Road
1
Let there be a man who lived through the winter
Let him fill his inner pocket with rain
and find a farmer
sowing his fields with wind seeds
and let him say to the farmer: “Here I am.”
On his return let him seek cotton at seven houses
and show it to me pressed between his fingers
2
Let there be an angel heading to breakfast
Let there be a blue package in his hand
Let him send the package to me express
From it let a talking bird emerge
and say to me: “Here I am.”
Let the angel return home
to braid a cotton wick for his oil lamp
3
In the distant wilderness let there be a tree
growing there just for me
with no one else taking notice
Let its trunk be iron, its leaves silver, its fruits golden
I will fill my inner pocket with wind seeds
and find the tree
and say to it: “Here I am.”
On my return
let me see a farmer
sitting by a window, beneath an oil lamp
drowsing, dreaming of a talking bird
March 2015, Ürümchi
The Border
It’s hard to pry the two of us apart
and I don’t dare use force
for we could both get bruised
The way I see it
Beijing is the product of lime
The border lies just there
atop the stone wall
that closes off the backyard of the temple
Like the naked nerves of the Central Asians
impeccably serene
But the moment I mention serenity, I recall
the structural beauty of a nerve
the Pharaoh’s midget servants
your odd pronunciation . . . and all kinds
of other extremely cute ideas
September 1994, Beijing
The Distance
We can’t defy the singing of the cicadas.
Behind the convex glass
the hospital building, the distance;
nurses’ distorted faces
watch our cartoonish party.
Downing cold water and liquor
we open the window and, half-naked,
speak sneeringly of
life, nation, girls.
Cicada song keeps bursting in
and wrecking crucial parts of our discussion.
They think up some excuse to ditch me
and leave me here alone.
The romantic tableau
of empty bottles
makes me feel
I’m in a Turkish bath.
I lock the door:
Time to go to work!
I feel like doing somersaults.
I feel like killing myself.
June 1994, Beijing
Three Poems
Tahir Hamut Izgil
translated from the Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman
Listen to the poems read in the original Uyghur by the poet:
Tahir Hamut (b. 1969) grew up in Kashgar, in the southwest of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He began writing and publishing poetry as a high school student, and hit his stride as a poet in the early and mid-1990s while studying and working in Beijing. In those years Tahir was deeply influenced by the Western modernist poetry he read in Chinese translation, and began to cultivate an unadorned verse style drawn from the rhythms of colloquial Uyghur.
A distinct thread of the absurd runs through much of Tahir’s work from this period: the deafening cicadas of “The Distance,” the naked nerves of “The Border.” The narrator’s buzzing emotional intensity is displaced onto objects seen in passing, as empty bottles seem charged with significance and a stone wall delimits the possibilities of life and love. Capturing the terse aesthetic of these poems can be a challenge for the translator, given that Uyghur, an agglutinative language, sometimes expresses with a single richly suffixed word what English takes a sentence to say.
By the early 2000s, Tahir was focused primarily on his burgeoning career as a film director and on his young family, and he largely withdrew from the literary scene. In 2015, however, he committed himself anew to writing poetry, and has since re-emerged as one of the outstanding practitioners of contemporary Uyghur verse. “Road,” written in March 2015, is one of the most notable poems from Tahir’s ongoing literary comeback. Composed in the more expansive style of his recent work, the poem builds a mythic atmosphere through repetition of phrasing and archetypal images, and leaves the reader with a sense of something just beyond words.
A distinct thread of the absurd runs through much of Tahir’s work from this period: the deafening cicadas of “The Distance,” the naked nerves of “The Border.” The narrator’s buzzing emotional intensity is displaced onto objects seen in passing, as empty bottles seem charged with significance and a stone wall delimits the possibilities of life and love. Capturing the terse aesthetic of these poems can be a challenge for the translator, given that Uyghur, an agglutinative language, sometimes expresses with a single richly suffixed word what English takes a sentence to say.
By the early 2000s, Tahir was focused primarily on his burgeoning career as a film director and on his young family, and he largely withdrew from the literary scene. In 2015, however, he committed himself anew to writing poetry, and has since re-emerged as one of the outstanding practitioners of contemporary Uyghur verse. “Road,” written in March 2015, is one of the most notable poems from Tahir’s ongoing literary comeback. Composed in the more expansive style of his recent work, the poem builds a mythic atmosphere through repetition of phrasing and archetypal images, and leaves the reader with a sense of something just beyond words.
Tahir Hamut Izgil is one of the foremost poets writing in the Uyghur language. He grew up in Kashgar, an ancient city in the southwest of the Uyghur homeland. After attending college in Beijing, he returned to the Uyghur region and in the late 1990s and the 2000s emerged as a prominent film director, best known for the groundbreaking drama, The Moon Is a Witness. His poetry has appeared in English translation in The New York Review of Books, Asymptote, Gulf Coast, Berkeley Poetry Review, and elsewhere. In 2017, as the Chinese state began the mass internment of Uyghur intellectuals, Izgil fled with his family to the United States. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he continues his work as a poet and film producer.
Joshua L. Freeman is a historian of twentieth-century China and Inner Asia, and a translator of Uyghur poetry. He is currently a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows and a lecturer in Princeton’s East Asian Studies Department. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2019, and is now working on a book manuscript entitled Print Communism: Uyghur National Culture in Twentieth-Century China. His translations of contemporary Uyghur poetry have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Southern Review, Asymptote, Crazyhorse, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. For more of his translations of Uyghur poetry, follow him on Twitter @jlfreeman6.
