Goderdzi Chokheli’s Human Sadness and Short Stories

“I'm impressed by the project: the translation is very high quality and brings out all the individuality of Goderdzi's genius."

Donald Rayfield, Emeritas Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London.

We have recently completed a first-ever English translation of the Georgian 20th-century classic novel Human Sadness by Goderdzi Chokheli, together with five short stories by the same author: Full Stop and Comma, Cipollino, Fish Letters, Communal Crow, and 9 Questions About Love.

Goderdzi Chokheli was born in 1954 in a small village north-east of Tbilisi, and worked as a writer, film producer, and screen writer. Translating his work was a challenge, as the original texts are written in a complicated dialect and a number of different voices, which will no doubt add to their interest for the reader.

Human Sadness is a journey through life. Chokheli, for whom “every character is a story”, invites us into a world which is both real and unreal, where harsh mountain traditions intermingle with the individual worries of the villagers who inhabit it. The story is narrated by five different voices, each of which was translated by a different participant in the project in order to preserve its individuality.

Translated by Ollie Matthews, Margaret Miller, Walker Thomson, Clifford Marcus, and Geoffrey Gosby.
 

Read more about the book, its context, and the experiences of members of the Oxford Georgian Translation Project who worked on it in our series of posts for Georgian Week on the European Literature Network here.