I first encountered Ardakh Nurgaz’s poetry in 2016 during the Polyphony festival in Almaty. In the intimate, half-dark theater, the Russian translations of Nurgaz’s poems shone from the screen while the author read in his native Kazakh. A poet can speak in any language; if the poems are real, the very energy of them shatters the dams of linguistic barriers.

It was obvious to me then that the voice of this author was markedly different from anything that emerged in Kazakhstani literature in the post-Soviet years. Nurgaz grew up in a different environment, far from the traces of a Soviet past, which are sewn into the minds of even the younger, post-1991 generation. In other words, a new voice was added to an already multifaceted literary landscape, a voice ready to speak out about the present, a voice ready to belong to the current moment, and yet a voice that remained in the context of a very different traumatic search for identity. The poem “Dolls Over the City”, is very possibly a seminal text within this search, an important bid for essential participation in the contemporary literary sphere. One can say that this bid was made with the very first emergence of the author—but is now verbalized fully, not only in the language of the original, but also in the English, Chinese, and Russian translations. The poem itself is dedicated to the Kazakhstani poet and translator Kanat Omar, and, though I may be mistaken, I cannot recall another case of such direct dialogue in contemporary Kazakh/Kazakhstani literature. Authors working in Kazakh and Russian, respectively, rarely cross paths in the local literary landscape, representing essentially two separate worlds—the growing world of Kazakh literature and the fading world of local Russo-phone literature, whether ethnically Kazakh or Russian (behind the sheer number of identifiers hides a kind of bewilderment). The words of Ardakh Nurgaz fit into the fault line between these two literatures in Kazakhstan, but this is only one facet of his text—the total sum of its meanings will come to light with time, as always happens with poems that were written at just the right time by an author ready to put the words down on paper.