ABSTRACT
Galaktion Tabidze (გალაკტიონ ტაბიძე, 1891 – 1959), older than his cousin and neighbour Titsian Tabidze, began as a fringe poet. Preferring solitude, he took longer than the Blue Horns to attract recognition, although his first book in 1914 marked him out, in Titsian Tabidze’s words, as ‘Chevalier of the order of loneliness’. An encounter in a park with Bachana, Vazha-Pshavela’s brother, was for Galaktion a laying-on of hands. His next book, Crâne aux fleurs artistiques (1919), heavily influenced by French Symbolists, especially Verlaine, who was still fashionable in Georgia, proved his superiority to every other contemporary and his totally new talent for making Georgian a subtly sonorous, almost onomatopoeic, medium for conveying mood. By the 1920s his themes of isolation, lovelessness, and nightmarish premonitions were wholly his own: they made certain lyrics — ‘Without Love’ (უსიყვარულოდ, 1913), ‘I and the Night’ (მე და ღამე, 1913), ‘The Wind Blows’ (ქარი ჰქრის, 1924) — as widely known as nursery rhymes, the last in particular: O the wind, how it blows, how it blows, The wind whirls the leaves off afar, Arches trees, trees in ranks, trees in hosts. Tell me where, where you are, where you are. How it rains, how it snows, how it snows. You’re not to be found any more. Your image pursues me, it haunts Everywhere, every day, every hour. From the sky drizzle far, misty thoughts, O the wind, how it blows, how it blows.
