Essay · A way to begin
Book of Words
Qara sözder
Abai Kunanbaiuly · 1898
Synopsis
Forty-five prose texts, or “words”, written in the 1890s. In the first, the author says that at the end of a life of struggles, exhausted, he no longer sees any meaning in what he has done; governing, seeking knowledge, devoting himself to religion or raising children, nothing suits him, and he decides to amuse himself with paper and ink. Others attack the chiefs and judges who live off the people, corruption, flattery and quarrels, or argue for the school, including for girls; one of them is a dialogue between Socrates and a disciple on God and man.
Context
Written from 1890 to 1898, these words, also called Gaklia, mingle pamphlet, philosophical reflection and moral lesson, and are addressed above all to the young; the thirty-seventh consists of twenty-three aphorisms. They circulated by word of mouth before being printed: a few appeared in 1918 in the journal Abai, founded by Mukhtar Auezov and Zhusipbek Aimauytov, the whole in 1933. Viktor Shklovsky gave the first Russian translation in 1945, and Czech was in 1959 the first European language to receive them. Cambridge University Press has published a complete English translation.
Who it is for
Short, sententious texts, to be read a few at a time, for hearing a moralist judge his own people without indulgence.
Prizes and reception
Translated into Portuguese in São Paulo in 2020, the book was presented on Brazilian television for the hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of its author's birth.
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