The innovative methods in teaching foreign languages: the role of skill and translation in teaching namangan, uzbekistan

v
ārizmī’s ‘Ma
ḫ
zan al-asrār’ 
Ḥaydar’s masnavi is known as ‘Ma
ḫ
zan al-asrār’ in literary historical sources. 
However, Bābur’s book on prosody suggests that originally it could have had another 
title, Gulšan al-asrār. Scattered pieces of information found in the text indicate that 
the work was dedicated to the Timurid prince, Iskandar Sulṭān (d. 1415) at a time 
when he was an independent ruler, between 1413 and 1415. Ḥaydar’s poem, is a 
poetic reply to Niẓāmī Ganjavī’s (d. 1209) Ma
ḫ
zan al-asrār and as such, its author 
retained his model’s main characteristics, the metre, the structure, the subject and the 
style. It is composed in the metre sarīʿ-i musaddas-i ma
ṭ
vī-i maksūf (- . . - | - . . - | - . -
) which is a quantitative metre. The poem as all masnavis do, consists of couplets 
(bayt) containing two rhyming hemistichs (mi
ṣ
rāʿ). Depending on the manuscript the 
text is 550–620 couplets long.
3. Translating the ‘Ma
ḫ
zan al-asrār’ 
The very first problem a translator of classical Turkic poetry faces is an 
essential one: how to translate quantitative poetry into English. Though theoretically 
quantitative poetry is viable in English, early translators experimenting with 
quantitative verse sooner or later abandoned the idea and favoured stress-based 
metre.
5
The hardly surmountable difficulties preserving the original metre in English 
leave a translator of classical Turkic poetry with only three options left. First, he/she 
can opt for using a stress-based metre well-known in English poetry or second, he/she 
can translate the poem into free verse.
6
While translating the ‘Ma
ḫ
zan al-asrār’ a 
third option was chosen. In order to give the reader the feeling of reading poetry, it 
was decided to keep the masnavi form, couplets consisting of two rhyming 
hemistichs, but the original number of syllables in each line was changed from 11 to 
12 or 13. With the exception of a few difficult situations this solution created enough 
2
For the details see H. F. Hofman, Turkish Literature. A Bio-Bibliographical Survey (Utrecht: Library of the University 
of Utrecht, 1969), 275. 
3
For a detailed argumentation see DeWeese, ‘The Predecessors,’ 124–128. 
4
For the poem see Tourkhan Gandjeï, ‘Note on an Unknown Poem by Ḥaidar in Uighur Characters,’ in A Locust’s Leg. 
Studies in Honour of S. H. Taqizadeh, ed. Ehsan Yarshater and Walter Bruno Henning (London: Percy Lund, 
Humphries & Co. Ltd, 1962) 64–69. 
5
Kristin Hanson, “Quantitative metre in English: the lesson of Sir Philip Sidney”, English Language and Linguistics 
5:1 (2001), 41–42.
6
For a general discussion on the difficulties of translating quantitative metres into modern European languages see Jiří 
Levý, The Art of Translation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company (2011), 205–210. 

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10
space to express the meaning of the Turkic original in English. Now let’s see a few of 
the difficult situations. 
It is hard to fit the original content into the translation when there are too many 
fixed elements in Ḥaydar’s lines. This task is especially difficult if a given line is 
crammed with expressions that are culturally foreign to the reader who is not well-
versed in the cultural tradition that inspired the text. For example names Rūḥ, Kalīm, 
Ḥalīl and Jibrāʿil in the line below are not familiar for the reader if he/she doesn’t 
have a basic knowledge of Islam.