Poems

Translated by Innes Merabishvili This is a bilingual volume of 50 poems by Galaktion Tabidze (1891-1959), one of the greatest poets of Georgia. The English translations are by Innes Merabishvili, Professor of English and Linguistics of Translation at the State University of Tbilisi, and a well-known Byron scholar, who has rendered many of Byron's poems into Georgian and published works on the English poet. She has also published (in Georgian) a study of Galaktion's enigmatic metaphors in the monograph Enigmas in Galaktion's Poetry (Tbilisi, 2003). "The renderings of the poems from Georgian into English are accomplished and sensitive. She has captured the tone and rhythms of Galaktion and her translations of the difficult metaphors of the originals come over into English remarkably faithfully. This is a token of Professor Merabishvili's skill as a translator in that one does not sense the presence of a foreign source in these translations. Since Georgian poets - Eristavi, the Chav'chav'adzes, Galaktion, etc. - are hardly known at all in the English-speaking world, Professor Merabishvili has rendered a great service to Georgian letters by making one of the nation's greatest modern poets available to English readers. That alone, in my view, justifies the publication of this volume." - Professor Richard A. Cardwell, The University of Nottingham