Poetry
არტისტული ყვავილები
Not translated into English
Galaktion Tabidze · 1919
Synopsis
A collection of symbolist poems, in which loneliness, the absence of love and the foreboding of nightmare recur. The language is so dense that critics often give up trying to draw a precise content from it: it is the language that made the book. It contains some of its author's best-known pieces, including the one everyone recites about the wind that blows.
Context
The collection appeared in 1919, five years after a first Symbolist book, much noticed, which had not made its author a leader of the movement; it gave him that rank for several decades. The full Georgian title names a skull covered with artistic flowers, and encyclopaedias render the book in French as Crâne aux fleurs artistiques, which is the title of no edition. The Soviet regime, established in 1921, spared the poet, who had become popular and who went on publishing and receiving honours. No French edition of the collection exists.
Who it is for
A collection in Georgian, never translated as a volume, of which a selection by the author gives an idea under another title; this symbolism resists paraphrase.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author the leading figure of Georgian poetry for several decades.