Poety Gruzii [Poets of Georgia]

AN ATTRACTIVE COPY IN THE ORIGINAL PRINTED WRAPPERS OF THE EXTREMELY RARE FIRST EDITION OF THIS FRAGILE PUBLICATION, CONTAINING VERSE BY SIXTEEN CONTEMPORARY GEORGIAN POETS, AMONG THEM MEMBERS OF THE PART-FUTURIST, PART-SYMBOLIST, PART-DADAIST ‘BLUE HORNS’ GROUP. Included are poems by Grigol Robakidze (‘the most flamboyant manifesto-writer, poet, novelist, and dramatist Georgia was ever to know’, Rayfield, pp. 259–60); Paolo Iashvili (after Robakidze, the group’s leader); Titsian Tabidze (‘the most popular of Blue Horns poets’, Rayfield, p. 271), and his cousin Galaktion Tabidze; Valerian Gaprindashvili (who also provides ten of the translations here); Kolau Nadiradze (‘the most promising poet of his generation’, Rayfield, p. 276); and the Symbolist Giorgi Leonidze. ‘Modern poetry – poetry devoted to no aims but itself – did not penetrate Georgia until Europe itself was in the throes of self-destruction. Imitators of Russian Symbolists, Acmeists, and Futurists at first had little success in Tbilisi … [so] quite unpredictably, the convulsion that shook Georgian poetry into true modernity came from the provinces. The sleepy boulevards and cafés of Kutaisi [130 miles west of Tbilisi] were transformed in 1916 by a group of former local schoolboys who had returned from university in St Petersburg and casual study in France and Germany. They were determined not only to avoid conscription, but to foist a cult of Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, and Russian Symbolism on the local intelligentsia. Rimbaud was perhaps the ultimate role-model for the Georgian adolescent poet. Perhaps more important still, the young innovators of Kutaisi, the future Blue Horns, were not content to accept traditional metres [and thus] gave Georgian the chance to try out the percussive and flexible rhythms characteristic of English and Russian poetry’ (Rayfield, p. 259). Among the translations are four by Mandelstam, then living in Tiflis, who was recuited by the editor, Nikolo Mitsishvili, to help with the project (Rayfield, p. 275): ‘Birnam Wood’ (1919) by Titsian Tabidze; ‘Fifth sunset’ by Valerian Gaprindashvili (from Daisebi, 1919, ‘his first and best book’, Rayfield); ‘Self-portrait’ by Giorgi Leonidze; and ‘A Farewell’ (1920) by Nikolo Mitsishvili, ‘one of his best poems … [which] was lovingly translated into Russian by Mandelstam, and arguably generates the motifs of Mandelstam’s as yet unwritten poetry of exile in Voronezh’ (Rayfield, p. 276). The other translators are Tatyana Verochka, Sergei Rafalovich, Tristan Machabeli, and Nikolai Bobyrev. Osip Mandelstam was arrested by Stalin’s government during the Great Purge in the 1930s and sent into exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a temporary reprieve, he was arrested again in 1938 and sentenced to five years of forced labour. He died that year at a transit camp near Vladivistok. Galaktion Tabidze, Georgia’s greatest 20th-century poet, committed suicide in a psychiatric hospital in Tbilisi having plunged into depression and alcoholism as the result of the Great Purge, which saw his wife arrested and exiled to Siberia, where she died in 1944, and himself savagely tortured by the KGB. Charged with anti-Soviet agitation, his cousin Titsian Tabidze was executed in 1937. Gaprindashvili survived the Stalinist purges, but his later years were unproductive. Robakidze defected to Germany in 1930 and following the publication of his two books on Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler was considered to favour Nazism. He died a broken man in Geneva in 1962. Pressured during the Great Purge to denounce many of his associates from the Writers’ Union, as well as his former friend, André Gide, Paolo Iashvili shot himself at the Writers’ Union office in 1937. Giorgi Leonidze tried to pursue the ‘correct’ political line during the purges, but was forced to direct his talents into panegyrics to Joseph Stalin.…