Following Ardakh Nurgaz, Tilek Yrysbek propels modern Kazakh speech into the realm of global poetics. He undertakes to change the framework of familiar structures rooted in Middle Ages and Soviet 1960’s to new models, which, presently, can barely be called post-modern.

In addition, in contrast to Nurgaz, Yrysbek exhibits a deeper connection to the steppe poetics itself; he writes not so much with an awareness of a general Western poetics, but rather of an Eastern poetics – and not even Chinese, but Japanese. The author’s introduction to an international audience will begin with the publication of these paradoxical tests translated into Russian and English.

Russian readers might have seen Tilek Yrysbek’s texts in the collection translated by Yuriy Serebryansky and Aiman Kodar in the December issue of the Daktyl literary journal, which launched in the previous year.