Goderdzi Chokheli’s Human Sadness (Dedalus, 2024)
“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.
Human Sadness by Goderdzi Chokheli, published by Dedalus Press, is on sale in most bookshops in the UK, Europe, USA and Australia, and is available on Amazon here.
Human Sadness is a classic Georgian novel translated into English for the first time. Set in the harsh mountain world of Soviet Georgia, Goderdzi Chokheli's 1984 novel is a journey through life, where 'every character is a story', where the real and the magical intermingle. The story is narrated by five distinct voices, each of which was translated by a different translator in order to preserve its individuality.
One winter, the inhabitants of Chokhi, a remote village- primarily women, children and old men, as most of the young men are away tending to their flocks-decide to reassert their power over the neighbouring villages in Gudamaqari Gorge. Traditionally, Chokhi has reigned supreme in the region, with Chokhian men enjoying the right to claim any women from the surrounding villages as their wives. When a Chokhian boy is turned down, his mother enlists their fellow villagers in a campaign to conquer the other villages. Along the way, the Chokhians document their progress and collect the worries, memories, folktales and philosophical musings of both the conquerors and the villages they conquer.
Goderdzi Chokheli was born in 1954 in a small village north-east of Tbilisi, and was one of the most important writers, film producers, and screenwriters of his era. His unique place in Georgian society and culture is encapsulated by Levan Berdzenishvili: “Goderdzi Chokheli did not write anti-Soviet literature, he wrote non-Soviet literature. This is something that nobody else was able to do.”
The novel was translated by Geoffrey Gosby, Clifford Marcus, Ollie Matthews, Margaret Miller, and Walker Thompson, under the tutelage and editorship of Lia Chokoshvili.
Special thanks to Nino Melashvili-Chokheli, wife of Goderdzi Chokheli, for giving permission to translate this work and for her guidance and assistance in translating the specific dialect used by the author.
A stand-alone book of translations of five short stories by Goderdzi Chokheli, entitled Fish Letters and Other Stories, will be published in 2025.
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.
Reviews
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/georgia/chokhelid.htm
Times Literary Supplement review
