CONTEMPORARY GEORGIAN FICTION Texts copyright © 2012 by the individual contributors Translation and introduction copyright © 2012 by Elizabeth Heighway This edition © 2012 by Dalkey Archive Press First edition, 2012 All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contemporary Georgian fiction / edited and translated by Elizabeth Heighway. -- 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-56478-716-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-56478-751-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Short stories, Georgian--Translations into English. 2. Georgian fiction--20th century--Translations into English. I. Heighway, Elizabeth. PK9168.2.E6B47 2012 899’.969--dc23 2012004231 This book is published thanks to the support of the Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia Partially funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency www.dalkeyarchive.com Cover: design and composition by Sarah French Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America CONTEMPORARY GEORGIAN FICTION TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY ELIZABETH HEIGHWAY Dalkey Archive Press Champaign | Dublin | London CONTENTS INTRODUCTION IX MARIAM BEKAURI Debi 3 LASHA BUGADZE The Round Table 9 ZAZA BURCHULADZE The Dubbing 21 DAVID DEPHY The Chair 35 TEONA DOLENJASHVILI Real Beings 38 GURAM DOCHANASHVILI The Happy Hillock 64 REZO GABRIADZE The White Bridge 95 KOTE JANDIERI Cinderella’s Night 99 IRAKLI JAVAKHADZE Kolya 114 DAVIT KARTVELISHVILI The Squirrel 148 BESIK KHARANAULI Ladies and Gentlemen! 163 MAMUKA KHERKHEULIDZE A Caucasian Chronicle 174 ARCHIL KIKODZE The Drunks 183 ANA KORDZAIA-SAMADASHVILI Rain 212 ZURAB LEZHAVA Love in a Prison Cell 216 MAKA MIKELADZE A Story of Sex 233 AKA MORCHILADZE Once Upon a Time in Georgia 247 ZAAL SAMADASHVILI Selling Books 297 NUGZAR SHATAIDZE November Rain 305 NINO TEPNADZE The Suicide Train 351 AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES 357 INTRODUCTION When I was approached about translating an anthology of contempo- rary Georgian literature I was both delighted and intrigued. My stud- ies in the Georgian language had introduced me to many of the nation’s great authors—Shota Rustaveli (c. 1165–?), Vazha Pshavela (1861–1915), Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907), Akaki Tsereteli (1840–1915), Galaktion Tabidze (1891–1959)—but my knowledge of Georgian literature from 1950 onward was rather limited. From a personal standpoint, then, I was very pleased to be offered the chance to devote my time to a project of this breadth and in doing so to acquaint myself with the contemporary literary scene within Georgia. I was also very enthusiastic about playing a part in making Georgian literature accessible to an English-speaking readership. There are only relatively few published works and journal articles in trans- lation, mostly centering on classic texts, with almost nothing that could be considered “contemporary.” It is my hope that this anthology will go some way toward addressing this shortfall by bringing to the English-speaking reader a selection of stories from some of the best Georgian authors of the last fifty years. In collaboration with the Georgian Ministry of Culture, a selection was made with an eye toward including a very comprehensive mix of writ- IX ers and a broad range of literary styles. Some of these authors are well established, with long publishing careers, while others are young writers who are just emerging onto the literary scene. Some have previously been translated into English or other languages, while for others this will be their first published translation. Some lived large portions of their adult lives under Soviet rule, others just their childhoods, and a few have no memory of Georgia being anything other than an independent country. Indeed, the majority of the works included here were written in the years since the restoration of Georgia’s independence in 1991. While the stories deal with universal human themes—love, belonging, betrayal, loss—the range of settings reflects the many transitions Georgian society has under- gone in recent years. Georgia’s literary history is long; the first works date back to the fifth century and even before then the region had generated a wealth of oral folklore. The number of references in this anthology’s stories to historical Georgian authors, as well as characters from their work, is evidence of the pride with which this literary heritage is viewed by the Georgian people. In this brief introduction I will mention only some of these authors, mainly those mentioned in this anthology or else who have been translated into English, and have included a bibliography at the end of this section for readers wishing to learn more. Sadly, a number of the translated works were published only within Georgia or the Soviet Union, or appeared only in literary journals. To date, the most accessible and wide-ranging selec- tion of translations is to be found in Donald Rayfield’s The Literature of Georgia: A History, of which a fifth of the text consists of translated ex- tracts of literature from all periods. Arguably the most well-known work of Georgian literature outside Georgia is the epic poem The Man in the Panther’s Skin (Vepkhistqaosani; also known as The Knight in the Tiger Skin), written by Shota Rustaveli, poet in the court of Queen Tamar at the end of the twelfth century, dur- ing the golden age of Georgian literature. It was translated at the start of the twentieth century by the English translator Marjory Wardrop, who X INTRODUCTION produced a prose version of the poem, and again by Katharine Vivian in the 1970s. Among Katharine Vivian’s other translations was an eighteenth- century work by the writer and lexicographer Sulkhan Saba Orbeliani, The Book of Wisdom and Lies (Tsigni sibrdzne-sitsruisa), a collection of folk tales, fables, and sayings (also translated by Marjory Wardrop’s brother Oliver in 1894). Two other collections of Georgian folklore have also been translated by Kevin Tuite and Marjory Wardrop. One of the most respected of all Georgian writers emerged in the 1860s; the realist Ilia Chavchavadze, so revered within Georgia that in 1987 he was canonized as “Saint Ilia the Righteous” by the Georgian Orthodox Church, and is widely considered one of the founding fathers of the Geor- gian nation. His narrative poem The Hermit (Gandegili) was translated by Marjory Wardrop in 1895. After Chavchavadze came Vazha Pshavela, at the end of the nineteenth century, and whose narrative poems such as Host and Guest (Stumar-maspindzeli) and The Snake-Eater( Gvelis mchameli)— translated by Donald Rayfield for publication within Georgia—are firmly rooted in the myth and folklore of the Caucasian highlands. During the first decades of the twentieth century there was a sudden resurgence of poetry and prose that coincided with Georgia’s brief period of independence between 1918 and 1921, after which it was annexed by the Soviet Union. Galaktion Tabidze and the Georgian symbolist poets and prose writers Titsian Tabidze, Paolo Iashvili, and Grigol Robakidze (known collectively as “the Blue Horns”) took literature in innovative new directions inspired by Modernism, Russian Symbolism, and French poets such as Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé. In the 1930s, Beria’s purges re- sulted in the arrest or death of many of Georgia’s writers and it took some time for Georgian letters to recover. Some of the more noteworthy writers of the remainder of the Soviet period are the poets Ana Kalandadze and Mukhran Machavariani, and the prose writers Chabua Amirejibi and Otar Chiladze. In the first years after independence, publishing in Georgia was severely affected by the country’s civil war and subsequent economic col- lapse, but writing and publishing started to re-emerge from the mid-1990s INTRODUCTION XI onward as Georgia regained relative political stability. It was that period in which most of the works in this anthology were written. And so to the process of translating the present anthology. The first issue that needed to be decided was precisely what language I would be translat- ing into; my native language is, after all, British English, but the anthology was being produced by a publisher with offices in Dublin, London, and Champaign, Illinois, in the United States—and my own editors located at the latter! It is a relatively simple matter for a speaker of British Eng- lish to adopt US spelling and punctuation, and even vocabulary, but it is a lot harder not to betray one’s origins through subtler regional differences in idiom, metaphor, and nuance. I was very aware, though, of the danger of producing some kind of overly neutral, bland “mid-Atlantic English” if I was over zealous in my attempts to deregionalise my translations. By avoiding overtly British phraseology and working with the US editors at Dalkey to iron out other regional inconsistencies I hope we have achieved our goal of producing a text that sits comfortably with English-speaking readers from a variety of geographic backgrounds, but not at the expense of depth of expression. The sheer variety of narrative styles contained in this anthology meant that each story presented its own distinct challenges to the translator. I hope I have succeeded in recreating the various different voices and styles, for example Dochanashvili’s biblical tone, Bekauri’s almost childlike voice, and Burchuladze’s increasingly manic narrator. Some of the challenges I faced were at a purely linguistic level: Kharanauli’s dense, non-linear prose, Jandieri’s complex structures, and Mikeladze’s heavy use of meta- phor meant that even the first drafts were very time-consuming and la- bor-intensive. Some of the other stories were much simpler at a structural level, and here the first draft was a relatively quick process, but then the challenge presented itself as to how to establish distinct authorial voice within the confines of that simplicity of form.