Sketches of Central Asia (1868): Additional chapters on my travels, adventures, and on the ethnology of Central AsiaVámbéry, Ármin
History
Sketches of Central Asia (1868): Additional chapters on my travels, adventures, and on the ethnology of Central Asia
Vámbéry, Ármin
Asia, Central -- Description and travel
5. _Wednesday._ My beauty walked in the fields; the nightingale saw
her face and uttered wild cries.
6. _Thursday._ I said to my loved one: Hearken, then, to my advice:
hide thy secret still from both good and bad.
7. _Friday._ At last Nesimi saw her beauty, and drank to satiety of
the sherbet of her rosy lips.
These, although through the poetic beauty of our European tastes
they may not prove quite agreeable, give yet sufficient evidence
that the inhabitants of Central Asia, apart from the roughness of
their social relations, despite their incessant wars and forays,
are not unskilled in the expression of traits of poetic feeling and
tender love. The higher classes, though they do not look on the
popular poetry with contempt, still wish to show traces of refined
taste, a higher education, and enjoy the works of the elder Persian
poets, or the books of Nevai, who stepped forward as the first of
the Tchagatay poets in that kind of accomplishment, by which all the
rest of the poets of the Islamitish polite world acquired renown.
Nevai is a scholar of the celebrated Sheikh Abdurrahman Djami,
during many years minister, field marshal, and governor of many
provinces. He is of rare genius in poetry, and of great fertility;
for he has produced more than thirty-two distinct works on poetry,
history, morals, logic; and though his works are thoroughly Persian
in spirit, and not pervaded with the spirit of Central Asia, yet the
merit of having reined and ennobled the Turkish dialect of Central
Asia cannot be taken from him.
Here I give a few specimens.
NEVAI.
1. Oh! heart, come, let us seek out a love; the cypress-growing one,
the silver-cheeked one, let us seek.
2. As the darling of our eyes has looked for another friend, we also
have eyes; therefore, another let us seek.
3. She greets the glance of men only with the dust of death. Why
stand longing here? Another beauty let us seek.
4. Should I not find another like thee, who destroyest all the
world, then a lowly, modest, but tender one, I will seek.
5. We will hasten through field and plain for the loved one; we will
search garden and meadows. Her will we seek.
6. As the wish is good, it shall not remain unfulfilled. Among small
and great, through all as far as possible, we wish to seek.
7. Oh! Nevai, from this passion you will never get freed. Come,
therefore, before the meeting. Patience and perseverance let us seek.
NEVAI.
1. Absent from the loved one, the heart is like a land without a
king. A land without a king is like a body without a soul.
2. Oh! Mussulman, what service is a body without a soul! It is like
black earth, which has no sweet smelling roses.
3. Black earth, that has no sweet smelling roses, is like a dark
night, that has no bright moonbeams.
4. A dark night, that has no bright moon, is like darkness without a
life-source.
5. A darkness, that has no life-source, is like a hell, which has no
paradise-plains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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