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أباي كونانبايف مختارات شعرية
شعر قازاقي
260 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2011
58 people want to read
About the author
Abay Qunanbayuli
3 books14 followersAbay (Ibrahim) Qunanbayuli(1845-1904). Abay was born in 1845 at the bottom of the Chingiz Mountain in the today's Abay district (former Karkaraly) located in Eastern Kazakhstan region (formerly, the Semipalatinsk region).
He was a well-known Kazakh poet, a great thinker, composer, philosopher, the founder of written Kazakh literature, and its first classic.
The heritage he left his nation is rich in songs and poems, translations and prose. His translations of the poetry written by Russian writers and poets such as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Krylov became the national patrimony of Kazakhstan. He translated the works of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron into Kazakh language.
«Qara Sözder» [Book of Words] (prose) created by the great thinker constitute an ethnic philosophical work. This creation of his is an exploration of Kazakh national life in the second half of the 19th century. He influenced social affairs in the country where he lived.
He also participated in the governing of the country and played a certain role in trying to solve complicated problems justly.
The name of Abay is known worldwide just as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Pushkin are well-known in many countries, because his great words became a spiritual patrimony of not only one nation, but of the entire humankind.
He was a well-known Kazakh poet, a great thinker, composer, philosopher, the founder of written Kazakh literature, and its first classic.
The heritage he left his nation is rich in songs and poems, translations and prose. His translations of the poetry written by Russian writers and poets such as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Krylov became the national patrimony of Kazakhstan. He translated the works of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron into Kazakh language.
«Qara Sözder» [Book of Words] (prose) created by the great thinker constitute an ethnic philosophical work. This creation of his is an exploration of Kazakh national life in the second half of the 19th century. He influenced social affairs in the country where he lived.
He also participated in the governing of the country and played a certain role in trying to solve complicated problems justly.
The name of Abay is known worldwide just as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Pushkin are well-known in many countries, because his great words became a spiritual patrimony of not only one nation, but of the entire humankind.
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November 17, 2022
This book contains about a hundred or so poems by a Kazakh poet who lived in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Living among nomadic tribesman who follow a largely pastoral existence, his poems are almost exclusively anguished, painful, despairing and resigned to an existence disappointing in the extreme. Rarely have I encountered a writer so woebegone and dispirited both personally and socially.
There are love poems of youthful exuberance. But they are few and brief and are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those which eloquently plead with a lover who has abandoned him to reappear. She seemingly never does, causing him to write more and more about the tortured lover whose soul burns in such an unrequited manner. There are also very moving poems regarding the death of one of his sons, the most eloquent one of which is told from the perspective of the 22-year-old widow he left behind. It was shortly after the death of his second son from tuberculosis that Abai himself passed away.
Yet it is the society around him for which the poet reserves most of his writing and most of his scorn. It is as if he can see only lechery, greediness, pettiness, vainglory, boasting, prideful laziness, ignorance, duplicity, hypocrisy and sloth among his compatriots. The moral preaching involved in these poems is almost as if they were to be declaimed in church by a stern and unforgiving preacher. A fervent Muslim, Abai believed that Allah rules all, but even this cannot account for the venal practices of his peers that he finds so reprehensible. The two much longer poems which close the volume deal with Alexander (here referred to as 'Iskander') being taught the meaningless of his ambitious triumphs by Aristotle and Mas’hood learning that frenzied mobs can become so powerful that they can force even otherwise rational and calm people to join them.
Such personal agonies and distaste for the society around him existed in virtually all of the poems, making their reading more than a little dispiriting. Once in a while, he does observe the natural beauties of the world around him but by the end of such poems, he has returned either to chastising men who fail to appreciate such uplifting images or to lamenting that such natural growths still end in deaths as inevitable as they are essentially meaningless.
All in all, quite discouraging stuff.
Not really recommended.
There are love poems of youthful exuberance. But they are few and brief and are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those which eloquently plead with a lover who has abandoned him to reappear. She seemingly never does, causing him to write more and more about the tortured lover whose soul burns in such an unrequited manner. There are also very moving poems regarding the death of one of his sons, the most eloquent one of which is told from the perspective of the 22-year-old widow he left behind. It was shortly after the death of his second son from tuberculosis that Abai himself passed away.
Yet it is the society around him for which the poet reserves most of his writing and most of his scorn. It is as if he can see only lechery, greediness, pettiness, vainglory, boasting, prideful laziness, ignorance, duplicity, hypocrisy and sloth among his compatriots. The moral preaching involved in these poems is almost as if they were to be declaimed in church by a stern and unforgiving preacher. A fervent Muslim, Abai believed that Allah rules all, but even this cannot account for the venal practices of his peers that he finds so reprehensible. The two much longer poems which close the volume deal with Alexander (here referred to as 'Iskander') being taught the meaningless of his ambitious triumphs by Aristotle and Mas’hood learning that frenzied mobs can become so powerful that they can force even otherwise rational and calm people to join them.
Such personal agonies and distaste for the society around him existed in virtually all of the poems, making their reading more than a little dispiriting. Once in a while, he does observe the natural beauties of the world around him but by the end of such poems, he has returned either to chastising men who fail to appreciate such uplifting images or to lamenting that such natural growths still end in deaths as inevitable as they are essentially meaningless.
All in all, quite discouraging stuff.
Not really recommended.
Displaying 1 of 1 review