Ardakh Nurgaz. Oil Paintings
'I'd like to lift it; it's too heavy'
Gilgamesch
I.
Midnight. Just wrote a poem. I walked outdoors.
Misty. Cloudy. A grey sky, shrunken, starless
All around, a low, sinking mist
A feeling that everything is disappearing
Like the dissolution of words, the dispersal of matter, retreating
Is the beginning of another infiniteness
I, secretly, asked myself if this was heaven or hell
In that moment, another thought emerged in my mind, like a white cloud
Who am I? Am I alive or dead, in a world of disappearance, dissolution, dispersal and retreat
Am I really existent?
Or the primal voice that sounded in the first dim light?
In the finished poem flowed a line like the tip of a wave
Like something, like nothing, on a certain page
A meteor is sliding across the time of the night sky
On the pointed head of the unmoving arrow
And on the petal, like that of a rose, in my hand when I woke
Like the feather that fell from the wings of the birds that took flight from the tip of Attar's pen:
II.
That's the moment when one word fell and another took flight
The moment in which the rose entered into a dream—
Tasting the mud on the hand and the compressed bitter saltiness
One does not know what the in-depth soul is looking forward to
The passion of an angry ocean or the sound of a bird in the darkness?
Sometimes darkness suddenly arrives, like a guest that knocks on the door in silence
Endless sea plates are disappearing on the seabed but hidden currents are surging from the deeps
Streets, of traffic and people, are sound and fury everywhere
Resembling the suspect traces of the written words on a piece of white paper
Ferocious histories are crowded with figures beset with bad dreams
Pages of books drifting, and the fires on the plains are shining
Shadows, that leap from anywhere, stare at each other with enmity, attacking, hurting
People, in panic, who keep looking back, fall as they run
Footsteps of civilisation begin to be erased by the rising dust of remote ancient times
Blood, dripping from the seams of time, keep knocking at the rocks, heaped up
Sounds from the forest of the past centuries are terrifying, stifling
Unable to recover, I, stuck in the swampland, the more I struggle, the more I sink
Gradually losing the glow of the sunset, until I am swallowed up by the mud
Unwakeable dreams piled up by the drifting sands, and the sea that appears when one is about to
drown
Helpless wind sometimes blows northward, sometimes southward
Like the clock that gets close to a stop as it loses its direction
When there is a power cut, darkness will reach the apogee
People run to swim in the ocean at night, leaving their clothes on the beach
Life is the only promise given you
One has to get ashore before the tide rises
When the mountain is trodden flat, it becomes the plateau
Our steppes are forests of sand dunes everywhere
Roads, like wrinkles, have disappeared into the legends of ancient relics
Crowded starts, the Big Dipper twinkling, an ancient play
This is a world of desert, desiring the blessing of a raindrop, in the infinite wait
The drop of water that drips from the bottom of the pail each time water is drawn is a memory
Wondering if the wish is realized. Drops of water have now returned to the sea
The sound of the bells in the memory, words with no grave, the sun burning in nakedness
The oil colours impacting the invisible walls, the style listening to the cadence of the heart
People hidden in the shadow are getting ready to pounce on lives
The gloomy ocean is updated sometimes by the silvery waves
The patterns of the sunshine, slanting inside the window, keep changing forms, transforming
Silence, that breaks through the house, is playing with the seashore, like huge waves
In the infinitely exaggerated skies, a kite is freezing the scene
Seven wild geese, in a straight line, are flying in the darkening setting sun
Landing across the lake
The one who wakes up midnight is searching in the dark, for the end of the road
Every step the pawn makes, the happy scene of my childhood appears in my field
Love sometimes resembles the sacrificial offering
The ancient concealment will, by accident, wake up
A tree in the snow is the destination in the deeper levels of cold wind
Despite numerous roads, they eventually lead to the crossroads
The baby is laughing, the flowers are opening, a line of poetry, long forgotten
Circling in my mind, like the six swans of my memory
When night falls, birds call from the forest, pain impossible to spot
One seems to have heard whisperings in the ancient stone figurines, buried in the sand
In the wind, plush-crested reeds, in the final golden ray, flare up, like burning fires
Lightning flashes across the dark clouds, but the thunderclap is coming late
Colours, oils, words, the spring is urging the icicles to melt in imagination, to drip
The mirror is a lake, where each dew that drips collapses and returns to its original features at
random
Wave after wave is disappearing at the shore, the endurance of the stones
This is not a dream
This is the forbidden remark made by Korkut when chasing after the bull, the moment in which
Odyssey tied himself to the boat post
Labelless days on the white paper are moving, by leaps and bounds
Something blows, flowers are opening:
A white cloud is suspended in the middle of an oil painting, hanging on the wall
III.
Pre-dawn every day, there is not a single light in the east
We get up and drive a truck filled with rubbish to the outskirts.
We have to take it to the tip designated for outside the city
before the colours of the night disperses.
That's my work.
The tip, called ‘The Pasture', is the size of the city.
There's a clear creek of spring, with water not too much or too little, with four seasons there.
I call it The Sacred Spring.
Don't know what mayor, abandoned by the Creator, instructed
We dumped the garbage alongside the Sacred Spring.
I was waiting for the truck to finish unloading when I turned around
And accidentally saw something had dropped on the road.
So I went to pick it up before it got squashed by the truck
I took it in hand in the gathering lights
It was a painting whose frame was damaged.
One that was brilliant
Even though erosed by dirty water, damaged and wrecked:
Red, yellow, white, blue, green, black, all colours
Shown in oil colours, us, the world in the sunshine.
(September 2021)
Written in Kazakh by Ardak Nurgaz
Translated into Chinese by Ardak Nurgaz
Translated from the Chinese by Ouyang Yu
Gilgamesh: An epic that stems from Sumerian poetry and legends, with different sources and versions (across a span of more than 2000 years), each version incomplete.
Farid Din Muhammad Attar (1145~1230), famous poet and thinker of Sophism, whose works include The Conference of the Birds, a famous narrative poem of fable, among other things.
Dede Korkut: A prophet that appeared in Central Asia in the third or fourth century. Legend has it that he had agreed with the Creator that as long as he didn't voice the word 'death', he'd never die. One day, Korkut accidentally said to a bull he was training, 'I'll submit you even if I die'. He began dreaming from that day onwards. In his dream, he sees a number of people digging the ground and asks them what they are doing. They tell him: We are digging a grave for Korkut. As soon as he hears that, Korkut begins running away from death, riding a dromedary across the world, from East to West and from South to North. But wherever he goes he always sees those people digging a grave for Korkut. Eventually, he returns to a river in today's Central Asia, the Сырдарья River, where he spreads the camel skin over the water and plays Kobuz (a little resembling the Morin Quur) for seven days and seven nights before he finally closes his eyes in sleep. It's not till then that a water snake swims over and bites him. Thus, the Creator takes Korkut's life. Ardakh Nurgaz wrote a long poem, 'Korkut' (2015).
Chinese translation:
阿尔达克·努尔哈兹：油画
http://miniyuan.com/read.php?
Attachment, in the original:
Ardakh Nurgaz. Май бояулы картина (The Painting)
https://www.thebilge.kz/e/action/ShowInfo.php?classid=5&id=3809