tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20659588086956332792024-03-12T20:24:04.007-04:00Fragments of a MelodyWrite, or do not. There is no try.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-53174254222674476022015-12-07T06:42:00.000-05:002015-12-07T06:42:02.121-05:00Blood Orange - Cupid Deluxe (2013)In July 2014 I returned to my then home in Atlanta after eight months overseas. I spent six of those months in Tashkent, researching my dissertation in archives and libraries, thumbing through crumbling manuscripts and tattered books in search of ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī. I was trying to pull together fragments of his legacy and influence upon later writers in an attempt to illustrate (or was it Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-60513547638142476422015-12-06T05:40:00.000-05:002015-12-06T05:49:51.569-05:00No More I Love Yous - The Lover Speaks (1986)/Annie Lennox (1995)"I used to have demons in my room at night ..."
For much of my teen years and well into my twenties, I used to have night terrors. In the in-between state of awake and asleep, spiders used to drop onto my bed. Or build webs over my head. Dark shadows half-concealed themselves behind my bedroom door. Other times I would wake up, paralyzed. I could feel someone holding me. On other occasions, I Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-57376220688173682802012-11-19T00:53:00.000-05:002012-11-19T00:53:20.001-05:00Research Methods (3)A week or so ago I attended a workshop organized by the recently-established Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis at IUB. The workshop was on Omeka, a digital publishing platform tailored for librarians, archivists and humanists who want to curate collections and research materials online. I attended because I'm becoming more and more interested in possible ways of Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-67494201739121382562012-10-12T18:09:00.001-04:002012-10-12T18:09:28.779-04:00Nawa'i Editions (2)In one of my earliest posts I noted the lack of both critical text editions and translation of the works of نوائی. Therefore, I was very excited when I was in Tashkent back in August to pick up a copy of a recently-published Arabic-script edition of the نسایم المحبَه, his biographical dictionary of Sufi saints, based largely on three of the earliest known manuscripts: 1) Topkapi MS. Rivan 808; 2)Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-70500825818017975582012-09-07T11:45:00.001-04:002012-09-07T11:45:31.447-04:00Q&A sessionIt was a busy summer: a couple of pre-dissertation research trips, one to the UK and one to Uzbekistan; a French readings class; work at the research institute; class preparation for the Fall; and reading for Quals. It was probably *too* busy, but I achieved a couple of major goals, namely finally fulfilling my coursework requirements, and then taking - and passing - my Qualifying exams, Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-28202775101595019932012-03-16T12:02:00.012-04:002012-03-16T12:52:57.253-04:00'Let go of the madrasa and the khaneqah'One of the highlights of the annual conference of the Association of Central Eurasian Students (ACES) at Indiana University, which was held at the beginning of this month, is the booksale. Consisting mainly of donations from publishers and cast-offs from faculty-members' personal libraries, it can be a hit or miss affair. However, this year (as with last), it was beefed-up by the remnants of the Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-20983494385695475972012-02-20T01:36:00.002-05:002012-03-06T01:21:49.160-05:00Color me amazed ...Among projects I keep in the slow-lane is an attempted translation of a pair of verse histories that belong to the clutch of Persian and Turkic works collectively referred to as the Kokand Chronicles. Produced in the 19th century, these works offer various perspectives on the history of the Ming dynasty, the Khanate of Kokand, and the Ferghana valley after 1720. Timur K. Beisembiev is at the Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-24234658179178159732012-02-02T15:13:00.003-05:002012-02-02T15:25:00.615-05:00Write on!One of the things that inevitably slows down my blog-posting is the fiddly and persnickety process of correctly transliterating non-Latin scripts. Hence, if you look at some of my past posts, you'll see I've transliterated titles of books and whatnot originally published in, say, Russian or Uzbek, into Latin.I've now decided this not a helpful process ... both intellectually dishonest and - whatNickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-49141916153518783842011-06-06T12:00:00.005-04:002011-06-06T12:10:57.704-04:00Ongoing Research (1)I've accumulated a short list of "to do" projects over the summer, which I need to somehow fit in around my Uyghur language programme; these include:1) MESA conference presentation;2) CESS conference presentation;3) Revise and submit paper for publication.Of these, the first two are green-lighted; the third is more of a shot in the dark, but since I'm working on my advisor's recommendation - and Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-17535870260339035892011-04-28T23:01:00.006-04:002011-04-28T23:10:49.278-04:00Research Methods (2)Hmmm. That didn't take long. Still, since no-one actually *blogs* anymore, I don't suppose anyone noticed. Life has been busy, but I've become involved in a Wiki project based out of Harvard, established by my friend Eric (the man behind Who was Du Tong?, which aims to provide an online chrestomathy for Chaghatay Turki (and variants of).Called nothing more grand than TurkicWiki, it's still in itsNickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-80783238141842581582011-03-16T21:42:00.015-04:002011-03-16T22:30:15.779-04:00Nava'i Scholarship (2)It is Spring Break Break. Let joy be unconfined. Wandering around campus and downtown today I am reminded just how wonderful Bloomington can be when a) the weather is mild, and b) most of the students have left. Lest I be accused of misanthropy or academic snobbery on account of the latter point, I should point out that I happen to think Bloomington fairly lovely - if not outright wonderful - Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-41899728080624424332011-01-24T13:50:00.012-05:002011-01-25T15:01:51.193-05:00Uzbek Scholarship (1)I've reached that point in my preliminary research where I've exhausted most of the published English-language source material, and I'm moving into the realms of Uzbek and Russian publications, more particularly, academic journals.The initial phase has been to tootle around the stacks of IU Wells Library, plucking volumes, issues or parts of journals from the shelves, flicking through the tables Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-79212274355667042972011-01-05T15:54:00.010-05:002011-01-05T16:09:14.695-05:00Research Methods (1)In one of the December issues of the London Review of Books last year, the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick recalled her experiences as one of the lucky few foreign researchers allowed into the Soviet archives in the 1960s ('A Spy in the Archives').It's a wonderful account of the dualities and binaries that seem to have underlain her encounters. On the one hand, there was official suspicion, both Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-33513149591542487072011-01-04T18:44:00.009-05:002011-01-04T19:03:03.698-05:00Diversions (3)The New York Times Sunday Book review recently elicited responses from six writer/critics to the question, 'Why criticism matters.' One of the writers canvassed was Elif Batuman, an American writer from a Turkish family, whose wonderful book on the the study of Russian literature and the ups and downs of graduate student life, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-35772563325384276062011-01-03T01:54:00.005-05:002011-01-03T17:26:16.537-05:00Glossing Nawa'i (2)As noted in an earlier post, for the student whose first language is English, the absence of dictionaries and lexicons defining and explaining Chaghatay Turki words and phrases is frustrating.Another useful aide I've (re)discovered is Cagataische Sprachstudien: grammatikalischer Umriss und Chrestomathie, enthaltend zwoelf Original-Auszuege mit Uebersetzung, nebst Woerterbh dieser ost-tuerkischen Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-7446463690262493622010-12-29T13:12:00.011-05:002010-12-30T02:25:07.561-05:00Diversions (2)'What role for theory in historiography?' is a question historians constantly ruminate on. When I was at school in the UK, there were generally reckoned to to be four "schools" of historiography through which historians interpreted British history, namely Whig/Liberal, Marxist, Revisionist, Post-Revisionist.For the uninitiated Whig/Liberal (as I understand it ...) meant the teleological Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-88535884333169817752010-09-26T21:25:00.003-04:002010-09-26T21:58:00.742-04:00Nawa'i Scholarship (1)Part of the process of researching Nawa'i includes, of course, engaging with previous scholarship. It is an onerous task: major monographs and articles have appeared in Russian, Uzbek, Turkish, Persian, German, French, Tajik ... and so on. Curiously, little is available in English - it's a similar situation that alluded to in an earlier post, when I was bemoaning the paucity of English-language Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-64456549966075423892010-09-19T20:59:00.007-04:002010-09-19T21:21:48.783-04:00The Historic Nawa'i (1)part of my research ... well, *part* of it now - probably most of it in the near future - involves examining how successive generations of poets engaged with and responded to Nawa'i's literary legacy. Quite simply, it means reading reams of late medieaval Turkic poetry (Central Asian or Ottoman) and identifying occasions on which poets either responded directly to Nawa'i - usually through the Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-52903112960766593382010-09-08T22:25:00.007-04:002010-09-08T22:59:49.548-04:00Diversions (1)Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not reading/studying Mir 'Ali Sir all the time - just most of it ... but that's by the by. By way of distraction, and in order to hone my reading and translating skills vis à vis Chaghatay Turkic, I've been working through some materials available online at Harvard University's Islamic Heritage Project.One is Janāb-i Ba-davlatnī hikāyātlārī ('Tales of the Blessed Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-64054782717217545982010-09-05T11:20:00.008-04:002010-09-05T11:54:49.441-04:00Nawa'i MSS (3)Earlier posts alluded to a) the lack of English translations of Nawa'i's works, and b) the production of scholarly editions in (mostly) Uzbekistan and Turkey. However, as libraries and archives get stuck into the arduous process of digitizing their collections, it is to be hoped that the manuscript copies themselves will become accessible online - preferably without having to pay for the Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-64485069506088146302010-09-04T13:21:00.000-04:002010-09-04T13:21:32.897-04:00Nawa'i MSS (2)Earlier this year I compiled for the purposes of a term paper an initial handlist of Nawa'i MSS worldwide. I identified over 680 copies of Mir 'Ali Shir's Persian and Turkic works in libraries and archives throughout Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia. The oldest dated from his lifetime (i.e. the 2nd half of the 15th cent.) and the most recent from just before WWII (1939, Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-79864339240446014082009-12-26T22:38:00.009-05:002009-12-29T14:34:31.302-05:00Nawa'i in Historical Context (1)Maria Subtelny at University of Toronto is supreme among English-language scholars who focus on this period. Her most recent work, Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2007), is effectively a summation of her life's work, combining both new and previously published scholarship on the latter years of the Timurid dynasty, with particular Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-57622810223912539342009-12-15T21:35:00.003-05:002009-12-17T13:31:19.675-05:00Glossing Nawa'i (1)In the absence of a Chaghatay-English dictionary/lexicon/glossary and so on, the reader of Mir 'Ali Shir is forced to consult a number of different reference sources to make either head or tail of his works which, transgressing on the territories of religion and poetry, often contain a lot of oblique or obscure words and phrases, many of them loans from Arabic and Persian.A good starting point isNickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-21792228686750007432009-12-11T00:54:00.000-05:002009-12-11T01:20:26.862-05:00Sources on Mir 'Ali Shir (1)While we lack for accessible translations of Mir 'Ali Shir's works, there are no shortage of sources on him, his life and times available in English translation (and other languages). An obvious starting point is the Makarim al-Akhlaq, a panegyric written by Khwandamir in Mir 'Ali Shir's honor, listing his virtues and literary achievements. Significantly, it gives details of the institutions Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-22840156597694394612009-12-09T21:30:00.000-05:002009-12-09T22:15:44.101-05:00Nawa'i Editions (1)For the non-linguist, accessing Mir 'Ali Shir is a sisypheaen task. As far as I am aware, only one of his works has been translated into English, the famous Mughamat al-Lughatain (composed AH 905/AD 1499), his treatise on the superiority of Chaghatay Turkic to Persian as a literary language. It's an interesting work, but imho has more novelty value than anything.If it's critical and/or published Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0