Қайғудан нарига ўта олмадим.

Қайиғим урилди қуруқ соҳилга.

Қайғунинг нарёғи нимаю-нега -

билмадим, билмайин била олмадим.

Чиройга бўкдиму, қоним тинмади.

Чиройдек тавозеъ бўлмади бу қон.

Ҳаммадан айрилган бечора шайтон

жондан инса инди, қондан инмади.

Фаришта ўқитган маъсум Азозил -

мунча зилдек оғир бу юрагимиз?

Айт, сенга қонимми буюрар эмиш

ё қайғум ёрлиқаб бўларми нозил?

Йўқса нечун дарё оққанда сокин,

барг тушса дарёга қон қайғуради? –

Қонимда бир кимса эшкак уради,

Қайғуга етса-да, узрга локин...

by Shelley Fairweather-Vega

Most English-language readers know Hamid Ismailov as a novelist and journalist, but he has been a poet for much of his life. Ismailov tells me he has come to understand that his Uzbek poems were written “by-the-by, in my notebooks, pieces of paper, somewhere in my novels at the very edges of the pages, etc.” He comments that he has written the most poetry during “uncertain periods” of his life. The poem published here was written during one of those uncertain periods, “at the end of the last century in Bamberg, Germany, one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen, a place with deep and strong religious roots. In medieval times, it was once the place where the Pope and the Papacy were settled. At the same time, it’s quite a Faustian place,” he says. Bamberg was a longer stopover after his sudden exile from Uzbekistan to Western Europe, fictionalized in his novel whose English title is Of Strangers and Bees (2019). Ismailov wrote so many poems in Bamberg that he eventually compiled them into a poetic symphony he calls the “Bambergiana,” yet to be translated out of Uzbek.

This poem was included in the original text of Ismailov’s latest Uzbek novel, Бизким—компютерлар ё дунёнинг энг гўзал шоири, which came out chapter by chapter on his Telegram channel in 2022. My English translation of the novel is set to be published in August 2025 by Yale University Press, under the title We Computers: A Ghazal Novel, but the editors chose to leave this piece on the cutting room floor. I am very grateful to Turkoslavia for giving it a loving home.

In my translation, I worked to preserve the emotional tone and imagery of the poem, as a first priority, and then to honor the sound patterns of the original. Of the important sonic elements, the most obvious is the rhyme scheme (exact rhymes in the first and fourth lines of each stanza, less-exact rhymes in the second and third lines). Another, subtler element emerges from repeating consonant sounds. The nearly-matching words that begin the first two lines, қайғу (grief) and қайиқ (rowboat—like kayak), became the alliterative “grief” and “aground” in my translation, with the “ground” recurring as “grounds” in the same English stanza. That repetition and others in the English mirror repetitions of the same or different concepts in the Uzbek, sometimes of the same word used in different forms (билмадим, билмайин била олмадим, rendered as “did not know, and could not know,” and инса инди, a phrase hinting at an act which was attempted then accomplished, a nuance I could not replicate poetically). Refusing to discard the emotions, imagery, or sounds means the English lines gradually expand to accommodate all these vital parts—but in a way, I hope, that remains rhythmical and artistically convincing.

Hamid Ismailov, born in Kyrgyzstan and raised in Uzbekistan, is the author of novels including Железная дорога (The Railway), Мертвое озеро (The Dead Lake), and Ялмоғиз Гея ё мўр-малаҳ маликаси (Gaia, Queen of Ants). He splits his time between London and Prague. 

Shelley Fairweather-Vega is a professional translator specializing in prose and poetry from Central Asia. She lives in Seattle, WA.