Aigerim Tazhi

These poems were written by a Kazakhstani poet and the translations are offered alongside the Russian originals. The collection includes a lovely note from the translator (I love a good translator's note!) and even better, notes in the back for when a certain level of wordplay was lost in translation, or explaining context and references. Poetry in translation is always tricky, but I like how they presented this here.

The poems in this collection are short, accretions of tiny but precise images, observations. I found the effect to be kind of dreamlike/meditative, and I really took my time with these poems, reading just a handful at a time before taking a break. There were a few times where I stopped and really tried to figure out if there was some wider context/commentary to these poems that I was missing, but I think these are just a series of moments, most of them very easily relatable.

An excerpt from one of my favorites to illustrate:

Rain over a keyboard of leaves.
A freshwater sea overflowed galoshes.
Clumps of earth grew into hooves.
Heads crowned with rainbow-haloes.
We groan tenderly with watersoaked songs.

I picked this collection up mostly to fill the Kazakhstan prompt for my Read Across Asia challenge, and I am very happy with this choice. Though I do feel like I learned more about Kazakhstan from the translator's note than from the poems themselves.… (plus d'informations)