The Modern Novel

Home » Uzbekistan » Hamid Ismailovдунёнинг энг гўзал шоири (We Computers)

Hamid Ismailov: дунёнинг энг гўзал шоири (We Computers)

Our hero is called Jon-Perse and if that name looks familiar, it is not surprising. Our hero does not like this name. During the war, his father got hold of a book called Anabase by the poet Saint-John Perse (real name Alexis Leger). cIt is an epic poem about a journey across the Gobi desert. The father was very impressed by the book so he named his newborn son after the author. When our hero was grown up and was off to Paris to study his father, gave him his copy of the precious book. He read it on the train and thought it was awful and felt that he could do a lot better so he started writing poetry. He studied psychology under Jacques Lacan but remained very keen on poetry and he started working forAction poétique under Louis Aragon and later Henri Deluy.
Because of all the different types of poetry that was submitted to the magazine, mostly of poor quality, he published a book, called The Encyclopedia of Poetrywhich catalogued every type of poetry.

At this point, he discovered computers. He examines thousands of poems.The magazine and he wanted to break them down into categories and what parts speech they used in the poems and what better way to do this by computer so he studied computers at university and became friendly with the computer people.

This did not help his private life as he was away so much his wife got fed up and had an affair with the neighbour and they ran away to Algeria together, leaving him with the neighbour’s very irascible wife. However, he is now focusing on his computer activities and uses it to examine other types of work, such as novels. On a trip to Russia, he meets a poet called Abdulhamid Ismail. His initials – AI – and the similarity of his last name to our author are not, I feel, coincidental. Ismail introduces him to the Ghazal, a type of Sufi love poem, found in classical Arabic.

His story which we are following seems to be told to us by something, presumably an AI, called, of course, We Computers. Is AI reliable? No of course it is not and We Computers admit this at times. To put it plainly, We are extremely unreliable. We have no mastery of any of the ethical or moral principles that human beings have cobbled together for themselves, nor are We bound by them. However, what we do see is that he is able to get very much into Sufi/ Persian literature and key Persian writers such as Hafez, Mowlana and others. Not only do we learn about their poetry, but we also learn some of their stories, which can be quite colourful as they have interesting adventures and clashes with the authorities of the day. Our hero gets very much involved in these people and their lives and of course stores it all in his computer.

As well as his computer activities we follow his murky love life. He suddenly realises that he had been with Odette, the former neighbour’s wife, for seventeen years. However, her son goes off to university and then she gets cancer and dies, leaving him on his own. He becomes friends with a musician,Blaise, and make a mistake of falling for his wife, which obviously makes life complicated. He then hires a cleaner, Nabud (it means the one not there in Persian) but we soon learn that she is an invention of We Computers, though there may be a real Nabud who is a local prostitute.

However, we are having more fun with We Computers and Jon-Perse as we follow, various different accounts of Sufi and Persian writers, our hero’s own story, both his personal life but also his involvement in various aspects of French poetry. As we have seen We Computers has a mind of its own so often goes off on tangent ssuch as giving us a list of very interesting quotes from various French writers and all sorts of stories about Persian poetry and the people who wrote it with the focus on ghazals.

One thing that we may have noticed and, if we have not We Computers reminds us, is that there is a parallel between our hero’s life and the life of Hafez. Jon-Perse himself has also noticed this. The other interesting point is that Jon-Perse did not like the work of his namesake at all as we saw at the beginning but now changes and start reading all the works and realises there is a good reason why he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

All of this leads onto another avenue for study for both computers and Jon-Perse, namely weather in studying a poet you should also study his life or other two completely separate and not connected.

Saint-John Perse himself kept his private life very much secret. It was only known that he was married when it was found that he was buried with a woman who had the same surname as him. It does not know whether they had any children. Similarly, he worked in an office but kept that quiet too and it was not known

Jon-Perse himself changes as he suddenly decides that he is interested. In his namesake and reads all his works with interest. We Computers also has to decide how to end this story and inevitably it gets complicated not least because Jon-Perse has written a book called Spiderweb which features a character who may turn out to be a major computer virus.

This is a wonderfully chaotic novel but chaotic in a good way in that there is a certain method behind the madness. We are dealing primarily with four things: twentieth century French poetry, classic Persian, Sufi and Uzbek poetry and the people involved in it, the use of computers in poetry both to examine the poetry as well as to write it and of course the life of our hero which mirrors to a certain degree the that of Persian and Uzbek writers. Nothing is quite as expected and we are going to learn a lot about aspects of poetry and computers that we almost certainly would not have known otherwise

Publishing history

First published in 2022on Telegram
First published in English in 2025 by Yale University Press
Translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega