Book 137: Turkmenistan (English) – The Tale of Aypi (Ak Welsapar)

Clouds of downy pollen blown by the scorching wind landed on the hills and mixed with the sand, turning the entire area as grey as a wolf pelt. It was hot beyond all endurance, and a bitter, heavy-smelling breeze blew from the sea. People found no relief; first they ran out of their simple homes, then they ran back inside.

Similar to the tale from Tunisia, this is a story about the relentlessness and pitilessness of developers, and how those whose land is being ‘developed’ have to cope after they have been left with nothing (at least where they have lived for generations). And like Lion Mountain in Tunisia, this book (and its author) have been banned in Turkmenistan – Ak Welsapar had to leave in 1993. But it is the first Turkmen novel to have been translated.
Aypi is a young bride in a fishing village on (I assume) the Caspian Sea. For telling some strangers the villagers’ secrets, in exchange for a necklace which fascinated her, her husband pushed her off a cliff into the sea and the necklace dragged her down to her doom. She became the village ghost.
We find out eventually that Aypi’s real name is Ay-peri (’ay’ is ‘moon’ in Turkmen), and in a sense she always was a peri (magical female being in Persian mythology); even as a girl she was always a good swimmer and mischievous. I guess I was expecting her to somehow turn out to be more substantial – more powerful, more moral, less ethereal – but after all she is just a spirit of the dead. She doesn’t do anything practical but is just a gadfly. What she really respects are beauty and wealth. Well – that is what she is.
Three hundred years later, when the whole village is ordered to relocate to the city, and fishing is forbidden, only Araz refuses to leave (despite the authorities inflicting an unusual ice cream torture on him…), thinking everyone else is spineless.
Aypi has begun a campaign of gadfly torture on the men as revenge for them muttering about women’s weakness.
There are two main themes – the battle against (or rather acquiescence to) development, and the war of the sexes. The Tale of Aypi is a surprise – a ghost story and a tale of reincarnation perhaps from a Muslim country (Islam is almost totally unmentioned, but it is set during the time of the Soviet Union), and a feminist tale written by a man (as is Liberia’s Guanya Pau). It was very well written and enjoyable.

WELSAPAR, Ak (1956 – ), The Tale of Aypi, translated by W. M. Coulson, London, Glagoslav, 2016, ISBN 978-1-78437-983-4 (originally published 2012)
 

Book 124: Kyrgyzstan (French) – Djamilia (Tchinguiz AÏTMATOV)

When we had loaded the last mojar [two-wheeled cart], Djamilia, as if she had forgotten everything in the world, watched the twilight for a long time. Over there, beyond the river, somewhere on the edge of the Kazakh steppe, like the mouth of a burning tandyr [earth oven], the evening monsoon sun flamed languidly. It slowly sank behind the horizon, soaking with a burning light some crumbly little clouds in the sky and throwing its last shimmers onto the mauve steppe, whose lower ground was already covered by the blue of precocious gloom. Djamilia watched the setting sun with a soft exultant joy, as if a fairy-tale vision had materialised in front of her. Her face shone with tenderness, her half-open lips softly smiled like a child.

[my translation]

Here is a love triangle (or should that be square?) set during World War II on a collective farm in Kyrgyzstan when it was still part of the USSR. When we meet Djamilia she is a joyous, spirited girl who tells everyone exactly what she thinks and is not overly respectful of her elders. She is the younger wife of the narrator’s brother Sadyk, who has been away in the war since shortly after marrying her and is invalided in a distant town. But he shows little interest in her, relegating her to a mere footnote in his letters. Another soldier comes back to the ail (village) wounded from the war: Danïiar, who is (now, at least) a taciturn loner. The three have to bring grain across the steppes to the nearest railway station in order to keep the soldiers fed. Djamilia and the narrator, Seït, immaturely mock Danïiar, and saddle him with an impossibly enormous bag to carry – which he manages to do without complaining. He thereby wins the heart of Djamilia (and the respect of the narrator, who belatedly discovers that he himself is a little in love with her). When they learn that Sadyk is finally coming home, all three come to the realisation that they will have to leave the ail.
While it’s a slim story (I read it in a day) with a fairly predictable plot, it’s still a lovely little book with some gorgeous natural descriptions which confirmed to me that Kyrgyzstan is one of the places I most want to visit!
My translation was into French, so I’ve used the French transliterations of the names here.

AÏTMATOV, Tchinguiz (1928 – ), Djamilia, translated from Kyrgyz into French by A. Dimitrieva & Louis Aragon, Paris, Denoël, 2001, ISBN 2.207.25236.1

Originally published in Kyrgyz, 1958

Also translated into English (via Russian) by James Riordan as:
AITMATOV, Chingiz, Jamilia, Telegram, 2007

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].