Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile

In Jeffrey Yang’s collaborative translations from the Uyghur and Arabic, Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile collects over two decades of Ahmatjan Osman’s poetry. Osman, the foremost Uyghur poet of his generation, channels his ancestors alongside Mallarmé and Rimbaud to capture the sacred and philosophical, the ineffable and the transient, in a wholly unique lyric voice. Born in 1964, Osman grew up in Urumqi, the capital and largest city of East Turkistan. In 1982, he became one of the first Uyghur students to study abroad after the end of the Cultural Revolution, spending several years studying Arabic literature at Damascus University in Syria. Uyghurland is the first-ever collection of poetry to be translated from the Uyghur language into English.