Meeting with the poet Sabir Rustamkhanli!
Jakhongir Nomozov
Sabir Rustamkhanli is one of the rarest people who has left very deep and in-situ traces in the literary, cultural and socio-political life of Azerbaijan; who as a personality is well-recognized and loved in all families, popular around the whole Turkic world. The main reason of his nationwide popularity and admiration, which is unattainable even for the chosen ones, is love for his people and top patriotism traced through his whole creative activity along with the career of a leader of the national-liberation movement of the Azerbaijani people for independence after breaking up with the USSR in 1988. He is one of the authors of the Constitutional Act on the restoration of the national sovereignty of Azerbaijan and one of the minority of the parliament who pushed for its adoption in the parliament. He instituted the first independent and democratic newspaper named Azərbaycan (Azerbaijan) and was its editor-in-chief for two years.
Sabir Rustamkhanli is the national poet of Azerbaijan, as well as an outstanding literary critique, Doctor of Philology, author of a number of novels devoted to the past and new history of Azerbaijan, playwright and translator. His “My Road of Life” is one of the masterpieces of the popular writing in Azerbaijan, which is read with love in every family as a desk-book.
His novels “Göy Tanrı” (The Green God), “Ölüm Zirvəsi” (The Peak of Death), “Difai Fədailəri” (The Fedayeen of Difai), “Xətai Yurdu” (The Homeland of Khatai), “Sunami” (Tsunami) made him a beloved prosaist for his new approach to the events of history and for their high artistic-aesthetic evaluation.
Besides, over fifteen of his books have been published in Turkey, Russia, Iran, Uzbekistan, Sweden. He has been awarded state prizes such as “Qızıl Qələm” (Golden Pen) and the M. F. Akhund-zade prize for achievements in literature. In 2005 he acquired a title of the People’s Poet of Azerbaijan. The Ministry of Culture of the Polish Republic awarded him with the medal of the “Man-of-Letter Glory” for his services in the field of culture.
In 1992 he founded the Party of Civic Solidarity, one of the leading political parties in Azerbaijan, and became its chairman; he has been the member of the Azerbaijani parliament for 22 years.
One of the focuses of his creative activity is the tragedy of his divided nation, 35 million of which is groaning under the Iranian regime and 20 percent of whose territory is under the occupation of Armenia. He is engaged in the diasporic activities and is the chairman of the Congress of the World Azerbaijanis, the biggest organization of the Azerbaijanis who immigrated to dozens of the world countries. He is well-known on the international arena as a tireless champion of peace, justice, and human rights.
In 1991-1995 he was the Minister of Press and Information of the Republic of Azerbaijan and greatly contributed to the development of the democratic press and establishment of the freedom of word in Azerbaijan.
I WISH I WERE STILL COMING
If you were born from the branch of love,
If you were hung as a lantern from somebody’s ceiling.
If you uttered the words syllable by syllable.
I wish I were still coming!…
I wish you were just joining the girls in the class,
Fixing your eyes at the newly born stars…
Still unable to utter the words in the ABC book,
I wish I were still coming!…
I wish you had neither a dream in your heart, nor a grief in life,
Neither a secret as light as a petal of the rose, nor a sin…
I wish you were at the age to be embarrassed when you saw your budlike breasts,
And I wish I were still coming!…
I wish the red roses turned pale on seeing your cheeks,
The bees mistook your lips for flowers,
You neither knew the notion of love, nor the road to spring
where young ladies took water home,
And I wish I were still coming!…
I wish you did not yet taste the strangeness of the fate,
Your fragile spirit has not yet met a spiritless spirit and got corroded,
Not your wings were broken in the hands of the wingless…
And I wish I were still coming!…
Then I wish one day blood boiled in your heart,
An unexpected whirligig destroyed your mind,
A village guy came from behind the mountains,
The fate made us come face to face,
What a heavenly coincidence, what an unexpected miracle!
I wish lightning struck in my mind; it became transparent as water!
I wish I thanked the God and fell in love from the first sight.
MY HEIR
Everybody has an heir in their world, I know it,
An heir to property, to an estate, to gold…
Someone appoints him orally, passing this right from one to another,
Someone does it in written form.
The longest quarrels are on property, on land.
The dirty names of padishahs have shed the blood of hundreds of brothers.
Estates, treasuries, honor, and popularity heavy for a caravan to transport.
Sometimes someone leaves his country at the disposal of somebody.
I wonder whether there is an heir to wisdom.
Is there an heir to love, to thinking?…
An heir not to one’s money, to his power able to open the roads?
If there is a choice of having the opportunity
to make a gift out of the warmth of one’s heart,
I would have given all my spirit only to you, my beloved!
I would have known that after my death
the strings of my saz will not cease playing the music I loved best,
And my spirit will live as long as my heir lives!
AS AN INSTANT
The spring passed as if it was a sigh,
The whisper of flowers which opened in my ears,
I joined the tumult of swiftly running rivers,
My reflections were left unfinished on the writing desk.
I made the slices of leaves with my hands,
My breath called the flowers to approach.
One song of spring was sung by the lightning,
Another one by me, it echoed in the mountains!
The hail emptied the wrath accumulated in winter,
The greenery of forests and meadows covered the dirty face of the earth!
My eyes caught the fleeting scenery,
Could not feel your love sufficiently!
Summer is also coming to an end,
The earth is missing a breeze for cooling the sweat.
The time is hurrying to reach the last spring.
At last, we are together,
The roads have also got tired
as if from this haste.
If life is an instant,
Then what is left behind us?
What is it, I wonder?
The chilled passions?
The clearing sky?
What is its use if the end comes at the beginning?!
WHAT OF IT
Whether your departure bent my figure,
Or gladdened me, what of it?
Let thousands of people come to visit me,
What of it?
If my glory is higher than mountains,
My name is a key to mysteries,
If I have flowery gardens in each town,
And palaces built of gold,
What of it?
If her golden wings descend down,
Gives up the eternal desire,
And fate gives up its obstinacy,
I reach my love, what of it?
Lullaby, elegies, tears,
Eternal fellows of man,
Carry stones your whole life,
The end – an execution… What of it?
There is both love and trick,
There is a heart maddened by love,
At the end the angel of death is waiting
With a goblet, what of it?
