What Fellow Writers Say

He drew my attention as a young writer back when he was working in television. His manner of reporting was altogether unlike that of his contemporaries. The young writer avoids dry, colourless words and groundless praise.

This exacting writer tries, in his translations too, to go down to the bottom of every thing and grasp its essence. In each work he chooses, what he looks for first is meaning. High meaning. He treats a translation as though it were his own property.

In Abdujabbor's work we see a painter, a philosopher, a fine psychologist, an investigator of the human soul. He combines, to a remarkable degree, the lyrical agitation of an artist with the sober gaze of realist enquiry.

In his novellas there are no violent collisions of opposing forces, but rather the tangled reflections of a central figure. The writer lays bare, step by step, the psychological, historical and social ground on which a character is formed.

Stories of two or three pages are like paintings. The writer takes a small event, ordinary at first sight, and like a practised painter lays every colour clearly, beautifully and in its place.

If I were asked, I would say that the best of the best in this beloved writer is the novella Where Are You, Unreachable Goal?, which draws me to it every time like a magnet. Whatever he writes, in whatever language it is printed, finds its own discerning reader.

He came to know himself as a journalist. He wrote hundreds of essays and articles about figures in science and the arts. Each of them opened a new world to him. Out of a single moment, a single fragment of people's lives, he opens up the character, the temper, the conduct and the speech of his heroes.

Abdughaffor, I read your short stories with delight. Zoopark I could not get through: my eyes fill with water. You know, talent belongs to the people. I think that applies to you as well.

The novella The Last Snow holds a place of its own in the writer's work. Its central idea is to guard the Conscience and to hold it above everything else. The work is written in a manner close to the modern.

Some years ago I gave the well-known Afghan journalist Ajmal Koshoni the Tajik translation of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. After a while he telephoned me: “If Señor Márquez had read this translation, he would without doubt have learned pure Tajik.” Is it not a matter for pride that the Colombian journalist Martín Rodríguez called this Tajik writer the ambassador of Colombian literature in Central Asia?