We are very excited to hold our Summer party for the British-Uzbek Society members and supporters! The event is supported by the Uzbekistan Embassy in the UK and hosted by the Fieldfisher legal services company in London City. Along with other fun activities, the event will give opportunity to introduce Andrew Staniland’s new book “Three Karakalpak Poets”.
Synopsis:
“Three Karakalpak Poets” is an English translation of selected poems by the founding fathers of Karakalpak literature, Berdaq (1827-1900) and Ajiniyaz (1824-1878), and the modern Karakalpak poet Ibrayim Yusupov (1929-2008). It brings one of the great Central Asian literatures, which draws on both folk poetry and classical Turkic-Persian poetry, to an English-speaking audience for the first time. The selection includes extracts from Berdaq’s “Chronicles”, his legendary history of the Karakalpak people, Ajiniyaz’s “Bozataw”, about the suppression of the 1858-1859 Qonirat uprising, and Yusupov’s “Aral Elegies”, his sequence of environmental poems about the Aral Sea becoming a desert. The translations are by the English poet Andrew Staniland with the help of Karakalpak co-translators Gulbahar Izentaeva, Shaxnoza Kengesbay qizi, Aynura Nazirbaeva, Nilufar Bayrambaevna Abdullaeva, Nargiza Urazimbetova and Gulnaz Jadigerova.
Bio:
Andrew is an English poet and co-translator of Central Asian poetry. The previous books of translation are “New Method, New Poetry” (an anthology of Jadid poetry), “Nodira And Uvaysiy, Selected Poems” and “12 Ghazals By Alisher Navoiy, 14 Poems By Abdulhamid Cho’lpon”. His own collections include “A New Diwan” and “In Couplets”. All the books are available on Amazon.