Three Karakalpak Poets: Berdaq, Ajiniyaz, Ibrayim Yusupov

"Three Karakalpak Poets" is an English translation of selected poems by the founding fathers of Karakalpak literature, Berdaq (1827-1900) and Ajiniyaz (1824-1878), and the modern Karakalpak poet Ibrayim Yusupov (1929-2008). It brings one of the great Central Asian literatures, which draws on both folk poetry and classical Turkic-Persian poetry, to an English-speaking audience for the first time. The selection includes extracts from Berdaq's "Chronicles", his legendary history of the Karakalpak people, Ajiniyaz's "Bozataw", about the suppression of the 1858-1859 Qonirat uprising, and Yusupov's "Aral Elegies", his sequence of environmental poems about the Aral Sea becoming a desert. The translations are by the English poet Andrew Staniland with the help of Karakalpak co-translators Gulbahar Izentaeva, Shaxnoza Kengesbay qizi, Aynura Nazirbaeva, Nilufar Bayrambaevna Abdullaeva, Nargiza Urazimbetova and Gulnaz Jadigerova.