Book 72: Xinjiang (Esperanto) – Loulan [楼蘭 Rōran] (INOUE Yasushi)

 

Within two days Loulan seemed to be a wholly unpopulated walled city. The town seemed to have suffered decades of decrepitude in those two days. This was hastened by, on the one hand, the furious blowing of the wind; earthen walls were destroyed, strata of ash-like sand were deposited on every street, and the whole town went ruinously pale. On the evening of the third day, when the wind had hardly fallen, from across the desert came a Han cavalry of several hundred riders to reside there. The depopulated walled city suddenly became filled with voices and neighing. It was on that day when the water of Lop Nor changed into yellow darkness and waves jumped noisily across the entire surface.

 

[my translation]

 

As mentioned I haven’t yet been able to find a novel by someone from Xinjiang, so to go with my Uighur short story I’ve added this book which includes the novel Loulan and the novella Fremdregionano (as well as an afterword by the translator), by the Japanese author INOUE Yasushi. Inoue was deeply interested in this region. It is an area that I’ve long been fascinated with, but I couldn’t help being disappointed with this one. Both stories read more like straight histories rather than novels. Perhaps that is almost inevitable considering the vast span of time that ‘Loulan’ covers. Loulan itself is the name of an abandoned ancient city on the southern Silk Road which has been reclaimed by the Taklamakan Desert, and also the name of its kingdom (later renamed Shanshan). It had a brief life of half a century, 2000 years ago. Its inhabitants were neither Uighurs (who arose a long time later) nor Chinese, but it seems they may have been Indo-Europeans and did speak an Indo-European language, Tocharian, so related to English. This unfortunate country was squeezed to death by the Han Dynasty Chinese on one side, and the ‘barbarian’ people they called the Xiongnu (who may have been identical to the Huns who later attacked Europe – Inoue calls them Huns ((hunnoj)) here). There was a third destructive force, the desert which finally claimed the city, and perhaps a fourth, the spirit of the Konche River which abandoned it. (Throughout history the rivers, and the mysterious salt lake Lop Nor which they fed – now notorious as the site of China’s nuclear tests, and non-Chinese are almost never allowed to visit the ruins – have moved around the Tarim Basin). In this story, the Chinese force the abandonment of Loulan in 77 BCE for another city called here Shanshan, actually Yixun (which has not been positively identified); in fact more of the tale takes place in ‘Shanshan’ than in Loulan. (Both of these are Chinese names; Loulan’s real name was Kroraina). This is on the pretext of protecting them from the Huns; Loulan becomes a Chinese military base until it is mysteriously abandoned. As Shanshan, the country remained loyal to China but had to struggle to keep the latter’s interest (and eventually failed, leaving them to the Huns). ‘Loulan’ follows how the kingdom tried various survival strategies, trying to keep both powers on side, then trying to get the Han to protect them from the Huns, all unsuccessful.

Fremdregionano takes part of this history and concentrates on one person, Han governor-general Ban Chao (sent to establish a Chinese protectorate but only temporarily successful) and is perhaps more successful for this. Even so, you don’t really get any idea of his character, let alone any character development. He died almost as soon as he returned to the Chinese capital Luoyang, and the Han abandoned what they called the Western Regions within five years.

The trouble with historical novels, while I love both history and novels, for me is that I find it annoying not knowing what is historical fact (or opinion) and what the author has fictionalised. I got the impression that very little was fictionalised, but it is impossible to be certain.

I found it rather jarring that the place and personal names were taken wholesale from the Chinese Pinyin transcription system, and then the Esperanto morphological endings added on. Even sounds that could be easily transcribed (and thus made pronounceable) in Esperanto orthography, such as ‘sh’, were left in Pinyin form. For example, Shanshan-anoj (inhabitants of Shanshan) could easily have been written ŝanŝananoj. There are some typos and (possibly controversial) neologisms. Some of the names are anachronistic (e.g. the kingdom of Former Cheshi). There are some very long quotes from the Chinese Silk Road travellers Faxian and Xuanzang and the Swedish archaeologist-discoverer Sven Hedin, all of whose full accounts are definitely worth reading if you’re interested in this area.

 

INOUE Yasushi 井上靖 (1907 – 1991), Loulan kaj Fremdregionano, translated from Japanese into Esperanto by Miyamoto Masao, Serio Oriento-Okcidento 20, Tokyo, Japana Esperanto-Instituto, 1984 [no ISBN].

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Xinjiang (English) – Wild Pigeon (Nurmemet YASIN)

Yurts on the Karakorum Highway towards Pakistan – my photo

 

Coming from Kazakhstan, which was lucky (and perhaps rather surprised) to find itself liberated from Russian control when the USSR disintegrated, it’s time to hop across the border to look a the closely-related people next door who were not so fortunate. Xinjiang (Chinese for ‘New Territory’) is the largest and westernmost province of the People’s Republic of China (Kashgar is closer to Istanbul than to Beijing, and not just geographically). It has traditionally been inhabited by mostly Turkic-speaking Muslim peoples, especially the Uighurs, who call it East Turkistan or Uyghuristan, and smaller groups such as the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz (now with their own nations) who are related to other peoples in Central Asia rather than to the Han Chinese. Nobody said history is fair.  On the contrary, in recent years so many Han have moved in (colonised?) that the Uighurs may now be in a minority in their own homeland, in a similar situation to the Tibetans. (It should be said, though, that the Chinese have also been in the ‘Western ‘Regions’ for a long time, since the heyday of the Silk Road). So far I haven’t been able to get a single Uighur novel, at least in one of the western European languages I can read. Perhaps that in itself says something? So I’ve covered this huge territory with a short story by a Uighur writer, Wild Pigeon (also called Blue Pigeon, light blue being the Uighurs’ colour), and the novel Loulan kaj Fremdregionano by INOUE Yasushi.

.

“The air inside and outside this cage are identical, I think, but the life possible on my side of these iron bars might just as well belong to a different universe.”

Considering how much writing it was to cost its author, this is an important little work.
In a dream, a wild pigeon (perhaps from the ‘Stans to the west?) visits his relatives the domesticated pigeons (of Xinjiang?) They have given up their souls, given up even thinking about souls.
The visitor suspects that words have different meanings here, but actually they don’t. There are in fact two kinds of naivety.
The older pigeon has ‘gone over’ to the humans, and he gets his fill while others starve, defending the system. In the end it’s the pigeons themselves that do in the wild pigeon, not the humans.
Perhaps the captors’ stupidity and ignorance about the pigeons’ is shown by their idea that they could keep a male pigeon for eggs? It is such a sad, cruel, hopeless and beautifully written story that, even if not of the same quality, it reminded me of one of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.
After the wild pigeon falls into the human trap, in the end he comes to the heartbreaking conclusion that the only thing to do is commit suicide and die with dignity. The situation really does seem hopeless. The poet Yasin was jailed by the Chinese authorities for writing this story, ‘inciting splittism’, and reportedly died in prison in 2011.

In the translation on the Radio Free Asia website, blocks of the text were repeated – I was unsure as to whether this was deliberate or a mistake.

As a postscript – The PRC has recently started using surveillance drones disguised as birds, called The Dove, especially in Xinjiang. I’m sure this is a pure coincidence.

 

YASIN, Nurmuhemmet (Nurmemet) (1977? – 2011?): Wild Pigeon (also: Blue Pigeon), first published in the Kashgar Literary Magazine, 2004, issue 5 (all copies of which were subsequently recalled). Translated by Dr Dolkun Kamberi, 2005 https://www.rfa.org/english/uyghur/wild_pigeon-20050627.html, accessed 14/11/2018.

Book 71: Kazakhstan (German) – Abai = Абай жолы (Abai’s Way) (Mukhtar O. AUEZOV =Мұхтар Омарханұлы Әуезов)

 

Beside Kunanbai’s yurts stood, closely-packed, those of the relatives. Multifarious life echoed through the afternoon steppe. Dogs barked; sheep and lambs bleated, blended with the calls of the shepherds, the clip-clop of the horses, which, enshrouded in golden glow-through clouds of dust, pulled to the drinking-trough; foals neighed, having just been released, and now rushed through the steppe, seeking the dams. From the campfires the smoke climbed into the clear evening sky and hung like a dark grey curtain over the yurts… Yes, that is what he had longed for in the city.

[my translation]

 

I have to admit that my heart sank when this one arrived in the post. Firstly I found that through some slip of the finger I’d accidentally ordered two copies. Secondly that the binding was of such poor quality that the spine was broken – already – on BOTH copies. (Perhaps I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been from an ex-Soviet publisher, but from a German one I expected a bit better). Thirdly, because it is in German. Well, of course I already knew that. (’Abai’ doesn’t seem to have been translated into English, despite being the, or one of the, key works in Kazakh literature). But how would my German stand up to the fourth point, which is: it’s gigantic – nearly 900 pages. What is it about Kazakh novels, that they’re as vast as the steppes? The Nomads by Yesenberlin (reviewed by Ann Morgan) is also very long. Reading in German slowed me down too, so I ended up spending a whole year on it at the rate of three pages a day, while I ploughed on through other virgin lands in my reading (not a fast year, since three of these were in French, one in Dutch, and four in Spanish – serves me right for trying to read in the original!) Reading this book felt like running a marathon. I should mention that ‘Abai’ was translated via Russian, so I hope it didn’t lose too much seeping through multiple filters. Perhaps my little translation above into yet another language is nothing but a ‘Chinese whisper’.

Mukhtar Auezov (Muchtar Auesow in German spelling) lived during Soviet times and promoted the works of Abai Kunanbaev. He was attacked during the paranoid 1930s for supposedly propagating feudalism in ‘Abai’, but he received an Order of Lenin for it after Stalin died. Ironically, Auezov himself and his hero Abai Kunanbaev were quite Russophile; for him, making Kazakhstan a modern, civilised nation certainly involved fostering elements of its traditional culture such as epic poetry (Abai was an akyn – wandering poet/bard – himself), but also considering Russia as apparently the sole source of modernisation, including introducing high points of Russian culture such as Pushkin’s poetry. Despite his Russophilia he is still the Kazakhs’ national cultural hero. Abai pretty much single-handedly created Kazakh as a literary language. I wonder how much this seminal work has influenced modern Kazakhstan, which seems to be less nationalistic and friendlier to Russia than some of the other new Central Asian nations?

‘Abai’ gives great insight into the dying traditional nomadic life on the steppes. Everything you need to know about Kazakh life in the 1800s and early 1900s seems to be in this book, and it was instrumental in fostering self-consciousness among the Kazakhs. (The divisions among the peoples of ex-Soviet Central Asia, especially between the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, originally were really quite artificial, and several of the nationalities were virtually created by Stalin for divide-and-rule purposes; and the physical borders that resulted are quite crazy. But since the divisions have congealed with the gaining of independence, the national identities are slowly becoming a reality).

Being nomadic, or semi-nomadic, much of the Kazakhs’ culture was portable and verbal. Hence their love and respect for the akyns.

The novel begins with Abai’s life in the aul (a key word which is not defined in the otherwise excellent glossary, but which here means a nomadic camp, though nowadays it can also mean a village, a district or even a touristy ‘traditional’ restaurant). Abai’s father was a powerful regional clan leader, who administers rough justice, and is hated by other clans for his imperialism. Abai spends periods in the cities. He comes back to the aul as a rare educated man – the clansmen think he’s a mullah and can cure illnesses (he doesn’t try to disabuse them). He is happy to learn from the Russians, including exiled revolutionaries. He counters the narrow-minded Kischkene-mullah, since he respects Western civilisation more. He becomes left-leaning and has a feeling of class solidarity with the poor Russians he meets.

Abai ended up with several wives, but he always remained in love with Togshan, whom he couldn’t marry for political reasons. Personally, I felt that his first wife Dilda was not described enough so I wasn’t sure why he didn’t really love her.

Basically, ‘Abai’ is the story of how he becomes a leader for the Kazakhs who is above the petty conflicts of the clans, and the Kazakh literary star by blending the oral tales of the steppes, Islamic literature and Russian literature. It is a fascinating journey into another culture, time and place. But please, someone, translate it into English!

 

AUESOW, Muchtar (1845-1904), Abai: vor Tau und Tag, translated from Russian into German by Hilde Angarowa, Berlin/Tübingen, Hans Schiler, 2010, ISBN 978-3-89930-262-2

(originally published in Kazakh in four volumes between 1942 and 1956)