[Dedalus Books; 2024]
Tr. from the Georgian by Geoffrey Gosby, Clifford Marcus, Ollie Matthews, Margaret Miller, and Walker Thompson, with the editorship of Lia Chokoshvili
Human Sadness begins in a familiar place: A frustrated author (a death-obsessed young man at that!) has been stuck for three years between the unrelenting desire to tell a story about the place he is from—a Georgian village in the remote Gudamaqari Gorge—and an inability to find a suitable starting point to tell such a story. “Something really is not right with me,” the unnamed author tells us. His writerly imagination is sublime, overwhelming, and while “until now, I had thought that Gudamaqari Gorge was a big book with innumerable short stories in it,” now “Earth is one great book, illuminated by the sun and the moon, in which countless living stories are walking about. Oh, if only you know how glorious this book is!” So, how to give form to this “booming, buzzing confusion,” to grab William James’s phrase about a newborn’s first experiences? In the short preface to this short book, we are witnessing a writer being born, that is, someone who lives in and through proliferating stories to which they are increasingly sensitive. Returning again to the familiar position of this struggling author, what shakes things loose are some limiting factors to focus his attention and a stroke of good luck. While casting about for a candle wick to allow him to write he finds some papers “bound in a thick cover with large lettering that read: THE CAMPAIGN IN GUDAMAQARI.” These have been left by his grandmother, a woman renowned in his home village of Chokhi for keeping secrets, and the task he sets himself is to put these papers, which have become mixed up, in order.
But Goderdzi Chokheli’s Human Sadness is anything but familiar as the story of the campaign unfolds. Chokheli was a filmmaker as well as a prose stylist, and a still from his film version of Human Sadness graces the cover of this book, originally published in 1984 but recently issued in its first English translation by the UK press Dedalus Books. You can find a version of the film on YouTube with the Russian title Великий поход за невестой, or The Great Campaign for a Bride. This is a less poetic title than Human Sadness, but it accurately describes the instigating action of the novel. By virtue of fealty to the village shrine, it has been “the law in Gudamaqari that any son of Chokhi’s St. George, even if he was blind or lame, could knock on any door and ask for a woman’s hand in marriage, without being refused.” Young Shete has been refused by a woman from another village, whose leaders implore Shete and the rest of Chokhi to “Wake up, eh! You’re living in the Dark Ages.” Instead of accepting this, the Chokhi villagers, under the stewardship of their Commander-in-Chief Vazhi Gogi, launch this great campaign ‘to frighten the people of Gudamaqari, to regain the old privileges” and hopefully to secure Shete a wife.
What follows is indeed a campaign through the gorge, but as Vazhi Gogi insists, “No distinguished campaign has even been waged blindly and in disorder . . . every great Commander-in-Chief would take with them writers, philosophers, historians, and geographers.” Human Sadness unfolds through short excerpts from the notebooks left by these different chroniclers and entrusted to his grandmother, with occasional interjections by the author and letters written home during the campaign. Despite the fragmentary nature of this form of storytelling Human Sadness moves at a bracing clip, as the unnamed author has changed into a form that allows these “living stories” to directly express deep human truths. [In an introduction to Human Sadness, the Georgian author and politician Levan Berdzenishvili compares Chokheli’s books and films to the works of Svetlana Alexievich for their ethnographic and multi-vocal nature.]
Human Sadness has the unique feature of being translated by five different translators, all based around the Oxford Georgian Translation Project, to preserve the tonal differences between the various chroniclers of the campaign. There is Gamikhardai, the collector of worries, who dutifully inscribes people’s worries in his notebook and when confronted with one of exceptional weight, of which there are a few, promises that “When I go to God with my worries, if it’s not the first thing I tell him it’ll be the second.” There is the philosopher, who quickly submits conquered villages to pointed and direct questions about death, the afterlife, and the possibility of happiness in a world of finitude. And then there is the “Writer’s Notebook,” which bears the title Human Sadness, in which longer-form stories that verge on magical realism are told, such as that of a boy named Gigia and a wounded eagle who become blood brothers and follow one another to the grave under the foot of everyday human brutality. The effect of these different voices makes for a striking bit of experimental folklore, and a psychic ethnography that, to the author’s initial ambitions, links the living stories of the remote Gudamaqari Gorge with the great book written across the whole earth.
There are two bravura endings to the novel—one short and one long. The author brings us back into the present to note that the “Gudamaqari Warriors” are mostly still alive today, though they buried his grandmother the year before last. He is seemingly no closer to achieving his ambitions of becoming a great writer, but has fully settled into telling this particular story. He writes that Gamikhardai, the worry collector, would often take his backpack full of worries up into the mountains because “he said gods love heights and maybe one of them might be there on a mountain top.” Recognizing the angst of this young man, a shepherd dresses up in white one day to look like God, and Gamikhardai brings his sack looking for some kind of blessing and absolution. The shepherd asks him to “pick one of the worries, the one that is deepest in your heart, for me to dispel and I shall dispel it. Ask for no more.” Gamikhardai produces Worry no. 1 from a man named Giorgi Bekauri:
War is about to break,
The troops hear the call.
The Earth will shake,
The Moon with fall.
The shepherd, now fully inhabiting the role of God, lays his hand on Gamikhardai’s shoulder and says, “I will resolve this worry for you.” Gamikhardai is set at ease—“As long as God resolves this worry, to hell with our remaining worries. They can stay with us.”
But the novel does not end here. There is one more tale from the Human Sadness notebook that is disconnected from the campaign, but the author likes it so much that they present it unchanged. The story, titled “Carousing with Death,” gives embodiment to the novel’s fixation on the liminal space between life and death. 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 Schapira is an Interviews Editor at Full Stop.
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