12/8/90 — Rustaveli [K. Tuite]; page 1 Comments for Japanese translation of "The knight in the tiger's skin" [Vepkhist'q'aosani] by Shota Rustaveli Kevin Tuite Straddling the border between Europe and Asia, drawing upon the intellectual traditions of Persia and Arabia as well as Greece and Rome, the Caucasian kingdom of Georgia achieved its Renaissance, its cultural efflorescence in Christian soil fertilized with Classical humanism, a full century before Italy. Shota Rustaveli is, in a sense, the Georgian Dante, the author universally acclaimed by his people as standing at the pinnacle of their national Golden Era. Also like Dante, he is credited with the transformation of the literary language, taking it out of the hands of Lie churchmen and forging il into a vehicle for secular poetry and prose. Had history been kinder to Georgia, the Caucasian Renaissance would very likely have flourished and diversified, even as Dante paved the way for Petrarch and Boccaccio, and his contemporaries Cimabue and Giotto layed the groundwork for da Vinci and Michelangelo. Perhaps later scholars would have proclaimed Georgia, rather than Italy, as the birthplace of the great resurgence of European humanism. But it was not to be. Less than twenty years after Rustaveli wrote his epic poem, Mongol hordes were routing a Georgian army which had not known defeat for over a century. Soon afterwards Tiflis, the Georgian capital, was pillaged by the Khwarezmians, and dark centuries of massacre and foreign domination brought the once-proud Caucasian kingdom to brink of extinction. It is not known if Rustaveli was still alive when these events occurred. He was born in happier times, around the year 1170, in the village of Rustavi, from which he took his name. According to tradition he was educated at the academy of Iqalto, in eastern Georgia, with some of the finest scholars of his time. Because of his exceptional ability, he was sent to complete his studies in Greece, and, upon his return to his homeland, appointed to a high position at the court of Queen Tamar. Tamar, the most beloved of Georgian sovereigns, reigned from 1184 to 1212. Under her leadership Georgia achieved its political zenith: much of the North Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaidjan and Turkey was under her direct rule or rendered her tribute. This was also a fruitful time for intellectual activity. At the academies of Gelati and Igalto, and at monasteries in Jerusalem and Mt. Athos, Georgian monks were busily translating the works of the Greek philosophers and the epics of Homer. In Tiflis, Georgian aristocrats were eagerly reading the court poetry of neighboring Persia. In this atmosphere of cultural crosscurrents from east and west, Shota Rustaveli composed his epic. Unlike any Christian writer of his time - or for a long time thereafter — Rustaveli betrays no partiality toward the doctrines of his faith: the philosophical and cosmological framework of the12/8/90 — Rustaveli [K. Tuite]; page 2 Vepkhist'q'aosani draws as much from Platonism and Islam as it does from Orthodox Christianity. Rustaveli's God is generous, the creator of a world full of beauty, given to us that we may enjoy it. In the opening stanza Rustaveli declares: chwen, k'atsta, moqutsa kwea'ana, quakws utwalavi perita "[God] gave us the world, to have with all of its colors" (1).? At the same time, God has ordained that people must prove themselves worthy through struggle and suffering. Their virtue must be put to the test: ar_gardava garduvalad momavali sakme zena; ts'esi aris mamatsisa moch'irveba, ch'irta tmena, "That which is decreed from above will no go unfulfilled; It is the law of men that they must endure and bear up with misfortune" (793) If they are steadfast, courageous and loyal, they shall be rewarded with earthly riches. But such wealth, Rustaveli teaches us, has value only if it is given away to the poor, and spent entertaining one's friends: rasatsa gastsen, shenia, rats ara, dak'argulia "that which you give away remains yours; that which you do not give, is lost" (50). I have quoted some lines from Rustaveli because his words, more ‘than those of any other Georgian writer, are continually in the mouths of his people, even eight centuries later. This is not difficult to understand, for no other poet has so successfully depicted, in language of extraordinary beauty, the image the Georgian people have of themselves and the ideals toward which they strive. Rustaveli's men are handsome and brave, but even the most battle-hardened of them cannot restrain his burning emotions when thinking of the woman he loves. Rustaveli's women eclipse the sun with their radiance, but also are wise and resourceful, capable of ruling kingdoms, the equal of any man: lek'wi lomisa sts'oria, dzu ig'os, tunda khwadia "the lion's cubs are equal, be they female or male" (39). Georgians of both genders prize articulateness in speech, the ability to discourse kiek'luts-sit'a'wad "with charming words" (127). Readers of Rustaveli in translation cannot of course directly experience the linguistic substance out of which his poem was fashioned. For this reason I will say a few words about the Georgian language and the poetic style employed by Rustaveli when he composed the Vepkhist'q'aosani nearly 800 years ago. 1 ‘The numbers in parentheses refer to the quatrains as numbered in the standard Georgian text of the Vepkhist'a'aosani, published by the Vepkhist'q'aosnis Ak'ademiuri T'ekst'is Dandgeni K'omisia (Academic commission to establish the text of "The knight in the tiger's skin") in 1988.12/8/90 — Rustaveli [K. Tuite]; page 3 Georgian is one of the nearly forty Ibero-Caucasian or Paleo-Caucasian languages. These languages are indigenous to the region surrounding the Caucasus mountains, and have no known relationship to the Indo-European family or to any other linguistic group. Georgian avails itself of a rich array of consonant sounds — twenty-eight of them — plus five vowels. One series of consonants is pronounced with a simultaneous constriction of the vocal chords ('glottalized' or ‘abruptive’ occlusives, marked with an apostrophe in my transcription: /p'/, yk'/, /oh'/ etc). The grammar is rather complex, especially in regard to the verb, which can take markers indicating the person and number of its subject and objects, as well as suffixes for voice, aspect, mood and tense. In some respects it reminds one of Homeric Greek, but with exotic characteristics more reminiscent of the tongues of Native America. By the time of Rustaveli the Georgian language had a literary tradition at least seven centuries old. Most of the works written in Gn up to this time were of an ecclesiastic or scholastic nature: translations of the Bible and the Church Fathers, lives of the saints, theological and philosophical treatises. The great Gn scholars of the Middle Ages enriched their 1g with terms for intellectual concepts modelled upon those of the Greek philosophers, while at the same time a steady stream of Persian, Turkish and Arabic words were adding their distinctive hue to Gn speech, borne by the prestige of Persian courtly lyrics in Gn aristocratic circles. Under these circumstances Rustaveli was able to become, like Shakespeare, the master of a language at an especially vigorous stage of its life cycle, with a lexicon richly endowed with archaic words not yet fallen into desuetude, and new acquisitions whose potentials were still to be explored. The Vepkhist'q'aosani consists of nearly 1700 quatrains, each with four rhyming 16-syllable lines. Each line has a caesura (break) dividing into equal eight-syllable halves. Further subdivisions of the line are of two types: equal groups of four syllables, known in Georgian as maghali shairi "high verse,” and unequal groups of five and three, called dabali shairi "low verse." Both types of verse are common in the works of other Georgian writers and in folk poetry. We have seen examples of the two patterns in the excerpts quoted earlier. Compare the stately pace of the "high verse" in: ar gar-da-va / gar-du-va-lad // mo-ma-va-1i_/ sa-kme ze-na (4+4+4+4), with the more vigorous ‘tempo of the uneven fives and threes of: ra-sa-tsa ga-stsem,/ she-ni-a,// rats a-ra,/ da-k'a-rgu-li-a (5+3+3+5). By his selection of one or the other rhythmic pattern, Rustaveli is able to modify the pace of his verse according to its content and the dramatic situation. Another poetic device that Rustaveli has at his disposal is end rhyme. Although the oldest Georgian poems that have come down to us (liturgical hymns from the 10th and 11th centuries) are unrhymed, rhyme was already in common use by Rustaveli's time, and it is frequently met with in folk poetry as well. The rhyme12/8/90 - Rustaveli [K. Tuite]; page 4 schenes employed in the Yepkhist'a'aosani are very rich, with at least three rhyming syllables at the end of each of the four lines in the quatrain. One of Rustaveli's trademarks — which unfortunately cannot be reproduced in a translation — is the ending of each line in the quatrain with identical syllables which take on contrastive readings and word-divisions. As an example, let us look at quatrain 177: akhalman pipkman datova, vardi datrtwila, DANASA; moundis quisa datsema, zoqjer mimartis DANASA; thwis: ch'iri chemi sopelman otkhmotsdaati an asa, movshordi lkhinsa q'welasa, changsa, barbitsa DA NASA. "A new snow had fallen, it frosted over the rose, it ruined it; He wanted to strike at his heart, at times he took up his knife; He said: The world has multiplied my sorrow by ninety or a hundred-fold, I have withdrawn from all enjoyment, the harp, the psaltery and the panpipe." In this quatrain three lines end with the sounds danasa. In one it is read as a verb (dasnas=a "it destroyed its beauty"), in the second as a noun (dana=sa, dative case of dana "knife"), and in the fourth line as two words (da nazsa "and the panpipe"). Rustaveli creates a special effect through this tension between the recurrence of identical sounds with different meanings and different syntactic functions. On some occasions Rustaveli uses the more compressed device, familiar to readers of Japanese poetry, of words which take on two meanings simultaneously. Quatrain 1178 ends with the following words: vardi ertgan sheets'eba, margalit'sa ar aghebda, L/mch'wret'ni misni qaak'wirvna, rasamtsa vin IAZREBDA "the roses [ive. Nestan-Darejan's lips] stuck together, she did not reveal the pearl [she did not speak]; she caused those who gazed upon her to wonder: what is she thinking?" Read as a single word, the syllables isazrseb=d=a mean "she is thinking about it," and this is the reading that first comes to mind. But it is also possible to parse them as two words, giving vin ia zr=eb=d=a "who froze the violet?" In view of the reference to roses in the previous line, and the fact that in Georgian folklore (with which Rustaveli was certainly familiar) the violet is a common symbol of womanhood, the second interpretation is evoked simultaneously with the first. Finally something should be said about the exuberant use Rustaveli makes of the vocabulary of his native language. Having both native Georgian as well as newly-borrowed Persian and Arabic words at his disposal, he revels in rich, detailed descriptions of dress, scenery and props. His extensive use of flower, animal and gem imagery to depict his characters is one of the aspects of12/8/90 — Rustaveli [K. Tuite]; page 5 the Vepkhist'q'aosani foreign readers find the hardest to approach. To supplement the already enormous inventory of lexical items ready to hand, Rustaveli exploits from time to time the mechanisms made available by Georgian grammar to create new words. Some of these neologisms are truly remarkable, the sort of words only a madman or genius could invent. Patman addresses the following words to Nestan-Darejan, beloved of the hero Tariel: ornive mikhvdet ts'adilsa, igi vardobdes, shen ie "May you both attain your wish; may he [Tariel] blossom as a rose and you as a violet" (1267). Rustaveli has taken the names of the two flowers and formed verbs from them which defy translation: vard=ob=d= literally "may he [be a, blossom as a] rose," and ize, an imperative formed from ia "violet" meaning, at best approximation, "be a violet!" There is so much more I wish I could tell you about Shota Rustaveli and his magnum opus, but time and space grow short. Each translation of the Vepkhist'g'aosani is to be welcomed, as it conducts a new group of readers into the magical world of Tariel, Nestan-Darejan, Avtandil and Tinatin, and draws their attention to the as-yet little-known country of Georgia, or Sakartvelo as it is known in the Georgian language, a country that will soon, we hope, be allowed to stand on its own feet and make a name for itself in the world community. It is my hope that this new Japanese rendering of Rustaveli's immortal poem will bring much pleasure to its readers.