Vakhtang Javakhadze has made a very important contribution to the development of contemporary artistic thinking and poetic culture. Most of his poems are like an intimate conversation with the reader: sharing an idea or asking thought-provoking questions. The poet’s peculiar quality is that he not only shares his thinking and experiences with us, but brings us into his ‘laboratory’ too and makes us take an immediate part in seeking the appropriate form for these thoughts and experiences. He seeks for new means of embodying them, he wants to work out where the limit to the possibility of poetic expression lies and he uses, in order to communicated what he ‘has to say’, graphic devices as well as elements of everyday prose.

‘Vakhtang Javakhadze is one of those writers who defines the level not just of poetry, but of modern literature. If we make an effort, we want to become participants in a European poetic process and we say that for this we have sufficient strength, Among those who make this evaluation is Vakhtang Javakhadze. He is an eternal seeker, and that is why his work’s depth and novelty always seizes our attention.’    

R. Chkheidze, author, literary critic

EXTRACT
Translated into English by Donald Rayfield

TO THE TRANSLATORS OF MY POEM

Dear sponsor, if you wish, change the rhythm.
If you wish, change the metre too, twice or thrice.
If you wish, simplify the complex rhymes, too.
Don’t avoid alliteration, either.
If you need to, break off the line at the beginning,
Decode the metaphor, too, it doesn’t matter, it can take it.
Don’t imitate syntactical similarities and matches,
Take a free comparative view of comparisons,
Don’t keep count of subtexts and abbreviation signs,
Don’t preserve every example of inversion.
Don’t search for appropriate slang and epithets,
Avoid reproducing the exact intonation.
Don’t pursue the accent or the pauses,
You may refrain from emphasizing some refrains.
You may occasionally sacrifice a hyperbole,
There’s no need for every subtitle.
Leave out, when you come across them, exact adjectives,
Leave out a stanza and leave out a line.
Leave them out forty times, leave them out sixty times…
But don’t omit my name and surname!      


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