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"Morning Feeling" and "Elegy"

by Perhat Tursun

Translation and introduction by Joshua L. Freeman

 

Introduction

Perhat Tursun was born in 1969 in Atush, a remote and mountainous county located in the southwest corner of China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, along the border with Kyrgyzstan. He earned a BA in Turkology and Literature and an MA in Chaghatay Language at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing. Since 1989, he has worked as a folklore researcher at the Xinjiang People's Arts Center in Ürümqi, Xinjiang's capital city, and as a poet, essayist, novelist, and screenwriter. He is one of the most prominent and most-discussed authors in the Uyghur language today.

Perhat published his first poem at the age of eleven in a local newspaper, and for the next few years continued writing poetry within the framework of traditional Uyghur forms and themes. In college during the heady days of 1980s Beijing student life, Perhat mastered Chinese and encountered the new ideas swirling around Chinese intellectual circles in the early years of Deng Xiaoping's Opening and Reform policy. He devoured whatever Modernist poetry and literature he could get his hands on in Chinese translation, as well as works on philosophy, religion, and psychoanalysis.

As new literary horizons opened up for Perhat, he began venturing into fresh poetic territory. From the late eighties, his poetry took up some of the themes which would thereafter remain prominent in his work: bleak and bewildering urban life; the arbitrariness of fate and history; the redemptive possibilities of love. And with these new themes came new experiments in form, as his verse started to break out of the constraints of rhyme and meter which had characterized Uyghur poetry for centuries. "Morning Feeling," a free verse poem written in 1993, exemplifies Perhat's innovative style. Deftly-chosen details from the beginning of a city day capture the alienation of life in a gray metropolis like Ürümqi: the loss of private space that can paradoxically make people feel anonymous and interchangeable.

While Perhat's more traditional poems have been enthusiastically received by critics and readers, the conservative literary environment in Xinjiang has made it difficult for him to see some of his more avant-garde work into print. When I first read it, "Morning Feeling" existed only in long-hand form in an old, dusty notebook, its pages falling out, a notebook full of poems that Perhat kept promising to show me and kept forgetting. When he finally brought it around, he told me he had found it behind a desk in his apartment, where it must have fallen some time before.

Around 1993, Perhat began devoting more of his time to prose writing. Throughout the nineties, his novellas and short stories appeared regularly in Xinjiang's literary journals and attracted a substantial following. In 1999, his novel The Art of Suicide stirred much controversy in Uyghur society with its frank treatment of sexuality and mental illness, and Perhat found himself the target of widespread hostility. It was during this difficult period of notoriety that Perhat began writing poetry extensively again, a second burst of poetic creativity that has continued to the present.

Perhat's later work tends to be dark in tone, but often hints at a way out of the tunnel. Incomprehension at man's capricious cruelty to man underlies every stanza of "Elegy," composed in Beijing in 2006. "They cut my head off just to test the sharpness of a sword" could be an epitaph for all those lost to history's great deadly ideologies. The last line of each stanza, though, seems to offer individual human connection as redemption from the overwhelming impersonal tides of history.

Both poems presented here were composed in Uyghur, though Perhat also writes occasionally in Chinese. A highly inflected language, Uyghur allows poets great freedom in word order, and a Uyghur poem's lineation can therefore be difficult to replicate in English. I have tried here to stay as close as possible to the original, though some reordering of words and lines was inevitable. And while Perhat's poetic language is simple, the density of metaphor and allusion in some of his work can be quite challenging; I have provided brief explanatory notes for references which seemed likely to be unfamiliar to English-readers. For Uyghur words and names, I have used the Latin Script Uyghur transliteration system developed in 2000 and 2001 at Xinjiang University.

 

MORNING FEELING

Click here to hear Perhat Tursun read Morning Feeling


Every morning
the junk collector's coarse and ugly voice
through the cracks of the doors
through the cracks in the window
with all its might squeezes into the house
Perhaps there's nothing pitiful in this voice
yet its coarseness and ugliness
make it sound pitiful indeed

I recall
how many places
my address and phone number have been left
and with that I feel
that I've lost many things
I even sense I've lost
my most vital inner secrets
On broad streets
I feel myself stark naked
for no one comes to visit
and no one calls
Perhaps somewhere they watch me furtively
shamelessly gawking at my phone number and address
as if gawking sordidly at my secrets

Not daring to go outside
I curse them all sitting here
The junk collector's ugly and hoarse voice
the beauty of the sunlight on the buildings
the bad smell rising from the blanket
force one to acknowledge
that the sun has come up
1993, Ürümqi

Note: The junk collector (eski tüski tergüchi in Uyghur, shōupòlàn in Chinese) is a ubiquitous figure in urban China. Starting in the early morning, and throughout the day, junk collectors walk the city streets, calling out in a loud voice, often hoarse from shouting, for whatever junk they may be able to use or sell.

 

ELEGY

Click here to hear Perhat Tursun read Elegy


"Your soul is the entire world."
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Among the corpses that froze in exodus over the icy mountain pass, can you

recognize me? The brothers

We asked to shelter us took our clothes. Go by there even now and you will find our

naked

Corpses. When they force me to accept the massacre as love

Do you know that I am with you.

 

Waking from three hundred years of sleep they do not recognize each other, nor do

they know their own greatness

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 with you.

 

In that tower built of heads is my head too

They cut my head off just to test the sharpness of a sword. When before the sword

The cause-and-effect relationship we had loved is laid waste like a mad lover's body

Do you know that I am with you.

 

When in the market those with tall fur hats are used for target practice, and a man's

face draws out in suffering as the bullet cleaves his brain

And before his eyes which look to know the reason of his death the murderer's figure

fades and disappears

Reflected in that bullet-pierced brain's fevered thoughts will be my form, at that time

Do you know that I am with you.

 

In those times when drinking wine was a graver sin than drinking blood, do you

know the taste of the flour ground in the blood-turned mill? The wine

That Elishir Nawa'i deliriously dreamed up was modeled on the flavor of my blood.

In that infinitely mysterious drunkenness's deepest levels

Do you know that I am with you.


March 2006, Beijing, Xihongmen

 

Note: Elishir Nawa'i, a Central Asian poet and statesman of the fifteenth century, was one of the major Turkic representatives of Sufi poetry. This literary movement stressed the desire to achieve unity with the divine, and conveyed love and longing for God through symbolic expressions of love for wine and women. It is said that for all the poetry he wrote in praise of wine, Elishir Nawa'i never tasted any.

The form of Perhat's poem echoes a ghazal by another prominent Turkic Sufi, the dervish poet Baba Rehim (Shah) Meshrep. Recounting a number of momentous events in Islamic history–when God made Adam, when Ibrahim (Abraham) survived the flames, when the
prophet Zakariya was sawed apart along with the tree in which he was hiding–Meshrep affirms at the end of each couplet that "I was with [him]." Meshrep himself was martyred in 1711, hanged, it is said, because of his relentless criticism of the corruption and injustice
of contemporary Central Asian rulers.

The Uyghur poetic form qeside (elegy) is derived via Persian from the Arabic qasida, a long, highly formalized poem of praise or eulogy. Perhat's free verse poem departs from the traditional rhyme and meter of the qeside.








 

 

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