DUSHANBE, May 28, Asia-Plus — A scientific roundtable meeting dedicated to the 1,150th anniversary of Abu Abdullah Roudaki will be held in Moscow on June 4, Muhammad Egamzod, a press secretary at the Tajik Embassy in Dushanbe, said in an interview with Asia-Plus.
According to him, the conference is expected to bring together known researchers from the Russian Institute for Oriental Studies, Institute of World Literature named after Maxim Gorky and the Institute of Countries of Asia and Africa within Moscow State University and others.
The same day, a concert with participation of known Tajik artistes will be held in Moscow, Egamzod said.
Abdullah Jaffar Ibn Mohammad Roudaki (859-941) was a Tajik poet, and the first great literary genius of modern Tajik-Persian language, who composed poems in the “New Persian” Perso-Arabic alphabet script. Roudaki is considered a founder of Tajik-Persian classical literature.
He was born in 858 in Roudak (Panjrud), a village in Khorasan, Persia, which is now located in Panjakent, Tajikistan. Most of his biographers assert that he was totally blind, but the accurate knowledge of colors shown in his poems makes this very doubtful. He was the court poet to the Samanid ruler Nasr II (914-943) in Bukhara, but he eventually fell out of favor and ended his life in poverty.
Of the 1,300,000 verses attributed to him, there remain only 52 qasidas and rubais; of his epic masterpieces we have nothing beyond a few stray lines in native dictionaries. But the most serious loss is that of his translation of Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Arabic version of the old Indian fable book
Kalila and Dimna
(Panchatantra), which he put into Persian verse at the request of his royal patron. Numerous fragments, however, are preserved in the Persian lexicon of Asadi Tusi (the Lughat al-Fars).
