Chapter Fifty-Seven
Was Belgi aware of how famous he was as a poet? Yes and no. On the one hand, he did see the publication of his first book Yo’l (The Path), which was introduced to its readers by two friends of his, Hamid Ismailov and Kuvanbek Kenja, and I shall include their foreword and afterword to the book shortly. To have won recognition from these two – and especially from the latter – was a great achievement: in his book A Ground- Drift of Poetry Kenja had demolished the very foundations of Uzbek Soviet and post-Soviet poetry, but he had quoted abundantly from Belgi as a contrast to everything else. Apart from that, as I said at the very beginning of this book, by that time Belgi had already begun travelling widely and reading his poems in Germany, France and Italy. I therefore a
