ئۈچ شېئىر

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.