Dilshad And Anbar Otin: Women Who Want To Be Heard (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798253510674)

"Dilshad And Anbar Otin, Women Who Want To Be Heard" is the first English translation of a selection of poems and prose works by these two women poets who lived in Kokand, in the Ferghana Valley of Central Asia, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their writing is direct, honest and autobiographical. Dilshad is a historian of her era, an important eye-witness. She survived a massacre in her home town, Ura-Tepe, confronted the Khan of Kokand in his bedchamber, then ran a school for girls for over fifty years. Anbar Otin, one of Dilshad's pupils, is more polemical, in her analysis of the oppression of women and the tragedy of her own life. Unpublished in their lifetimes, they both wanted their work to be read, if not by their contemporaries, then in the future. With these translations, their wish is fulfilled for an English-speaking audience. They are by the English poet Andrew Staniland, with the help of co-translators Nilufar Mamajonova, Asaloy Bekturdieva and students from Uzbekistan State University Of World Languages.