DUSHANBE, September 10, 2008, Asia-Plus — Celebrations to mark the 1,1500 birthday anniversary of founder of Tajik-Persian classical literature Abu Abdullo Roudaki were held in Samarqand, Uzbekistan, according to the Uzbek Embassy in Dushanbe.
One of central streets in this ancient Central Asian city is named after the great Tajik poet and a statue to Roudaki was raised at the Samarqand central square Registan.
A conference dedicated to Abu Abdullo Roudaki was held at Samarqand State University.
Abu Abdullo Roudaki, (858-941) was a Tajik-Persian poet, and is regarded as the first great literary genius of the modern Persian language, who composed in the Perso-Arabic alphabet or new “New Persian” script. Roudaki is considered a founder of Tajik-Persian classical literature.
He was born in 858 in Roudak (Panjroud), a village then in Khorasan, Persia, and now located in Panjakent, Tajikistan. Most of his biographers assert that he was totally blind, but the accurate knowledge of colors, as evident in his poetry, renders this assertion very doubtful. He was 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, only 52 qasidas. Ghazals and rubais survived; of his epic masterpieces we have nothing beyond a few stray lines in native dictionaries. However, 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-Furs, ed. P. Horn, Gottingen, 1897).
