Overview

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. The book begins as a frustrated young novelist comes across a collection of notebooks and letters documenting a strange military campaign, of which his grandmother was a part. 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 the other 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 their fellow conquerors and the villages they conquer. AUTHOR: Goderdzi Chokheli was born in 1954 in a small village north-east of Tbilisi, and died in Tbilisi in 2007. He was one of the most important filmmakers and prose writers of his era.He published one novel Human Sadness and five short stories. His films and screen plays won many awards both inside Georgia and abroad. 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.'

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9781915568502

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'It emerges that an underlying war aim is to commandeer resources to construct a grandiose 500-room house from walnut trees. ""'Why live separately?' the priest intoned. 'Wouldn't it be better to be together all the time?'"" Soviet collectivization, though roundly mocked, is not the only target. The campaign's ultimate futility fuels a Swiftian satire on all imperial conquest and wars of occupation - from historic Greek, Persian or Russian expansionism to (by implication) the Red Army invasion of independent Georgia in 1921. Yet the author's genius is to hint, through myths and fables, that the will to conquer is inherent in us all - whether stoked by jealousy, revenge, pride, pique or lust. ' Maya Jaggi in The Times Literary Supplement 'Like many of the stories from the Human Sadness notebook, it is infused with the syncretic form of Christianity that unfolded in remote mountaintop churches in Georgia, where ritual and the rhythm of village life give shape to transcendent concepts. What follows from carousing with death is not a totalizing apocalypse, but the sun rising again, but ""not from where it usually came up, but from the grave that had been dug the day before; it went up and at midday it sat in the sky."" Even death cannot staunch the flow of living stories that had at first incapacitated our nameless author, but life goes on. ""What is life?"" the novel ends by asking. ""Life is sorrow, the sweet sorrow of human being. And death? Death is also sorrow, the sorrow of human non-being."" ' Michael Shapira in Full Stop Magazine 'The novel is narrated by five different characters each with a distinct voice which the translation seeks to emulate by having a different translator for each individual voice. Hence the five translator-credits. This seems to have worked out quite well as well; there are no real weak points among the different translations, while the differences between them are not jarring but rather seem entirely appropriate. Human Sadness is unusual in a variety of ways - not least as a (very atypical) example of Soviet-era fiction - but also enjoyable beyond merely that; it's very good to see this available in translation.' M.A.Orthofer in The Complete Review

Author Information

Goderdzi Chokheli Goderdzi Chokheli was born in 1954 in a small village north-east of Tbilisi, and died in Tbilisi in 2007. He was one of the most important filmmakers and prose writers of his era.He published one novel Human Sadness and five short stories. His films and screen plays won many awards both inside Georgia and abroad. 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.'

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