Tamar Eristavi, a Georgian poet and translator (1932-2014), graduated Tbilisi State University from the faculty of Western European Languages and Literature.
From 1960-1973, she worked in Tbilisi’s Ilia Chavchavadze Institute at the Chair of English Language, and, until 1993, she led the youth section of the Chief Board of Translation and Literary Relations at the Writers’ Union. She was among the editorial staff of the World Literature Library and contributed to the complete Georgian Publication of Shakespeare.
Tamar Eristavi translated and compiled the Anthology of Scotch Poetry (1979), and translated poems by Robert Burns (1959), George Gordon Byron, Jacques Prevert, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Tikhonov, and others. On her death, she was buried in Didube Pantheon.
Her poems have translated into various languages. Here is one of them:
Whatever was-was,
Whatever is-is.
I lived so long
That I could see
The sun and the moon,
The bee on the flower,
The dew on the grass,
And now, when
The day is gloomy,
Standing, with the
Top of the fir-tree,
I’m looking forward
To seeing the snow
And the winds blow.
* * *
It is cloudy,
It is drizzling,
The sky has
Come down, near,
But I don’t forget
The height of
The sky,
I remember it
And that’s why.
Tamar Javakhishvili-Amirejibi (born 1937) is the author of two collections of poems: “The Poems” (1977) and “Till I remember” (1986). She translated the poems of Boris Pasternak and Aleksander Block. Her poems and translations have been published in Georgian newspapers, literary journals, calendars (2021, 2024). Here is one of them:
If life is a dream,
You are the dream
Of my dream for me,
I woke up very early,
Alas! Your face
It disappeared…
And when I wake up
Forever –
I’ll remember
Nothing, never!
Translated from Georgian into English by Ketevan Tukhareli
