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