Paper-Thin Skin

by Aigerim Tazhi, J. Kates (Translator)

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.

Book is bilingual English and Russian.

Genres: Poetry, Kazakhstan, Asia

160 pages, Paperback

Published May 21, 2019

Reviews

[Mr.Sturm]

I became aware of this bilingual book thanks to World Literature Today. I was interested in Paper-Thin Skin because I read both Russian and English, although I had no particular expectations of the book. Besides that, I was not familiar with Kazakh poetry at all and was a little bit sceptical about it.

But Aigerim Tazhi's poetry surprisingly captivated me and touched my heart. Reading her poems is like a meditation where you fall into a trance and begin to float from one amazing world to another. The poems are very short, but each has its own cosmos, full of metaphors and subtle observations. I read the book to the end immediately after purchase, but now I periodically return to it and read individual poems, discovering new layers of meaning in them.

I found an interview with the author, where she herself talks about what poetry is, in her opinion.

"A few years ago, on a trip to Tibet, I found myself in a strange place. Under awnings people sat on the ground, using a hammer and chisel to cut words into stone slabs. The work was difficult, tedious, long. Sharp sounds made me flinch. Stone dust wrapped people in a dense cloud. What were they doing? They were inscribing layers together to build a high temple. The craftsmen admitted that most likely they would not live to finish the construction. There were a great many of these tables. The texts remained inside the walls. Nobody would ever read them, but they were the foundation of the building. A temple of words. Isn't this poetry?"

I really like this definition.

I also want to note the quality of the translation. The English translations seemed to me to be both quite accurate and poetic. But it certainly doesn't compare with the original :) I'm glad to be able to read both parts.

It is also a beautiful book itself, with plenty of space for each poem to get a sense and mood of it before moving on to the next. The book is a pleasure to hold, which makes it better and easier to immerse yourself in the poetry itself.

[Dinara]

Бумажная кожа - сборник невесомых, прозрачных (в лучшем смысле слова) стихотворений современной казахстанской поэтессы Айгерим Тажи. Если персонифицировать их в живое, то это был бы странник с бумажной кожей, смысл которого можно разглядеть по написанным словам. Но как только подойдешь ближе или рассмотришь бумажную кожу глубже, то сразу можно будет заметить миллионы мелких строк за основными строками, под или сверху них или даже вокруг.
Определенно нужно перечитывать, чтобы уловить все видимые и невидимые узоры из слов.

[Annushka]

Unusual and powerfull lwotds. Deep meaninng..

[Sonja]

I really loved reading Algerim Tazhi’s poems in Paper-Thin Skin. She is a Kazakh poet who writes in Russian because it was the language she was taught—“I’ve spoken it since childhood.”
Poetry without an “I” is striking. Most of them are. They are dense and meaningful like haiku.
It’s a bilingual book. Translations by J. Kate’s

[Donny]

Hypnotic verses that really touched my heart.

[Biblibio]

Paper-Thin Skin by Aigerim Tazhi (translated from Russian by J. Kates) may not be the most memorable poetry collection I've read, but it's still a solid, worthwhile read. The poems mostly reside in their own little bubbles (this often feels like a collection of poems by the same author, not a cleanly defined individual work), but there is a recurring rhythm to many of them.

Aigerim Tazhi has a particular knack for color- and nature-based descriptors, which make a lot of these poems feel very visual. Other poems aim for a deeper emotional core, but I felt somewhat disconnected from them; this isn't the sort of collection I would describe as particularly emotionally resonant or powerful, rather its beauty is mostly in the poems' motions and descriptions. Which, again, means that the collection isn't particularly memorable for me (I personally initially rate poetry based on how strongly it made it me feel, with language following), but it's still an often beautiful and enjoyable read.

[Katrina Adams]

Stunning!

[Jackie Smith]

Beautiful, subtle and very deep poems. They have exactly the magic that I love poetry for. I often had the feeling that Tazhi was writing directly about me, about my life. It's like she can see right through you. So powerful.
Definitely I’d be happy to buy her next book.

[Kwame Daniels]

A masterclass in an economy of language. Not a word or line wasted. Despite the brevity of each poem, it manages to be slow and meditative. Excellent work.

[Jennifer]

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.