Poetry
Devon
Not translated into English
Nodira · 1840
Synopsis
About ten thousand lines of verse, signed with different names depending on the language: Nodira and Komila for Turkic, Maknuna for Persian. Mostly ghazals, but also five-line stanzas, quatrains and isolated lines. Love predominates, addressed to her husband, and after his death mourning, separation and loss. The manner follows that of the masters her author read and taught, Navoï, Fuzuli and Bedil.
Context
Her work is divided between one hundred and thirty-six poems in Turkish and forty-four in Persian, according to one count, for about five thousand couplets in all. Several manuscript divans of her work are kept in Tashkent, and two of them open with introductions written by contemporaries. The chronicles and anthologies of her time also speak of her. The divan appeared in Tashkent in 1963, after a first edition in 1958. The date of the work is approximate.
Who it is for
In Kokand Turkic and in Persian, with no French version. It helps to know that the mukhammas consists of embroidering five lines around the couplet of another poet: some of these pieces are read in this way, as a dialogue.
Prizes and reception
A present-day historian, Scott C. Levi, regards her as the most famous of the poets of the court of Kokand.