Iasyr Shivaza

Iasyr (Yasyr) Shivaza or Shiwaza ( _dn. Ясыр Шывазы; _ru. Ясыр Шиваза) (18 May 1906 - 18 June 1988) was a Soviet Dungan poet, writer, editor, and scholar.

Name spelling

The writer's name was spelled "Jasƅl Sƅvazƅ" in the Latin-based Dungan alphabet that was in use in 1932-53, and Ясыр Шывазы in the modern Cyrillic Dungan alphabet. According to Rimsky-Korsakoff (1991), his family name, Shivazy (Шывазы), has the meaning 'the tenth child'; the expression could be written in Chinese as 十娃子 (Shiwazi) [Viz. a Chinese paper that spells the poet's names as 雅斯尔·十娃子 (Pinyin: Yasier Shiwazi) in Chinese and Yaser Shiwaza in the English translation of the title: [http://scholar.ilib.cn/A-lzdxxb-shkxb200602008.html "世界华语诗苑中的奇葩--中亚东干诗人雅斯尔·十娃子论" (On the Poetry of the Donggan Poet Yaser Shiwaza from Central Asia)] ] . This kind of three-syllable family name is common among the Dungan people of the former Soviet Union.

Life

Iasyr Shivaza was born on May 18, 1906 in the village of Sokuluk ( _dn. Сохўлў; _ru. Сокулук) some 30 km west of Bishkek, in what today is the Chuy Province of Kyrgyzstan. His parents and grandparents were born in China's Shaanxi province, and came to Kyrgyzstan (at the time, part of Russian Empire) from the Ili region in the early 1880s, after the defeat of the Dungan Rebellion and the return of the Yining (Kulja) area to China.

In 1916, when he was 10 years old, he was sent to study at the village's Koranic school, and, as he mentioned later, it was only by luck that he has not become a mullah, like the other three students who reached the graduation.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Shivaza's father, Dzhudzhuza Shivaza ( _dn. Шывазы Җюҗюзы, "Shiwazi Jiujiuzi") participated in establishing Soviet power in the region, joining the Communist Party in 1919, and later becoming the chairman of the village Soviet.

Seventeen-year old Iasir Shivaza was chosen, by drawing lots (there were no volunteers), to go study at the Tatar Institute for Education of the Minority Group in Tashkent.During the six years (1924-30) that he spent there, Shivaza, together with other Dungan students (Yu. Yanshansin, Kh. Makeev, etc.) started working on designing a suitable alphabet for the Dungan language, and writing poetry in Dungan.

After graduation, he spent two month in the fall of 1930 teaching at a Dungan school in Frunze (now Bishkek), participating in the creation of the first Dungan spelling books and readers. He was then transferred to an editing job at Kirgizgosizdat (Kyrgyzstan State Publishing House), where he worked until 1938, and then again in 1954-57. He continued both to work on textbooks for his people and to write poetry. At least three of his textbooks were published in 1933, and at 1934 he was admitted to the prestigious Union of Soviet Writers. He started translating Russian classics into the Dungan language as well, his translation of several Pushkin's poems being published in Frunze in 1937.

He worked for the Union of Kyrgyz Writers in 1938-1941, and then again in 1946-54. When the Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, he started to do war work, in Moscow and sometimes on the front lines, primarily writing and translating materials for the Kyrgyz-language news-sheets published for the 100,000 or so Kyrgyz soldiers in the Red Army.

The after-war period was a productive one in Shivaza's writing career. He also participated in the committees designing the new, Cyrillic-based Dungan alphabet, which was eventually introduced in 1953. In the 1950s he was finally able to meet Chinese writers from China, who would visit the Soviet Union at the time, and he made a trip to China himself in 1957 with a Soviet Dungan delegation.

As the Soviet Dungan newspaper resumed publication in 1957, Shivaza was appointed its editor-in-chief, holding that post until his retirement in 1965. The newspaper appeared for a while as "Сўлян хуэйзў бо" (i.e. 苏联回族报, "Sulian huizu bao", 'Soviet Huizu Paper'), and was renamed "Шыйўэди чи" (i.e. 十月的旗, "Shiyuede qi", 'The October Banner').

Iasir Shivaza died on June 18, 1988.

Original works

Shivaza's literary production was ample and versatile. Along with politically loaded poems and stories, expected from any author who was to survive in Stalin's era, he wrote love poetry, poems out the past and present of his people and his land, about China, children's literature. Some of his poetry addressed to China, the land of his ancestors, welcoming the Communist revolution that was happening, or had just happened there.

Soviet Dungans being largely separated from China's written culture, the language of Shivaza's poetry and prose - and the Dungan literary language in general - is closer to the colloquial, sometimes dialectal Chinese than to the traditional written Chinese.He was, however, familiar with some of the modern Chinese literature, such as works of Lu Xun, but, since he never had opportunity to learn Chinese characters, he read them in Russian translation.

Poem sample: "White Butterfly"

Following is Shivaza's short poem, "White Butterfly", originally published in 1974, along with its morpheme-by-morpheme "transcription" into the Chinese characters and the English translation by Rimsky-Korsakoff (1991), p. 188-189.quote
Бый хўтер
Тэйон җошон, бый хўтер,
: Ни тэ гощин.Ни лян җин гуон фадини,
: Чиди чун фын.Йисыр ни до тяншонли,
: Зущён бый юн.Йисыр зу до хуайүанли.
: Ба щян хуар вын.Җяр хуардини, вә канди,
: Ниди щин го.Дусы ниди да хуайүан,
: Ни ющир луә.Ни лян хун хуар фадини,
: Тэёнйибан.Дын нидини мо җүхуар.
: Щүәбый модан...Нисы чунтян, гуон зоди
: Хуар кэди вон.Зун луәбудо, хўтер-а,
: Җин фуершон.quote
白蝴蝶儿
太阳照上，白蝴蝶儿，
:你太高兴。你连金光耍的呢，
:骑的春风。一时你到天上了，
:走向白云。一时走到花园里，
:把鲜花儿闻。拣花儿的你，我看的，
:你的心高。都是你的大花园，
:你有心儿落。你连红花儿耍的呢，
:太阳一般。等你的呢毛菊花儿，
:雪白牡丹。。。你是春天，光找的
:花儿开的旺。总落不到，蝴蝶儿啊，
:金树叶儿上。quote
White Butterfly
The sun is shining on a white butterfly,
: You are so happy.You are playing with a golden ray,
: Riding the spring wind.Now you are up in the sky,
: Reaching towards the white clouds.Now you are in the garden,
: Sniffing the fresh flowersIn selecting the flowers, I see,
: Your ambition is high.The whole garden is yours,
: Alight wherever you like.You are playing with a red flower,
: Which is like the sun.The chrysanthemums are waiting for you,
: And the snow-white peonies...You are like spring, seeking only
: The flowers in full bloom.But you could never, oh butterfly,
: Alight upon a golden leaf.

The poet writes of a butterfly, who is happy in the here-and-now of the spring, but who is not going to see the fall with its golden leaves. He appears to make a botanical error, however, mentioning a variety of chrysanthemum ( _zh. 毛菊花 among spring flowers, even though in reality they bloom in the fall.

Translations

Having participated in the creation of the Dungan alphabet and bringing literacy to the Dungan people, Shivaza also did a large amount of work in making literary works from other languages available in Dungan. He rendered a number of classical and modern works of Russian poetry into the Dungan language. He has translated a number of works by Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky. He translated song lyrics by Lebedev-Kumach and prose works by Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky.

He also translated into Dungan some poems of the Ukrainian classic Shevchenko, of the Kyrgyz poets Sashylganov and Tokombaev, and even of the Belarusian Yanka Kupala.

Being fluent in Kyrgyz, Shivaza also translated some of his works into Kyrgyz.

Translation sample

Following are the first two stanzas of Shivaza's translation of Pushkin's The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda, its morpheme-by-morpheme "transcription" into the Chinese characters, and an English translation. [Cyrillic Dungan quoted as per The Dungan text and its "transcription" into Chinese characters is as per Rimsky-Korsakoff (1991) (p. 230); the Cyrillic Dungan text is back-transliterated with the help of the text in Sushanlo an Imazov (1988) (p. 119), who appear to give a somewhat different edition of this translation. The English translation is based on Rimsky Korsakoff's, with minor changes.] :quote
Нэхур ю йигә лодолэ,
Тасы йигә мынтулэ,
Лодо зэ базаршон җуан,
Та ба юди за хуа кан.
Йигә Балда до мянчян,
Бу җы та вон нани җуан,
Та ги лодо фәди хо:
"Виса ни җир чеди зо,
Ни зэ җытар ба са зо?"
quote
那侯有一个老道来,
他是一个朦头来,
老道在 bazaar 上转,
他把有的杂货看.
一个Balda到面前,
不知他往那里转,
他给老道说得好：
＂为啥你今儿起得早？
你在这达儿把啥找？＂
quote
There was a priest,
He was dim-witted.
The priest was walking around the bazaar,
He looked at all kinds of goods.
One "Balda" [ _ru. Balda: 'a silly fellow'] came up to him,
Himself not knowing where he was going,
He said to the priest:
"Why did you get so early today?
What are you looking for here?"

Scholarly work

Notes

Main source

*Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer, "Iasyr Shivaza: The Life and Works of a Soviet Dungan Poet". Verlag Peter Lang GmbH, 1991. ISBN 3-631-43963-6. (Contains a detailed bibliography and ample samples of Shivaza works', some in the original Cyrillic Dungan, although most in a specialized transcription, with English and sometimes standard Chinese translations).

Other literature

* Сушанло Мухамед, Имазов Мухаме. "Совет хуэйзў вынщүә". Фрунзе, "Мектеп" чубаншә, 1988. (Mukhamed Sushanlo, Mukhame Imazov. "Dungan Soviet Literature: textbook for 9th and 10th grade". Frunze, 1988). ISBN 5-658-00068-8.