Shota Chantladze: The Poet of the Streets and Gardens

Abstract

 “A listener of the mysterious voices of the city, a commiserator of its pain, a reader of the alphabet of the streets” - this is how poet and translator Jarji Pkhoveli refers to the Georgian poet Shota Chantladze.

Not a single piece of Shota Chantladze's work was published during his lifetime (as the poet stated, he had written four hundred poems). Thus, his voice was heard neither from literary newspapers nor the platforms of the literary society. As the poet Iza Orjonikidze points out: ”The only platform that he was not hindered from using were the streets of Tbilisi, the Tbilisi State University garden and Vera Park”.

In order the importance of urbanism to be outlined in Chantladze's poetry, it can be said that his poems are not merely about the city, but rather the poet turns the city into poetry. The principal quality of the theory of urban literature is the transformation of the city into a text, which, in turn, implies being aware of the city, reconciling with it, or, conversely, being estranged from it, decoding signs, symbols and the experience suggested by everyday urban life. Shota Chantladze is a poet who wanders in the streets, decodes its audio-visual experience and then turns urban impressions into poetry. For him, the city is a text to be written and re-read.

The image of a city cannot be created without the presence of the individual, and the convergence of the character’s internal and external spaces. Poet's being in the middle of city life is crucial in the works of Chantladze. The main focus of his poems is not the description of urban architecture, images of urbanites, or the symbolic landscapes of Tbilisi (i.e. Mtkvari River, Mount Mtatsminda). His poems suggest to the reader a different way of reading the city - a depiction of his own, personal, everyday experience congregating all together: urban characters, places, routes, transport, and situations inseparable from urban life.

Urban works of the Georgian poet depict movement, mobility. The author is a wandering observer, stroller. The samples of his urban verses often describe the poet’s observations: the main source of his explorations is an idle act of strolling. At the same time, he can transform from a passive observer into an omniscient mind, a reservoir of memories that stores all the information about every avenue, street, alley, square, garden, and city inhabitant.

One of his most outstanding urban works is “Tram (Requiem)” (1958) – a poem about the trivial life of the city. The main character is an inanimate creature - a tram - a symbol of technological progress. In order to create a vivid image of the city transport as a living organism, the poet attributes a human characteristic to it: the tram awakes, thinks, feels, desires, falls asleep, daydreams. Thus, like a human being, it experiences a full cycle of day and night. The tram becomes the cosmos of the poem, within which boundaries thousands of citizens and their stories, gather daily. The author suggests the non-pragmatic, personalized perspective of the means of transport, that, in general, is a pragmatic manifestation of technological progress.

Urban works of the Georgian poet are imbued with European modernist aesthetics. The personal experience and quest for self-discovery are crucial aspects of his poetry. As poet and translator Givi Shahnazar states, nowhere in Georgian literature, urbanism is as powerfully and apparently expressed as in the works of Shota Chantladze.

References:

1. Chantladze, Sh. (1998). I Will Come. Tbilisi, “Literature Chronicle” Publishing. (In Georgian).
2. Chantladze, Sh. (2010). 100 Verses. Tbilisi, “Intelekti” Publishing.
3. Kharbedia, M. (2017). “Garden and Wandering”, The Literary Magazine “Arili”. https://shorturl.at/MfNOt (In Georgian).
4. Pirtskhalava, N. (2022). “Tbilisi as a Text”. The Literary Magazine “Arili”, N7 (307). (In Georgian).
5. Tsipuria, B. (2021). “Shota Chantladze – Non-Soviet Poet in Soviet Georgia”. https://literature.iliauni.edu.ge/rubrika/shotha-chantladze-arasabtchotha-poeti-sabtchotha-saqarthveloshi/ (In Georgian).
6. Writers’ House of Georgia. (2018). “Reading the Poetry of Shota Chantladze”. Facebook. https://shorturl.at/E5vIs