In Jeffrey Yang's collaborative translations from the Uyghur and Arabic,
Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile collects over two decades of Ahmatjan
Osman's poetry. Osman, the foremost Uyghur poet of his generation,
channels his ancestors alongside Mallarmé and Rimbaud to capture the
sacred and philosophical, the ineffable and the transient, in a wholly
unique lyric voice. Born in 1964, Osman grew up in Urumqi, the capital
and largest city of East Turkistan. In 1982, he became one of the first
Uyghur students to study abroad after the end of the Cultural
Revolution, spending several years studying Arabic literature at
Damascus University in Syria. Uyghurland is the first-ever collection
of poetry to be translated from the Uyghur language into English.