POEMS
The collection Poems includes selected verses from three different collections by the author: Verb, The Circle and If. At the time of publication each collection played a crucial role in Rati Amaglobeli’s literary career and was regarded as a significant and influential poetic production by a young author on the contemporary Georgian Poetry scene. Although the poet tests the borderline between sound and meaning, he never goes so far as to reduce a poem to mere sound. He is extremely inventive in seeking forms for his poems, but the essence and idea are never less important. This collection includes his iconic poem Sequentia – or, as it is often called, An Ode to the Alphabet, in which all the letters of the alphabet are employed and woven into the fabric of the poem.
‘Today, when poetry of a western type is becoming more or less standard poetry created according to oriental traditions may become a means of aesthetic renewal. Rati Amaglobeli is an example of such a stance. You can sense in his texts that he has read and experienced plenty of western literatures, but their form – ornamentation, archaicism (using mediaeval Georgian, approximate quotation, etc.), frequent alliteration, idiosyncratic versification‚ shows us the face of a poet of an oriental type.’
EXTRACT
Translated into English by Donald Rayfield
I am letting you free... the world is vast, I am not frightening you –
Letting you free for you to be reborn under the sky and Sun.
Not pointing at you, but letting you free – I said, agate night
My lakes dried out, have no tears –
Letting you free without tears
I love you with every exhale, inhale, with naked
painful sleep, awake and I let you free on your
Only way, narrow way and it means
I am letting you free into your own depth and entrails.
Holy Mary returned home after Golgotha,
Crucifixion evening has faded away and probably
(Though not spoken, thought over or written)
She was arranging, cleaning things at night...
THIS LOVE LOOKED LIKE CHILDHOOD
This love looked like childhood
Summer, holiday house, breath of wind
Something from the past that I lost –
Nights on trees, moon and plums.
Going to the spring, biting nettles,
Fairy tales in front of the fireplace, late conversations
And how it hurts, how hard it is for me,
When it’s dead and open-eyed
This love, once fresh,
Sharp as a fresh needle of a fur tree,
With the odour of midday heat
And the thoughts that come in the fur tree shadow: -
“That I love You” – and that it looked like
Chasing birds’ shadows in the valley,
Or white shirt dirtied with grass or
Blood on your knees and complaining of parents.
This love was like cold spring water,
I used to drink with handful and killing my thirst,
Washing the wounds
Of Soul and body, at the knee and shoulder.
And my soul felt this love
Like the cozy house,
Watching from balconies the beautiful
Sunsets and sunrises in the village.
This love was like the Most Important,
Like love itself, all other feelings
I compared to it, - I had it like a wife,
Like a sister, felt like brother with him.
And now it remains only in my memory.
THE BEGGAR
I am empty, - telling you – here
Completely,
Soul is stabbed with empty spaces.
No coins left, I’ve spent all vowels,
I am a beggar standing on desolate roads.
I am a beggar, fortuneless, wandering
in black tatters.
Night spy, mysterious, its secret
Hangman I am.
Wandering, fortunate but full with woe
Night spy,
Begging for light, have mercy, help me, -
The Beggars is begging you.
THE SO-CALLED CAIN'S HARVEST, OR DEATH OF LOGIC
An old person, as aged as time.
What hitherto I was moulding as an entire teleological body,
Has shattered on me, is scattered into ten thousand bits and elements,
Like a human corpse,
Which after death has given back to mother earth
What a human being spent all his physical life putting together out of it, filling it with his invisible ghost:
With minerals, carbohydrates, vegetable or animal fats, and with proteins, and made it visible
and palpable, because he ate the mother earth when he ate: tomatoes and onions and garlic
and dill and lettuce leaves and petrushka, which is Russian for parsley, and he also ate celery
and mint and coriander and tarragon and basil and leeks and coloured vegetables and
thousands of greens and types of pepper and dried herbs and vegetables and carrots and
cabbage and beet and radish and gherkins and aubergines and maize, which you can boil
or else peel and make polenta from it and eat it, and so on.
Thousands of sorts of soft fruit and any sort of fruit: plums and apples and pears and
jujubes and damsons and smilax berries and korolioks, which is Russian for kaki fruit. And
pomegranates and watermelons, and melons and strawberries and
Mirabelle plums and wild seedling mirabelles: oh, how generous nature is!
And figs and grapes,
After pressing which we get a liquid product, from this liquid product we can make for the little ones: grape-juice jelly, flour and juice blancmange and, if we don’t grudge the walnuts and hazelnuts, we get churchkhela sweets, and we also have the right to make from this product, or the fluid we pour off it in liquid form, either grape juice or young wine, or whatever we like.
Put something over it and if we give it as bit of time, it gives us wine too for grown-ups.
And tart plums and small apricots and bullaces and sour plums and peaches and large apricots and cherries and morello cherries, not raw, but as preserves, as jams, which means
Physical organization, which makes visible and palpable our invisible ghost, which after
a whole life, and once again becomes invisible, like that teleological body which I was constantly
molding into a whole, which was shattered and scattered into ten thousand bits and
elements, because it is as though something expired in me, something died — an old person, as aged as history.
In case of using the information, please, indicate the source.