Poetry
Zöhre-Tahyr
Not translated into English
Mollanepes · 1850
Synopsis
The dastan takes up a legend widespread among the Turkic peoples: Zöhre, a king's daughter, and Tahyr, the young man who had been promised to her, love each other, but the will of the father, master of the country, separates them, and the treachery of the powerful and of courtiers rises against them. The narrative alternates prose and verse, and gives the heroes distinctive traits; it adds characters and episodes, and paints the social life of the poet's time around the fidelity of the lovers and the fate that tests them.
Context
Before him, the Uzbek poet Saýýady had already put the legend of Tahyr and Zöhre into verse; Mollanepes was the only one to make a dastan of it, into which he slipped his own poems. The verse was sung and the prose spoken by the storyteller, and the author himself accompanied himself on the dutar. The people gave him the nickname “shah of the kingdom of love”. A Turkmen edition appeared in Ashgabat in 1959, a Russian translation in Moscow in 1960.
Who it is for
In Turkmen, with no French or English translation. It helps to know that a dastan was spoken and sung before an audience rather than read.
Prizes and reception
Adrian Shaposhnikov drew an opera from it in 1941, revived in 1953 in a second version written with Weli Muhadow.
Sources for this page 6
The pages consulted to check this page.