Courtesy Mathias Krumbholz (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
I was down at the Friends of the Library sale again. A big literature anthology called to me from the shelf, “Hey you. Six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry here, hardbound, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan, by the dictate of Elbasy Nursultan Nazarbayev, distributed in partnership with Cambridge University Press—only 50 cents.”
Opportunities to participate are a funny reward by the universe for venturing out in it. That these are offered all the time might even be proof of the universe’s benevolence—but keep a weather eye.
The anthology’s goal, the foreword says, is to “offer…a rare glimpse not only into the history and geography but, above all, the imagination shaping modern Kazakhstan, initiating a dialogue with the literatures of other nations and languages, and nourishing those pleasures afforded by cross-cultural conversation and exchange.”
How this copy landed in a town library in St. Louis’ Metro East is a mystery, but it has met its goal. So far I like best the poems by Tynyshtyqbek Abdikakimuly (b. 1953), translated by Rose Kudabayeva. Abdikakimuly’s bio says he has worked as an “electrician, miller, turner [presumably a lathe operator], driver, projectionist,” and for arts organizations and a newspaper. He won the State Prize of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Literature in 2018. I would like to know more, but there is almost nothing about him online.
In “Sometimes, You Know…” Abdikakimuly’s narrator says:
“Sometimes, you know, my eyes and soul
want to solve the secrets of credible innovations,
somehow hiding all my fears and doubts.
But,
behind all books—comparable
to laudatory inscriptions on stones,
people shout, hungry for truth.”
The narrator struggles between urges to participate or retreat. Sometimes he wants “even to go to prison, / in search of justice,”
“But,
Some devil holds me back,
Repeating: ‘Stop-stop!’
I feel sick that I should have behaved like that then.”
Other times the narrator wants to become “a devout believer of some religion,” if it will help solve secrets, “to prostrate on a prayer mat or to cross myself.”
“But damn this sort of slavery
when you are torn all the time
between the mortal world and the Creator!”
Truth-seeking is frustrating, and things, like people, can work against you:
“Sometimes I want to go somewhere,
just wander off,
to distance myself forever from fools.
But, wherever I go,
As soon as a wooden block sees my head,
It starts to look for an axe.”
At night, two “angels of afterlife” question the narrator, and he says:
“How many times I sobbed terribly
before this merciless court of consciousness.
But,
in the morning,
with something tasty boiling in its pan,
life with all its temptations awaits…”
Even humble things (like people) are intermediaries to the infinite. In “The Night-Sky Charms,” Abdikakimuly says, “God-Ķůmalaķšy (who is above everything) / tells fortune using stars….” But a footnote explains that a Ķůmalaķšy is a “fortune teller who uses 41 beans or stones or sheep dung (ķůmalaķ means sheep dung in the Turkic languages) sorted in piles, to predict the future.”
