Tbilisi Evening

Abstract

Tbilisi Evening Titsian Tabidze (bio) Translated by Rebecca Gould (bio) March 15, 1927 Tbilisi evening almost died of crying with the music’s voice. The strings carried the heart’s sorrows from the river’s left bank. That’s how the raft man sang, his pine logs bound with swans, his sudden refrain reduced to new hopes’ ashes. My still heart keens with what I have or what I had, what was cast into the fire as I stand naked on the black mountain. I praise the wind of industry. I want to destroy the old country. Icarus’s honeyed wings were melted by the sun’s rays. Forgive me, if I cry for the milky dew of Tbilisi mornings. I envy the flute-player raised on heroic poetry. [End Page 37] I recline on the old raft I cry, bound to the pine swans. My song sings past the old refrain. I live with these dreams. [End Page 38] Titsian Tabidze Titsian Tabidze (1895–1937) was one of most eloquent and sophisticated poets of the literary modernist movement that dominated Georgian literature during the early decades of the twentieth century. Born in rural western Georgia, he passed most of his adult life in cosmopolitan Tbilisi, where he became close friends with Russian and Georgian poets, including his translator Boris Pasternak (winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature), Sergei Esenin (d. 1925), and Osip Mandelstam (d. 1938). Like many Russian and Georgian poets of his era, Titsian perished in a purge directed by Stalin’s police chief Lavrenty Beria. In Titsian’s case the stimulus for his execution was his refusal to denounce his close friend and fellow poet, Paolo Iashvili. To date, Titsian’s work has only been systematically translated into Russian, but an interview with his descendants is available in English at https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/tabidze_8_1_10/. Rebecca Gould Rebecca Gould is a translator of Persian, Russian, and Georgian poetry as well as a scholar, critic, and writer. Her work has appeared in the Hudson Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, and Literary Imagination, among many other venues. Her translated volume After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi will be published by Northwestern University Press. Gould has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of Literary Translators, and is currently an assistant professor in the humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Copyright © 2015 University of Nebraska Press