Hamid Ismailov

Hamid Ismailov (born 1954, Kyrgyzstan) is an Uzbek journalist and writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 and came to the United Kingdom, where he took a job with the BBC World Service. His works are banned in Uzbekistan. He published dozens of books in Uzbek, Russian, French, German, Turkish and other languages. Among them books of poetry: "Sad"(Garden)(1987), "Pustynya"(Desert) (1988), of visual poetry: "Post Faustum" (1990), "Kniga Otsutstvi " (1992), novels "Sobranie Utonchyonnyh" (1988), "Le Vagabond Flamboyant" (1993), "Hay-ibn-Yakzan" (2001), "Hostage to Celestial Turks" (2003), "Doroga k smerti bol'she chem smert'"(The Road to Death is bigger than Death) (2005) and many others. He translated Russian and Western classics into Uzbek, and Uzbek and Persian classics into Russian and some Western languages.

Ismailov's novel ["The Railway"] , originally written before he left Uzbekistan, was the first to be translated into English, by Robert Chandler, and was published in 2006. A Russian edition was published in Moscow in 1997.

Works:

The Railway

The Railway by Hamid Ismailov is an enthralling display of imaginative writing and technical adroitness, charting the fortunes of a fictional Uzbek village throughout the 20th century. Aided and abetted by his translator, Robert Chandler, Ismailov brings to brilliant life a richly-populated community as it copes with one of the most turbulent centuries in human experience. In this one novel there as many characters as there are in Anthony Powell’s sequence of 12 novels, A Dance to the Music of Time, which covers broadly the same period.

In his introduction Chandler described The Railway as ‘folkloric’, and adds that in it is current form it has been reduced by as much as a fifth; the mind boggles at what wonders have been left on the cutting-room floor! Where to begin, then, describing this marvel of prose. The people’s names are more often than not puns on their professions or characters: Bahri-Granny-Fortunes, the gypsy fortune-teller; Bolta-Lightning, the electrician; Fyokla-Whispertongue, an informer; Temir-Iul-Longline, railway engineer, to name some but a few. Some characters feature only in walk-on parts; others are briefly mentioned in one chapter, only to be focus of events in another.

Different stylistic techniques are adopted to color different stories. The elopement of a pair of lovers is played out against the showing of a Hindi filmi. The adventures of Mullah Ulmas-Greeneyes, who criss-crosses Europe, Asia, and settles in Brighton Beach, NY, are set against the Second Wortld War and its aftermath. In the course of his travels Mullah Ulmas-Greeneyes stumbles through famous events or meets famous people (Camus, Sartre, Solzhenitsyn), like a Central Asian Zelig.

Though these events often take against the backdrop of the Soviet Union, there is neither the sense of looming oppression nor of official interference that you might expect. Instead, the Soviet officials are often portrayed as cunning schemers or outright imbeciles. People are exiled or dispatched to the gulag, or simply liquidated, but their fate comes secondary to the demands of the story: Sevinch, the director of the Gilas music school, uses the many stops of his rail journey into Siberia to memorise whole reams of poetry and the masterpieces of Classical music - a feat which earns him adulation on orchestral tours to the West.

All serious readers read widely, and will be au fait with the masters of non-English fiction, and know that such authors owe a great debt of gratitude to the skill of their translators, one such example being the role of Maureen Freely in preserving the style of Orhan Pamuk’s works. Chandler has worked miracles to preserve the tropes which sprinkle Ismailov’s prose: the puns, the alliteration, the jokes. It is a marvellous achievement

The problem, if any, is the lack of a well-known Uzbek literary canon in which to place Ismailov and against which he can be compared. Little Uzbek literature has made it into English, aside from the interminable ramblings of President Karimov. The brief flowering of prose, poetry, and theatre initiated by the Jadids, and which carried on into the early years of the Uzbek SSR, withered during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and, literary memoirs aside, there has been little of note since. Ismailov should therefore be regarded as the foremost Uzbek writer of his generation.

The helpful notes provided at the end of the text explain aspects of Central Asia unknown to the general reader, but even for the informed reader it is a novel whose manifold charms and wonders will probably take many re-readings to uncover and fully appreciate. And what is the railway of the title? prosaically, it is probably the Turkestan-Siberia Railway, or Turksib for short, completed in 1930 as one of the earliest and most prestigious ’shock constructions’ of the First Five-Year Plan. However, in a poetic sense the railway would seem to be a metaphor akin to the threads of life reeled out by the Fates, its passage across the expanse of Central Asia representing the journey of life.

Hostage to Celestial Turks

This is a wonderfully strange novel that purports to be the diary of a captive of terrorists, Altaer Magdi, who is a translator. His client, an American trying to research a mysterious religious group The Celestial Turks, disappears. This group seems to hold the long-desired "key to all religions" with writings that sample from Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and even Shamanism.

The novel is organized in almost an epistolary format, with several points of view--the translator's story and that of the Celestial Turks. There are many stories being told here, in locations ranging from Europe to Central Asia. The reliability of the narrator, or narrators seems questionable, which adds to the sense of mystery. There are passages of great beauty here, but little organization nor a "red thread" for the reader. Hence you have to enjoy this book like bits of various sweetmeats drunk with some strong tea--not a book to be read in a meal but in mouthfuls.

This book reminds greatly of a novella "Seven American Nights" by Gene Wolfe.

External links

* [http://www.transoxiana.org/0107/ismailov-divan_tamarit-en.html On the poetics of Lorca's "Divan of Tamarit"] by Hamid Ismailov. Translated into English by Natalya Khan & Saodat I. Bazarova. Transoxiana 7 - Diciembre 2003. Original Russian text at [http://www.transoxiana.org/0107/ismailov-divan_tamarit.html К поэтике "Дивана Тамарита" Лорки]