”For a debut poetry collection, Aigerim Tazhi’s Paper-Thin Skin is a work of stunning originality.“ — Elmira Elvazova, Massachusetts Review

 

“ This is a beautifully translated volume that neither exoticizes nor renders out the joy of reading poetry grounded in another place and language.” — Alison Mandaville, World Literature Today

“…[Tazhi's] poetry is enjoyable for the pure inventiveness of her images and observations. The collection is riddled with vivid, often intriguing images and witty one liners.” — Belinda Cooke, Poetry Salzburg Review

"Nevertheless, Central Asian literature in English translation remains rare and since Tazhi’s current home of Almaty is equidistant between the capitals of Russia and China, a leading Kazakh poet, for such Tazhi evidently is, deserves to be read as much to her East as to her West. — Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books

"A beautiful bilingual book, produced with care and attention to white space around the poems, Paper-Thin Skin speaks to layers of loss–from personal and private to the loss of the country (I read these poems in the post-Soviet context) to climate change and the loss of habitats." — Olga Zilberbourg, Punctured Lines

Aigerim Tazhi (Айгерим Тажи) is one of the best-known contemporary Kazakh poets. She is the author of БОГ-О-СЛОВ (THEO-LOG-IAN, which could also be read as GOD O' WORDS) (Musagetes, Kazakhstan, 2004) and the bilingual poetry book Бумажная кожа/Paper-Thin Skin (Russian-English, Zephyr Press, USA, 2019, translated by J. Kates). Tazhi won the International Literary Steps Prize in Poetry in 2003; in 2011, she was a finalist for the International Debut Prize in Poetry; in 2019, she was included in the prize list of the International Literary Poetry Award and named a finalist of the International Literary Voloshin Contest. Her work has been featured in many prominent literary magazines and anthologies; and her poems have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Armenian, Uzbek and other languages. In 2009 Tazhi created a continuing project of literary installations and performances, Visible Poetry. She lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and co-director of Zephyr Press. The author of several collections of his own poetry, he is also the translator of more than a dozen books by Russian and French poets, including Tatiana Shcherbina, Mikhail Aizenberg, Mikhail Yeryomin, Aleksey Porvin, Jean-Pierre Rosnay, and Sergey Stratanovsky. He co-translated four books of Latin American poetry, was the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and was the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation, and a Käpylä Translation Prize.

Translator's Introduction: Aigerim Tazhi's Temple of Words

1

Walking like a camel
Where is it, where is what moves forward?
The trees know it is early to wake up.
In the depth of a mirror mottled with stains
The wind makes a measured noise.
There is a certain rhythm in anxiety.
Summer, organize a soundless holiday with a forest at night.
Hidden behind a gray facade,
Ivy. I gathered it on the river bank.
In the house a window
Rain ran over a keyboard of leaves.
I strain to listen for an imagined world:
Hands reach out. You hide yourself deep down.
A tree, keeping in balance,
Oh, why, from where to where
A purple window. A yellow one.
After I caught a conversation in the park,
When the narrator nods off on a mountain of books,
A runner with a flashlight in his head
Windows opening to the east
In open maps the future
. . . and somewhere everyday life turned into a miracle
I want to float downstream

2

A warm center floats up from the skin.
Probably a god is like a dying person
People carry dirt under their nails,
Don’t take one last breath — nothing to breathe here.
Earth, dying on the eve of winter,
Someone among the branches
It seems the more room
Over the heads of shriveled apples
Music in the heart gnawing and gnawing.
You are standing on the edge of a cloud,
The sea has enormous lungs
It can take time to choose a beautiful crab
Underneath, in a German-chocolate box
Heavier than age
Wrap up warm —
A morning crossroads. Tea freezes in a little cup.
On the overhang of the entrance
The natives hide a yellow cobra in baskets of bananas,
Tomorrow twenty above
Where is the tail of the fish
A violet sucks up from a saucer yesterday's sea filtered through the earth.
Somebody died.
Sleepless in Tibet just like those here

3

The aircraft of a dragonfly over the river.
The old tree has young leaves.
Slowly revealing itself
Head on shoulders. A shroud on the head.
The sky is a closed window.
To pour out a little from an overflowing heart
On the road people seem eternal
Like a face in a clinic an angel in white
A step away from the epicenter. An unlit courtyard.
The morning is pecked by birds
Wind in the room. rain
Trying other people's heads
A grim game on the rim.
In a sandbox under the playground mushroom
When the memory is not the same and hands are not the same
From resurrection to sunday
A flock of crows from the shores of the horizon
This city is flooded in a radiant glow
First a flood and finally a fly-boy
The house-ark sheets swelled like sails
God
Pushed away from an old ship
When the body dies, eagles and fish dine well,
First at a call a large lion's

Notes
Biographical Notes