Irma’s is one of the strongest voices of immigrant poets in Germany today because she has something important to tell us about the ephemerality of home and self. About the losses and findings, the sorrows and completion that they are. Irma speaks about home-ness and selfhood with an understated passion whose yearnings glow from underneath a rainbow of nuances and intonations, without pathos, yet with lucidity and with strength. The fact that Irma writes in her native language of Georgian instead of German (which she could, too) offers a chance for intercultural communication because it allows her and her translators to enter a dialogue with her poetry and create something new, something of the culture and the lifeways, to which she now belongs.

According to Dr. A. Dana Weber (Professor of German Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee) You do not need to know anything about the Georgian language for Irma’s verses to reach your emotions. In fact, they work in any translation. (I read them in German and English). This is because they are more like the music of songs than like lyrics. In their game of signifying, they leave enough open spaces to let you hum your own tune to a melody of meanings that resounds in your own language. Even in translation, they retain enough semiotic specificity for you to perceive the composite voice of a poet who addresses you from a distance and yet stands next to you.

It takes a masterful musician of words and meanings to pull this off. When Irma intones the blues tenderly in word, sound, and color, when – a shepherdess – she wards off stone splinters just enough to let them tear at your emotion but not tear it to pieces, she proves herself a sophisticated conductor of poetic communication’s complex symphony. As any accomplished compositions, hers resound across geographies and individual sensibilities. They rise beyond any categorization as unique and universal at once.

Behind this mastery of the linguistic form stands not only a skilled poetess but also a singular creativity. One senses that an unrivaled spirit inhabits the curves and edges of Irma’s poetic form, a spirit that is sometimes vibrant and supportive, at others relentless and prodding. Her voice is unique in the loneliness it can impart and in its coolness of sorrow. In its silent imprint of loss and the warm fish net of affection by which she pulls you out from a winter of sadness. In its blanket of comfort, that it casts around you as it pines for and yet imparts home. In its motherly chiding as it is weaving a world only for you. In a daughter’s longing for the bygone.

Personally, I think that Irma’s poems should be put to music. Yet, whether we’d sing them in the original or in translation, whether we hum, declaim them or read them silently, they enrich our worlds and cultivate our mutual understanding.

EXTRACT
Translated into English by Manana Matiashvili and Dana Weber

1 BLUE 

Once the blues were in fashion.
At the time, I used to write much about the blue truth.
I used to put on blue dresses,
Blue did I look at the world
That was getting bored with the color Light Blue.
This is why the world had laid aside old lady Light Blue
On the ledge of the window, at the edge of the world.

I put on the blues.
I bought my clothes second hand or fetched old dusty jeans and blazers from the cellar.
And hung them all in the sun – because they did not fit in my palm.

The blues were in fashion again.
Every morning, I sent you blue welcomes,
I filled a cup bought especially with hot bubbling coffee
And put sugar in it with fingers whose nail polish blossomed blue.

I went with the fashion and never asked,
How, in these blue shades, you could see me so pristine.


STONE SPLINTER  

Great is the hero’s feat
If the heart were able to keep you
As the mists of the mountains keep the splinter of a stone,
Wrap it in the own mantle
To keep it away from evil eyes.
Like that, I want you to survive wrapped in my heart.
Great is the hero’s feat
To be called my last love.
A mine in my heart,
A mine preserved in the splinter,
Preserved in the mists of my heart.
Great is the hero’s feat
When you roll down the heart’s mountain,
And I don’t bat an eyelid,
Standing there like a shepherd,
And like a shepherd following you with my eyes,
Wary that you don’t roll into the gorge abruptly.
And so, my sight turned inward,
Wading through veins and through blood,
I try to take you back to the heart’s mountain
To wrap you in the mantle of mists once again.




In case of using the information, please, indicate the source.