{"id":4601,"date":"2018-11-27T19:22:18","date_gmt":"2018-11-27T19:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iuhrdf.org\/en\/2018\/11\/27\/uyghur-poetry-translation-perhat-tursuns-elegy\/"},"modified":"2018-11-27T19:22:18","modified_gmt":"2018-11-27T19:22:18","slug":"uyghur-poetry-translation-perhat-tursuns-elegy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/uyghur-poetry-translation-perhat-tursuns-elegy\/","title":{"rendered":"Uyghur Poetry in Translation: Perhat Tursun\u2019s \u201cElegy\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Perhat Tursun (1969-) is one of the foremost living writers in the Uyghur language. Born and raised in Atush, a city in the southwest of China\u2019s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, he began writing poetry in middle school and branched into prose as a young college student in Beijing. From the late 1980s, his day job was a research position at the Xinjiang People\u2019s Arts Center in \u00dcr\u00fcmchi; but his real vocation was as a writer, in which capacity he gained increasing fame and notoriety.<\/span><\/p>\n

Having begun his writing career as a poet, Perhat turned increasingly to prose in the 1990s, publishing a succession of short stories and novellas. In 1998, he brought out a well-received poetry collection, One Hundred Love Lyrics<\/em>, as well as a volume of novellas, Messiah Desert<\/em>, which attracted some amount of controversy for its unconventional themes and imagery.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was only a prelude, though, to the massive uproar generated by the publication the following year of his lengthy novel, The Art of Suicide<\/em>. One of the most widely discussed and debated novels ever published in Uyghur, The Art of Suicide<\/em> combines a modernist prose style with themes of sexuality, suicide, and mental illness that had hitherto been largely taboo in Uyghur literature.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I first met Perhat Tursun more than a decade ago, the <\/span>controversary<\/span> around The Art of Suicide<\/em> had largely died down, but Perhat remained a controversial figure, not least because he continued to tackle Uyghur society\u2019s most sensitive subjects in his work.<\/span><\/p>\n

I got to know Perhat quite well, and we shared many cups of baijiu<\/em> (Chinese liquor) at innumerable dinners in the late 2000s and early 2010s when I was living in \u00dcr\u00fcmchi. Perhat Tursun is an utterly unique character: brilliant, stubborn, wickedly funny, thoroughly unpredictable. He is fiercely loyal to his friends and unsparing to his rivals, most notably various conservative intellectuals in the Uyghur community. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s ever had an opinion he didn\u2019t voice, often in shades of the darkest sarcasm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last year, as news filtered abroad of a sweeping, unprecedented campaign of mass extrajudicial detentions<\/a> in Xinjiang, I started to worry about Perhat. With nearly all electronic communications between Xinjiang and the rest of the world cut off, I had little means of learning how anyone there was faring during this latest campaign; but I worried in particular about Perhat, given his prominence and outspokenness.<\/span><\/p>\n

This February, my fears were confirmed, as a mutual friend who managed to leave Xinjiang informed me that Perhat had been detained in late January, joining hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other minority citizens in Xinjiang\u2019s expanding network of internment camps. As of midsummer, Perhat was still in confinement.<\/span><\/p>\n

After hearing the news in February, I found myself repeatedly recalling lines from Perhat\u2019s poem \u201cElegy,\u201d which speaks of the individual buffeted by the harsh winds of history. I published a translation<\/a> of the poem in 2011, but revisiting that translation this February, I felt I hadn\u2019t done the poem justice. A <\/span>couple<\/span> days after I heard the news about Perhat, I prepared a new translation, which can be read below.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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ELEGY<\/span><\/h3>\n

Perhat Tursun, translated by Joshua L. Freeman<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYour soul is the entire world.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Among the corpses frozen in exodus over the icy mountain pass, will you recognize me? Our brothers
we begged for shelter took our clothes. Pass by there even now and you will see<\/span>our<\/span>naked<\/span> <\/span>
corpses<\/span>. When they force me to accept the massacre as love
Do you know that I am<\/span>with<\/span>you<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

After three hundred years they awaken and do not know each other, their own greatness long <\/span>forgotten<\/span>,
I happily drank down poison, thinking it fine wine
When they search the streets and cannot find my vanished figure
Do you know that I am<\/span>with<\/span>you<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that tower built of skulls you\u2019ll find my skull as well
They cut my head off just to test the sharpness of a sword. When before the sword
our beloved cause-and-effect relationship is ruined like a wild lover
Do you know that I am<\/span>with<\/span>you<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

When in the market men with tall fur hats are used for target practice and a man\u2019s face draws out in agony as a bullet cleaves his brain, and
before the eyes that look to find the reason of their death the executioner fades and disappears,
reflected in that bullet-pierced brain\u2019s fevered thoughts will be my form, just then 
Do you know that I am<\/span>with<\/span>you<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In those times when drinking wine was a greater crime than drinking blood, do you know the taste of the flour ground in the blood-turned mill? The wine
that Alishir Nava\u2019i deliriously dreamed took its flavor from my blood
In that endlessly mystical drunkenness\u2019s farthest, deepest chambers
Do you know that I am<\/span>with<\/span>you<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

March 2006, Xihongmen, Beijing<\/span><\/p>\n

Read \u201cElegy\u201d in the original Uyghur<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Hear Perhat Tursun read \u201cElegy\u201d<\/a><\/span>:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Joshua<\/em><\/a><\/span> L. Freeman<\/em><\/a> is a Ph.D. Candidate in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies and a Graduate Student Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

Source: https:\/\/medium.com\/fairbank-center\/uyghur-poetry-in-translation-perhat-tursuns-elegy-902a58b7a0aa<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhat Tursun (1969-) is one of the foremost living writers in the Uyghur language. Born and raised in Atush, a city in the southwest of China\u2019s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-4601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4601"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=4601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}