'Human Sadness' Translated Novel Out Now
My third published book, a classic Georgian novel of the 20th century, has been published and is now on sale
A novel that I have translated in part has been published and is now on sale! Human Sadness is a novel by the Georgian writer Goderdzi Chokheli which I have translated into English for the first time alongside other members of the Oxford Georgian Translation Project. This is my third published book.
The book is on sale in most bookshops in UK, USA, Europe and Australia, and available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sadness-Dedalus.../dp/1915568501
Human Sadness (original title Adamianta Sevda—literally, “the melancholy of human beings”) appeared in 1984. Set in the harsh mountain world of Soviet Georgia, the novel is a journey through life, where “every character is a story”, where the real and the magical intermingle.
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. The stories range from comedy to tragedy, from the fantastic to the mundane, from naive innocence to great cruelty.
The novel has been reviewed here:
Also here:
And here:
I recently spoke at the book launch of Human Sadness at the Third Annual Oxford-Georgia Forum at St Anthony’s College, Oxford. In my speech I described the merits of Chokheli’s writing, his influence on my own style, and I explained a little about the method we used to translate the novel.
You can read about my speech in full here: https://olliematthews.substack.com/publish/post/145468119?back=%2Fpublish%2Fposts%2Fscheduled
The following is an excerpt from my post about the project which was published on the European Literature Network blog in February 2022:
One of the voices I translated in Human Sadness is that of Gamikhardai, the worry-collector. The worry-collecting is a set-piece of the novel’s structure: the documentation of a fantastical military campaign by the inhabitants of the village of Chokhi against neighbouring villages. Upon the conquest of each new village, the worry-collector sets to work asking the subjugated villagers what worries them the most. Thus the question, “What’s worrying you?”, becomes a familiar refrain, and acts as a plot device to open up further stories about the harsh mountain life that Chokheli knew so well.
One of the most heartrending passages of the novel unfolds when the worry-collector’s questions are turned back on him. We discover that the man who is so interested to know everyone else’s worries has a fair share of his own too:
“Are you really not in love?” asked Gamikhardai.
“No, I’m not, but even if I were, why should love be a worry?”
“Why not? Love is the greatest worry.”
“Are you in love then?”
“I was.”
“Go on.”
“When she was walking along the road one day, some bandits were lying in wait and they attacked her. She didn’t say anything for quite a while. One day she was sitting and she looked up at me without making a sound. I asked her what was wrong. She didn’t say anything. Then she came up to me and kissed me on the knees. I reached down and hugged her, but she pulled herself from my arms and went away. She went away and… that’s all really… she went away. She threw herself into the churning waters of the Aragvi. And so then I turned to collecting people’s worries. Any worry at all in the world, I have to collect it; and then go to God.”
Tears started welling in Gamikhardai’s eyes and so that Chaghi would not notice he turned around, went over to Salome, and wrote down the number of the worry in his notebook.
No one is exempt from worries and trauma in Chokheli’s novel, a reflection, then, of real life. After all, everyone is a story, as Chokheli states in the opening of the novel.
By translating Chokheli’s work, I feel as if I have lived in his world. Indeed I was tempted to believe that the book was non-fiction: an impression helped by the documentary trope of the novel that allows Chokheli to balance the real and the mystical.
Human Sadness leads us on a journey through the full range of human emotion, from the most absurd comedy to the very depths of tragedy. Chokheli’s style is a realism that brings his environment to life but is not removed from the mystical and the magical. He is telling us that the border between the real and the fantastic is an open one. He is also a chronicler of his way of life, and of life in general. Human Sadness might as well be subtitled a compendium of the human condition.
I appeared in a Georgian news report about our translation project:
ოქსფორდის უნივერსიტეტში ორ ათეულ წელზე მეტია ქართულ ენასა და ლიტერატურას ასწავლიან | Rustavi2
What I say in my little interview, from the original Georgian: “I translated stories by Guram Rcheulishvili, Erlom Akhvlediani, and Goderdzi Chokheli. It was very good and I loved it. My favourite writer is Goderdzi Chokheli because he writes about real life in the mountains, and in my opinion he’s a fantastic writer.” Hardly an earth-shattering insight—but speaking even simple Georgian on camera was one of the hardest things I’ve done.
Our first book, Unlocking the Door, was published in 2017. This brings together short stories and plays by eminent Georgian writers of the 20th century and the present day.
Our second book, Stories from Saba: Selected Fables from the Book of Wisdom and Lies, is a collection of fables written by the scholar Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani in the 17th century.
My translations of two short stories by Goderdzi Chokheli will be published in a collection, Fish Letters and Other Stories, in 2025.
For more information about the Oxford Georgian Translation Project, and for updates about our work, click here:
https://rees.web.ox.ac.uk/georgian-language-students-and-translation-projects#tab-3257201
We also have a Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/The-Oxford-Georgian-Translation-Project-105528865387515