Budding Vazhas?: Etseri, Svaneti

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A couple of weeks ago, my wife came home from school quite excited. “Dearo, you wouldn’t believe what those 8th-grade kids have written!” she said. Apparently, there was the usual Women’s/Mothers’ Day after-school event, in which each class is expected to participate with poetry and other media extolling the virtues of the female figures in their lives. Of which virtues there are many.

Some of the pupils, however, had penned their own verses instead of going the easy route of memorizing and reading from the many centuries of classics of Georgian literature. Of these there are also astonishingly many, some of the writers known on a first-name basis, so famous, so extolled are they. Like Vazha (-Pshavela), for example.

Now, I blanch at the thought of translating poetry from one language into any other, even with the help of a native speaker. It must be the pinnacle of the translator’s art. Look at the several attempted English versions of Rustaveli’s masterpiece over more than a century. How much of the rhyme and rhythm do you attempt to keep, especially from a national treasure of a poem which has both, the rhymes going up to SIX last syllables of its lines? Or do you go for greatest understanding, which suggests abandoning poetry altogether for prose? Thorny, to say the least. The Knight in the Panther Skin has also been translated into many world languages, despite its complexity, and we are blessed to have more than one such effort in English to compare. If you want to be known as a serious student of the Georgian language and culture, this is at the top of your list.

As a non-professional in this arcane art, aided greatly by my dear wife, my method with these new works will be to attempt maximum clarity at the expense of greatest beauty or rhythmic structure. Special thanks to Natia Tsindeliani, their Georgian language teacher, for stirring up the muse! More, please!

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When did Georgia bow her head to her enemy?!

When did Georgia make a road for her enemy?!

When did Georgia exchange her dignity?!

Worry, trouble and pain to add up.

Now it’s a different era, wickedness in fashion,

Forgetting of friendship and befriending hatred,

Not standing with each other in trouble, putting each other down,

Deficit of loving kindness, giving full rein to sensuality.

- Saba Gurchiani

Etseri

Going to Etseri, again my ancestors’ voices are calling

I won’t abandon my motherland, but if I go, I’ll return.

On the slopes, mountain goats climb,

Beautiful chamois in the forest

Nothing more lovely than Etseri

My Svaneti is my homeland.

- Saba Murghvliani

Spring

Now is March

Congratulations to the mothers

who take care of us

and put their hope in us.

- Oto Gerliani

I also want to take this moment to say that there are really only two things one needs to do to be and grow as a writer, according to Stephen King in his book On Writing: read a lot and write a lot. That’s it. I have the privilege of being able to write something regularly for a newspaper; but this is merely an extension and formalization of a lifelong habit of filling notebooks, begun when I was in my first year of elementary school in Rhodesia, some time after I began reading and long before we had a TV in the house. I wish these youngsters to be bitten and smitten by the writer’s bug, and for some of them too to make its possibly infinite variety a part of their life’s work and pleasure. No one knows where or when the next genius Georgian writer will spring up, but when she or he becomes known, even in potential, the best we can do is to encourage and then get right out of the way!

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:

www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

By Tony Hanmer