Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) – On 17 January 2020, the Uzbek Embassy in London hosted the presentation of the first English-published novel by Abdulhamid Sulaimon ugli Chulpon, one of the founders of modern Uzbek poetry and literature, “Night and Day” (“Kecha va kunduz” ").

The event, organized by the diplomatic mission together with the British-Uzbek Friendship Society, was attended by representatives of social and political circles of Great Britain, figures of science and culture, writers and poets, literary scholars and translators, as well as representatives of the Uzbek diaspora.

The author of the translation is a young scientist, lecturer at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan (USA) Christopher Fort, who lived in Uzbekistan for almost a year, collecting materials for his research work on 20th-century Uzbek literature and studying the Uzbek language.

In 2019, he successfully defended his dissertation, which proves the uniqueness of the literature of Uzbek socialist realism at the beginning of the twentieth century, which simultaneously embodied the cultural and historical traditions of the people and the progressive ideas of Uzbek Muslim reformers. According to Christopher Fort, Chulpon made a special contribution to the development of Uzbek literature, as he was able to fully reflect the aesthetic values of the worldview of Jadidism, not limited to the genres of satire and elegy.

As the translator noted, Chulpon’s work captivated him with his humor and poetry from the first pages, and he almost immediately began to translate it. At the same time, he approached his work in the same way as scientific research: at the beginning he explains to the reader why this novel is interesting and occupies a special place in Uzbek literature, then he reveals the features of Chulpon’s life and work, tells about the history and the future of the novel “Ketcha va kunduz ”, and at the end gives an explanatory dictionary of terms and concepts.

The Embassy of Uzbekistan in London provided practical assistance in the translation and publication of the novel, which was published in November 2019. The book is very popular among readers and is actively sold on the Amazon trading platform. A number of foreign universities plan to include Chulpon’s work in their curricula on the history and literature of Central Asian countries.

Christopher Fort emphasized that he would continue to translate the works of Uzbek classics into English. In the near future, he plans to translate excerpts from the story of Gafur Gulam "Mischievous", as well as the story of Abdullah Kahhar "The Tale of the Past."