Tilak Jora

Tilak Jo‘ra was born in 1947 in the village of Sayyod in the Qorakol district of the Bukhara region. He attended secondary school in 1956–1966, then entered Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan), from which he graduated in 1972.

From 1970 until the end of his life he worked at the university’s department of translation theory, teaching students the art of translation. He did postgraduate study in 1978–1981 and defended his candidate’s dissertation in philology in 1986.

He entered literature in the 1970s. His poetry collections are “Rayhon” (1977), “Olam ostonasi” (1980), “Yulduzlar tabassumi” (1981), “Chorrahadagi uy” (1983), “Sanduvoch” (1988) and “Ruhiyat” (1990). In his verse he wrote of the countryside and of the thoughts and hopes of honest, hard-working people.

He was also a translator, rendering poetry into Uzbek from Russian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Tatar and French. His translations of the Turkish poet Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca appeared in 1980. He wrote the books “Hozirgi turk she’riyati” (Contemporary Turkish Poetry), “Nozim Hikmat va O‘zbekiston” (Nazim Hikmet and Uzbekistan) and “Tarjima san’ati” (The Art of Translation).

He died in Tashkent on 21 April 1994 and was buried at the Hazrati Mastali Bobo cemetery in the Qorakol district. Relatives, students and colleagues remember him, and writers including the critic Ibrohim Haqqul and the poet Xurshid Davron have written about his work.