Poetry
ბედი ქართლისა
Not translated into English
Nikoloz Baratashvili · 1839
Synopsis
After the sack of Tbilisi by Shah Agha Mohammad Khan in 1795, King Erekle II resolves to place his kingdom under the protection of Russia. His chancellor Soliman Lionidze opposes this: he sees in it the loss of national identity. The two men debate, and the chancellor's wife asks what pleasure the nightingale takes in honours if it is in a cage. The reader leans towards the chancellor, but the king's reasoning prevails.
Context
The poem, written in 1839 by a twenty-two-year-old chancellery clerk, is the longest he left. It starts from a real event, the destruction of Tbilisi in 1795, but looks as much to the country's future as to its past, after the failure of the 1832 conspiracy. It was not published in his lifetime: the work was discovered and published in the journal Tsiskari shortly before 1860, and the poet's remains were returned to Georgia in 1893 for a national funeral. A bilingual selection published in France in 1968 made it available to read.
Who it is for
A long dialogue poem, readable in French in an out-of-print collection. It helps to know who Erekle II, last king of Kartli-Kakheti, was, and what the Treaty of Georgievsk was.
Prizes and reception
The title gave its name to Bedi Kartlisa, a review of Kartvelology that Georgian émigrés published in France from 1948 to 1984.