Paper-Thin Skin (In the Grip of Strange Thoughts) - Softcover

Tazhi, Aigerim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1938890906 ISBN 13: 9781938890901

Verlag: Zephyr Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Paper-thin Skin is the debut collection by Aigerim Tazhi, who has broken ground as a Kazakhstani woman poet by gaining attention both in Russia and internationally. Fish, insects, birds, the sea, the sky, humans seeking connection, and death figure frequently in these succinct poems, as do windows, mirrors, and eyes: these are poems of observation and deep reflection. Tazhi gently insists that we look at words and the world “in the eye,” as she seeks to create what translator J. Kates calls a “mystic community of communication.”

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

(untitled)

Earth, dying on the eve of winter,
responds to the touch like a cold corpse.
Over a cup of warm tea
sleepy people remember in leisurely conversation
those who have gone.
Outside the windows the dead step softly
along old tracks in the creaking snow,
they warm themselves in the heart of the quaint town,
clench their frozen eyelids.


(untitled)

Where is the tail of the fish
And where its head?
It rots from there
If everything is cut away.
But the fish
Rots
With a huge swollen belly
Where Jonah lives.
He weaves nets, he sews sails,
Hat pulled down over his eyes.



(untitled)

Heavier than age
Morning has us
By the throat.
Why do you birds rise so early?
Birds have tiny tongues
A bird is a bell.

Dark people in white clothing
Creep around town.
Heaven, heaven, pour into their ears
A song of tin.

Let them hear only the sea,
The old sea, the new sea.
While we keep on crying out
Crying out our grief.



(untitled)

On the road people seem eternal
the manystarred sky flies by
like an old film frame-by-frame they come toward you
they’re born and they die. snow
falls between the windshield wipers and the village
in which the princess lives happily with the shepherd
in their eyes desire turns into a red light
this one car among others around seems unknown
but even it leaves a track of its passing



(untitled)

slowly revealing itself
the shore leads to the sun
into a black and quiet town
soot on the temple of God
in the air people moan ―
their weeping is a pinch of salt
fish drown in the air,
fall under a cat’s paw
the city burns but the sea
will fill it with life
one day
and deep down a conch
a crayfish and a forgotten anchor

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zephyr Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1938890906
• ISBN 13: 9781938890901
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar