Medieval Central Asia was home to the most brilliant and outstanding scholars, philosophers and poets. Just to name few: Averroes, Avicenna, Omar Khayyam, al-Bukhari, al-Biruni and many many others. Among the best poets of that time (and of all times), we can without any doubt include Alisher Navoi (actually, I was named after him). His name Alisher itself shows the complexity and richness of his time: Ali being an arab name and word which is sometimes translated as “supreme”, and sher which means “lion” in Persian (in modern Uzbek it also means a poem).
Alisher Navoi is considered to be the founder of the Uzbek literature. Before him, all the works were written in either Arabic or Persian. Uzbek language was not considered to be subtle and melodious enough to write poems. But Navoi who started for the first time to write poems in Uzbek, proved that this was wrong.
I didn’t find English translations of his poems online for the moment, but I will post some as soon as I find. However, if they are not yet translated into English, I guess it would be an excellent idea to translate them, as their philosophical value and beauty of expression is no less than the poems of Omar Khayyam.
You can learn more on Navoi on this site
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I’m slightly surprised that English translations haven’t shown up here or that there hasn’t been an academic that’s done a translation. One of my regrets is not buying the Navoi poetry books available in Samarkand that were in English, Russian, and Uzbek.
Alisher, I have a book “Pearls from the Ocean” which has English and German translations of some poems by Alisher Navoi. I will try to post some of them at http://www.uzbekvoice.tk in a few days.
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