I lived in a village in Zeravshan valley. I was born there. My father sometimes called me to tell me "Come ! Let's go on soufa [sic]." This meant taking place on a dirt terrace in the garden. Later, it became more modern, of wood like here in the chaykhana. Nowadays, everyone has one. There are also in the fields where farmers have tea and rest. For me, the "kat" is associated with reading and with imagination. Often, I took a book and I laid in the shade of an apricot tree. I liked this quiet environment, in harmony with nature. Even today, I often take place on the kat to write.
- What are your projects, now ?
- To translate Oulipo.
- Is it not the tapshan an Ulipian object ? It too can bee defined by what it is not. It is not a bed, it is not a sofa, it is not a table. Nevertheless we sleep there, we sit there and we take meals there.
- And it opens to everyone that it welcomes the door of the imagination.
* If my interlocutor is real, the name Karoumatoullo is fictional. The first part of the dialogue is fabricated. This text in english is not the faithful translation of the original. The writing in french of the statements made by my interlocutor is dictated by an Ulipian principe : ban on using the letter "e" like in the book La disparition (the disappearance) by Georges Pérec. It is understandable that this principe is difficult to apply in english.
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| Leçon de tressage de nattes tadjikes du Docteur Tulp. (Personnages en habits : extrait de La Leçon d'anatomie du docteur Tulp, peint par Rembrandt en 1632.) |
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| Quelle bonne farce Nasreddine Hodja joue-t-il au pauvre Alex et à sa femme ? (Paysage : Morgen im Riesengebirge, peinture de Caspar David Friedrich, 1810). |
More photos Duchanbe
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