Monday, 20 February 2012

Color 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 forefront of current scholarship on these works, and has produced much that is useful (including the now indispensable Annotated Indices to the Kokand Chronicles) but a lot of work remains to be done. (This is the story, alas, for much of Central Asian history between the Mongol and Russian conquests.)

The works in question are the شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ عندالیب and the شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ مطریب and exist in two copies at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent. The copy I am working from is Ms. 696/I-II, and is described in volume five (publ. 1960) of the institute's catalogue of manuscripts (q.v. nos 3532 and 3534, p. 49). Both works are concerned with the reign of Muḥammad 'Alī Khan (r. 1237/1822-1258/1842). Nothing is known of the authors.

A pair of stiches caught my eye in شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ عندالیب (fol. 5b l.15-fol.6a l.1):

خان نی اوروغیدین ایرمیش اول ایر
حم آتی انینگ ایرور علی شیر

که رنگی اوجوب گحی قیزاردی
که سرغاریبان گحی کوکاردی

My best translation thus far of this quite literally colorful pair of stiches goes something like this:

'There was a man from the khan's kinfolk,
Also called 'Alī Shīr,

Who turned pale and sometimes red;
Who turned yellow and sometimes blue.'

The translation is a bit literal, and maybe the depth of meaning can be more accurately rendered in a metaphorical sense:

'There was a man from the khan's kinfolk,
Also called was 'Alī Shīr.

Sometimes he blanched and sometimes he blushed;
Sometimes he yellowed and sometimes he turned blue in the face.'

I'm still working on it; suggestions welcome.

Thursday, 2 February 2012

Write 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 - what with developments in OCR and the non-Latin script search capabilities of Google - no longer necessary on my part to transliterate or transcribe Cyrillic or Arabic-script titles and sources into Latin. As more and more libraries (mine own, IU, for example) are calibrating search functions for non-Latin scripts, it actually means we now no longer have to worry quite so much about how we transliterate the given title of a Russian or Persian work, since interested parties can now simply type the relevant text in the orginal scripts and let nature - I mean, teh interwebs - work it's magic.

Monday, 6 June 2011

Ongoing 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 since I like to think that he wouldn't deliberately send me on a fool's errand - it shouldn't be a complete waste of time and, in any case, it might well end up in my dissertation.

For MESA, I'll be presenting a paper on a Naqshbandi shaykh in Herat in the second-half of the fifteenth century, and for CESS I'll be discussing the influnce of Nava'i's work on early nineteenth century poets in Central Asia. The paper I'll be attempting to get published is a discussion of Nawa'i's memoir of Jami, Khamsat al-mutahayyirin.

A busy summer in store, then.

Thursday, 28 April 2011

Research 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 its early (Beta) stages, but we've already started posting texts online and slowly glossing them. For obvious reasons, we're initially focusing on printed texts in the public domain, which restricts our options somewhat, but we do have a sizeable chunk of the Baburnama posted, as well as a link to Ilminski's edition at Google Books.

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

Nava'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 - most of the year. It's just that, like a good wine (wah-wah-wah) sometimes you need a little time and space to breathe in order to truly appreciate the, err, and here the metaphor dies .. pfft.

That said, I've been able to return to some projects that have had to go on the back burner while I've been focused on the Conference, work, and regular studying. One of these projects involves gathering older i.e. 19th century scholarship on Nava'i. I've mentioned (I think ...) Monsieur Belin before, who published a two-part survey of Nava'i and his works in the early 1860s.

In the same venue - Journal asiatique - he published his translation of Mahbub al-qulub, Nava'i's treatise on ethics and society. A little earlier, the Russian orientalist Mikhail Nikitskiy, under the aegis of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, also published a survey of the works of Nava'i, as well as descriptions of Mir 'Ali Shir from period sources (Davlatshah Samarqandi, Khondamir, Sam Mirza et al).

These materials I've either been able to download off teh interwebs, or scan to .pdf from the wonderful microfilm and facsimile collection of Central Asian scholarship held at the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies - where I happen to work. Most convenient.

Monday, 24 January 2011

Uzbek 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 of content, and recording details of relevant articles.

This - children - is bibliographic research the old-fashioned way. The three journals I've most been concerned with in this phase - Sharq Yulduzi [Star of the East), O'zbek tili va adabiyoti (Uzbek Language and Literature) and O'zbekiston tarixi (History of Uzbekistan) - are not readily available electronically (yet...).

However, even with the incomplete sets in the Wells Library, I've identified several dozen likely looking articles which may be of some use, all to do with Nava'i, in some way or other.

Wednesday, 5 January 2011

Research 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 from British and Soviet bureaucrats charged with overseeing her visit; at the same time, her host family and acquaintances were seemingly quick to dispense with the formalities and provide her with the proverbial 'home from home.'

Based not on my own experiences, but from what I've heard and read about the experiences of researchers in the current post-Soviet space, it seems that some things haven't changed. For example, it is de rigeur in the acknowledgements section of any monograph written by a European or American scholar on, say, Central Asia (and when this thought first popped into my head, I was able to check immediately agains several such volumes in my bookshelves), to note the wonderful hospitality of librarians and archivists, usually in the form of endless cups of tea and local delicacies (dumplings, bread, pastries, kebabs etc.).

All well and good, you might think ... but I wonder if such a habit is a hangover from Soviet days. Fitzpatrick writes:

We weren’t allowed to go to the snackbar or cafeteria because that would have meant wandering unsupervised around the building; instead, kind-hearted supervisors (dezhurnye, always women) made tea for us and allowed us to eat sandwiches at our desks, dropping crumbs on the state secrets.