Tursunboy Adashboyev

Tursunboy Adashboyev was born on 1 January 1939 into a collective-farm family in Safed-Bulan, a village in the Ala-Buka district of what was then the Osh Region of the Kyrgyz SSR (today’s Jalal-Abad Region of Kyrgyzstan). He began writing verse at twelve or thirteen and later credited his schoolteachers and a local lover of literature, Abdullajon Shaitov, with setting him on that path. As a sixth-former he answered a newspaper appeal by the scholar Hodi Zarif to collect folk epics: at his headmaster’s request he sought out Olim Qarg‘a, a bakhshi from a neighbouring village, spent a week of evenings taking down the epic “Yozi and Zebo” word for word, and sent the text to Zarif. Adashboyev regarded this as the start of his literary life.

In 1957 he finished the Kyzyl secondary school in his home village, and his first poems appeared in print the same year. He studied at the Faculty of Journalism of Tashkent State University (now the National University of Uzbekistan). His first collection, “Kamol’s Apple”, came out in 1964, while he was still a student. His early poems caught the attention of Mirtemir and Qudrat Hikmat, who helped him with advice.

His working life began in Osh. In 1963–1973 and again in 1977–1979 he was a literary staff member of the regional Uzbek-language newspaper Lenin Yo‘li, and in 1973–1977 an editor at the regional committee for television and radio. In 1972 his first book in Kyrgyz, “Ala-Tooluk Bolomun” (“I Am from the Ala-Too”), was published. In 1980–1982 he attended the Higher Literary Courses of the USSR Writers’ Union in Moscow, where he made a close study of children’s literature from abroad.

From 1987 he worked in Tashkent, first as an editor at the Yulduzcha publishing house and then, until 1999, at the Cho‘lpon publishing house as editor, head of department and deputy editor-in-chief. For the two years before his retirement he was a literary consultant to the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan.

Adashboyev published some twenty collections of verse, among them “We Are Travellers”, “A Bouquet” (1968), “The Arslanbob Waterfall” (1969), “Alatau, Mountains of Tulips” (1978), “I Will Send the Sun” (1982), “The Legend of Arslanbob” (1988), “An Alphabet of Riddles” (1997) and “My Dreams Are My Two Wings” (2003). His best-known book is “Three Camel Calves and the Mysterious Pumpkin”, a collection of poems and fairy tales issued by Cho‘lpon in 1990, which also included his translations of foreign poets. A book of fairy tales, “The Tale of the Golden-Maned Steed”, followed in 2003. His poems about his homeland and its nature, and about children’s games and daydreams, are marked by gentle humour, and he was also known for literary parodies imitating the manner of well-known poets. His books were translated into Russian, Latvian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Tajik.

As a translator he brought more than thirty works of Kyrgyz literature into Uzbek, including a prose retelling of the Manas epic for children, Tologon Kasymbekov’s novel “The Broken Sword”, poems by Alykul Osmonov, Jolon Mamytov and Sooronbay Jusuev, and Musa Jangaziev’s collection “Quvonchbek’s Joy” (1986). Uzbek children also read in his translations Korney Chukovsky, Samuil Marshak, Sergey Aksakov’s “The Scarlet Flower”, and poems by Valentin Berestov, Boris Zakhoder, Nodar Dumbadze, Jan Brzechwa, Walter de la Mare and Leons Briedis; his Chukovsky and Marshak translations appeared as separate books.

For strengthening friendship between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz peoples he received the Order of Do‘stlik (Friendship) in 1999. He also held Kyrgyzstan’s Order of Manas, 3rd class (1995), and the title of Honoured Art Worker of Kyrgyzstan (1999), and was named an Excellent Worker of Public Education of Uzbekistan in 1993. Tursunboy Adashboyev died in May 2017, aged 78. In November 2019 the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan held a memorial evening for his 80th anniversary, attended by guests from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.