Translation or itinerary: (philosophy of) Azerbaijani literary terms in thresholds of cultures

Rahilya Geybullayeva ([e-mail])

Title: Translation or itinerary: (philosophy of) Azerbaijani literary terms in thresholds of cultures

Words, like peoples, travel their own evolutionary path, which can be retraced in one way or another. Like families and tribes, the words crossbreed in fresh soil with other interpretations, acquiring new shades of meaning. These shades then spill out into new words which, at first glance, have nothing in common with the previous meaning of their progenitor; for example, the lexical series – semeni-sema-semela-zemlya – where each word appears to be original.

Interpreting individual words in translation without any knowledge of their cultural context leads to contradictions. For example, how should we understand the ban on wine in the Holy Scriptures (sherab) and the praise of wine (sherab) in classical Islamic poetry of the same era? How did wine come to be divided into both drink and symbol in one and the same culture and historical period? Why do the Azerbaijani and Turkish languages have two words to mean the same drink wine¹: sherab and chakhir, which are different from one another in terms of their lexical roots? Searches for an answer to these questions lead to the distant past (relatively) of the primary semiotics of sacred drinks, which through interpretation and translation enter different cultures in new semiotic dimensions.

In this work I suggest retracing the path of several literary terms of Azerbaijani and Turkish literature studies such as ədəbiyyat, kitab, namə, xəmsə and also figures and images such as aşuq, ozan, Dədə, məcnun, şərab which are not mentioned (as well as other appropriate terms from other eastern cultures) in the Western textbooks. They are traditionally considered to have been borrowed from classical Islamic poetry.