The Book of Dede Korkut

nov 2011 · Penguin UK

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The Book of Dede Korkut is a collection of twelve stories set in the heroic age of the Oghuz Turks, a nomadic tribe who had journeyed westwards through Central Asia from the ninth century onwards. The stories are peopled by characters as bizarre as they are unforgettable: Crazy Karchar, whose unpredictability requires an army of fleas to manage it; Kazan, who cheerfully pretends to necrophilia in order to escape from prison; the monster Goggle-eye; and the heroine Chichek, who shoots, races on horseback and wrestles her lover.

Geoffrey Lewis's classic translation retains the odd and oddly appealing style of the stories, with their mixture of the colloquial, the poetic and the dignified, and magnificently conveys the way in which they bring to life a wild society and its inhabitants. This edition also includes an introduction, a map and explanatory notes.

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Geoffrey Lewis was born in London in 1920 and educated at St John's College, Oxford. After five years in the R.A.F. during the Second World War, mainly in Egypt and Libya, he returned to Oxford to read Arabic and Persian. He taught himself Turkish and was awarded a doctorate in Islamic philososphy in 1950. He became lecturer in Turkish at Oxford in the same year, and later became a Fellow of St Anthony's College. Geoffrey Lewis died in 2008 at the age of 87.