The poems of this collection arise from a reading and study of old Georgian poetry and hymnographic texts. Shalva Bakuradze is obsessed with his ideas about how old Georgian texts were read, pronounced and sung, where the accents were places, what the intonation was, etc. He writes his own poems and then declaims them with this intonation… The book gathers together his texts of various periods, but the collection has a conceptual bond and a number of codes are to be found in it. In the course of his encryption, the author did not shy away from mystification. One instance is the narrative poem The Decrees of all Flesh, which claims to be a translation of five Sumerian tablets found in 2005. When he first published this poem on the internet, many people assumed it to be genuine, so impressive was the mystification he had achieved. One indicator of this is the the main Georgian Sumerologist and translator of Gilgamesh, Zurab Kiknadze, took up Shalva Bakuradze’s ‘game’ and added what we might call a ‘scholarly’ afterword to the text, as a consequence of which the ‘authenticity’ of the translation became absolutely convincing. This afterword is now virtually an organic part of the text. This is what Zurab Kiknadze writes in the post-script to his essay: ‘This is no exception, it is in line with tradition. Such is the fourth tablet, whose extant fragments may possibly preserve a key word, but have been left with no context and thus depend on the whim of the translator as to how he reconstructs the context. Many attempt this, but the consequences are mere profanations. Our translator has not followed this path, and he has left the fragments which give us crucial words (melancholy, fear, love) for the reader to interpret as he wishes.’ In brief, this book of Shalva Bakuradze’s is a provocative attempt to make sense of the poetic experiments of the ancient era and to use those experiments as a way of creating new, contemporary poetry.
‘It is a well-known fact that more can be said (sometimes too much) by intonation than by words (we can thank our structuralist theoreticians and practitioners for persuading us of this). But intonation has hitherto been subordinate to the words, all the same. Here (in the case of Shalva Bakuradze) things are the other way round: words are subordinated to intonation. Intonation is the main thing and doesn’t depend on what words are used to offer us this intonation. Intonation is the dominant, words are the subsidiary means.’
Levan Bregadze, critic
‘It might sound it bit loud, but I think that this is one of the most important collections of Georgian poetry of the last twenty years. Shalva Bakuradze’s poetry is a path from Georgian hymnography to our own times, passing through Davit Guramishvili, who is for me the most loved of Georgian poets. What I like most about this poetry is that it has the mission or aim for which poetry was originally created, in the form of religious hymns and songs, and today, in twenty-first century poetry, we can read these same ancient, ritual poetics, which is what makes this author so very significant.’
Diana Anphimiadi, poet
Extract will be available soon
In case of using the information, please, indicate the source.
