29 MAY
Into what world have I stumbled? Last night I couldn’t write anything about my visit to the Writers’ House, my walks, the supra on the riverbank, and something else that I find hard to describe. In the morning, I continued to enjoy the splendid view that the balcony affords me. I had already spent a while there before bathing. The climate is perfect, like Cuernavaca’s. Around the hotel, brick houses of two or three stories with red roofs abound, which contrast with the architecture of cement or reinforced concrete that is now fashionable in the world and is abused in socialist countries. In the distance, all around, towers with conical metal roofs dot the landscape. Some buildings with Moorish elements, possibly from the last century, with a more or less artificial appearance, stand out. The towers of the Orthodox churches and monasteries have the air of minarets trimmed mid-growth. Yesterday, an interpreter, who will be my guide to take me to the Writers’ House, came to pick me up. I walked into a room where there were a dozen Georgians; a few more arrived later. On the tables there are big ceramic bowls overflowing with fruit. During our conversation we are invited to eat giant pears and apples; they peel them with knives in slow, precise gestures, cut them elegantly, and ceremoniously offer each other pieces of fruit as if fulfilling an ancient rite, then offer them to me and my guide. I learn that the first book of literature written in Georgian dates to the fifth century, an extremely remote date, and their ecclesiastical literature is even older. I ask them to repeat the date for me, because it seems all but impossible that the Georgians already had books in their language in the final days of the Roman Empire, five centuries before the Romance languages had produced a literary text. Could it have been the fifteenth century? I ask again, and they answer no. They also explain to me that the golden age of Georgian literature was the twelfth century, in which the great classic of the nation,
The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, was composed by Shota Rustaveli. I gather from the conversation that Georgian literature as well as cinema and theater are based on three elements: a strict sense of form, an effort of imagination that in no way dismisses the mythological, an attachment to reality, and at the same time the criticism of that very reality. They repeatedly complain that for a long time Georgians have not been considered as thinking beings, but rather as a national group that expresses its happiness vacuously by singing, dancing, and drinking wine all the time. “For many it has been very eye-opening to know that we Georgian writers and filmmakers are tremendously self-critical. We are not only a hedonistic nation, it must be stressed, but also a tragic one,” says the writer who chairs the meeting. Another man, in his sixties, short, plump, with a sensual mouth and skin that has been cruelly punished by smallpox, or by juvenile acne so pernicious that it destroyed his face, protests in a muffled voice, because the fair sex, the blessed ladies, above all the Nordic and German ones, consider Georgians as mere sex objects and not as subjects capable of making poetry, and this had ruined the prestige of the nation. “Pasternak was a great enthusiast of our poets, he wrote about them and translated the best. The French translations have been based on his translations, they have been published in France and Switzerland, and it has been very difficult to get out of their head that their splendor is owed to Pasternak alone and not to the authors themselves, whom they regard as mere raw material. But what can we do, their wives, their daughters come to Georgia and when they return to their countries what they want to talk about is the muscular strength of our boys, what they have between their legs, and not that they read poems here or there. They come in the summer, not like lobsters — not at all! — they come like packs of cougars, and they pounce hungry and ferocious on our defenseless bodies; not even the old men are safe. We endure them for three months during summer, and they leave us looking like skeletons. Our brains dry up and it takes us a long time to recover our vitality and remember our language properly. There is a lack of respect in such a crude way of behaving, don’t you think? One of my cousins who is older than I, his legs amputated in the war…” And there they all stop him mid-gallop. He acts a little stunned, apologizes, everyone then laughs, they talk among each other, discuss something that the interpreter doesn’t want to translate for me, peel more apples and pears, cut them into pieces and share them again. “Perhaps,” says a playwright, Shadiman Schamanadze, the youngest of the group, “no country in the world feels dissatisfaction for its achievements like Georgia. They label what amazes them about us as experiments in the avant-garde, we’re either the children of Beckett, or the surrealists or the minimalists; okay, yes, some may be, but I think we are instead the result of a different tradition, which goes far back in time.” Someone explains that the new generation feeds on ancient Georgian literature, and that’s why it seems so new. “What is being written today,” the playwright insists, “is a tragic literature, characterized by its acceptance of pain. The recognition of a moral code that comes from antiquity. What differentiates us from the West,” he concludes, “is our wish to build.” Before leaving the Writers’ House they showed me a list of Mexican books translated into Georgian in the last ten years: Rafael Muñoz’s