Aigerim Tazhi was born in the small Kazakhstani city of Aktobe (then known by its Russified name, Aktyubinsk) in 1981 and published her first book of poetry in 2004. She is a member of a new, post-Soviet school of Russophone Kazakhstani writing that emerged after independence in the late 1990s, helping present to the world a new literature that was certainly not Soviet, not exactly Russian, and also not nearly as middle-aged, rural, masculine, or even as Central Asian as prior stereotypes might have dictated. Her poetry was lauded by the late Olga Markova, a writer whose own work is yet to be fully appreciated abroad; Tazhi has had more success in translation, so far, than most of her peers at home. This success is in large part thanks to the work of her translators, notably including J. Kates for English, who worked directly with Tazhi to translate many of her signature short, Russian-language poems, publish them in literary magazines, and now, finally, to select and translate the poems that appear in this bilingual volume.

Tazhi's verses are remarkable for their clarity of image. Most are verbal snapshots of natural, but not always pure, beauty; refreshingly, these depict not Soviet literature's fabled steppe but more often city neighborhoods and parks, or more intimate, personal, domestic scenes. There are a few horses and a camel, but those “zveri davno ischezli” (14), with fish and birds taking their place. Many of the poems approach their subjects playfully, though there is usually emotional tension running not far under the surface, beneath the thin skin of the words on the page. The opening poem in the collection sets the stage, closing with a promise of meaning, perhaps, revealed: “Paper-thin skin translucent, / letters shine through the forehead” (3).

In presenting the original Russian and Kates's translations side by side on facing pages, the book invites bilingual readers to examine the English poems as translations, and to linger on the translator's choices. These choices persistently hold up as excellent decisions. Kates's verses faithfully channel the emotional tenor behind each of Tazhi's poems, and also honor the structure, very rarely deviating from the length or number of the lines, the shape of the verse on the page, or the sometimes surprising syntax and frequent sentence fragments that characterize Tazhi's writing. Some of the original poems have rhyme, and many incorporate sly wordplay or sonic elements that give the originals their own style; Kates reproduces these features in English subtly and skillfully, where he undertakes to do it, and shows laudable discretion at refraining from attempts at reproduction in other cases. His success in crafting the rhyming elements, especially (see for example the deceptively simple rhymes of “displays-cliché” for “na dushe-klishe” and “gate-wait” for “vorot-rot,” 54–55), puts the lie to a currently popular idea that Russian-language rhymes simply cannot be replicated in today's English-language poetry. In the tiny and aggressively whimsical poem that starts “Igra na grani,” the translation boldly, and successfully, accepts the challenge of four lines packed with meaningful wordplay (122–23). Kates's foreword to the collection describes some of his translation strategy, making it an excellent resource for students or teachers of poetry translation in general, as well as a useful source of insight into Tazhi's work in particular. Students will also find plenty of translation choices to debate and discuss. In at least one instance, a rhetorical question in Tazhi's poem is transformed into a conditional phrase (“no vyderzhit li ruka / uskol΄zaiushchuiu kholodnost΄” becomes “if a hand can tolerate / an elusive coldness” [30–31], which slightly obscures the doubtful, musing tone of the original; the English wording also evokes less directly the tangible, cold slipperiness of the fish referenced in the poem). Other choices introduce slight changes in meaning but compensate for them by faithfully presenting the image and feeling behind the words (“Khlopaiut / Dveri v ladoshi tverdye” becomes “Doors / clap their hands hard” [10–11], making the hardness of the doors as “hands” in Russian into the hardness of the clapping in English, in a way that the image nevertheless ends up being equivalent). These choices could fuel eye-opening classroom discussions of poetry translation. Perhaps more importantly, however, the book can and should be appreciated simply for the poetic view it offers of a finely observed and keenly felt world.