MAZHIT GAFURI. Anna Maslova. MAZHIT IN LOVE

MAZHIT GAFURI

POEMS AND VERSES

Anna Maslova

MAZHIT IN LOVE

Love poems and verses by Mazhit Gafuri are wonderful indeed. Traditional forms of oriental poetry with their intricate rhyme interlace, alliterations and refined similes just help him to express the most genuine feelings living in his heart, be it admiration for the beauty of the beloved girl, hope of a happy rendezvous or the bitterness of parting. Classical poetry for Mazhit Gafuri is a well-known, homelike space that can be arranged at his own free will. And then it does not seem strange for the poet either to use the features of a garden once stood in a calm street in Ufa in combination with those of an ideal garden in the style of Hafiz full of nightingale singing and the fragrance of roses or to liken a lover to a photo retoucher. Each poem is based upon some actual life event and born from immediate impression and deep emotion.

I have done my best to preserve both the rhyme pattern and the splendour of similes. In English literature there are marvelous translations of Omar Khayym’s rubais by Edward Fitzgerald, Reynold Nicholson’s versions of Old Persian poetry, oriental motives in Byron’s lyrics. They served as an example to me.

A few words about my background. On graduating from the Faculty of Romanic and Germanic Philology of the Bashkir State University (Foreign-Language Faculty in my days) I spent several years working at the Aircraft Production Plant in Kazan and then continued my career at the Ufa Research Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences. My translation experience lies in the field of geology, theoretical mechanics, medicine and other subjects. All the more interesting challenge to me was Mazhit Gafuri’s poetic heritage.

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