Joys and cares in great and small of the day

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Maya Sarishvili

(Born in Georgia, 1968)

There are two things that the Georgian poet Maia Sarisjvili (1968) clearly cannot get enough of: children and poems.She has studied pedagogy, is the mother of four children and teaches at primary school. Being this busy does not prevent her from writing poetry. Even so, there is a great difference between her way of dealing with her large family and professional life and her life as a poet.

She is brimful of energy and creativity when it comes to making life attractive for her children at home and those at school. Her inner poet, however, has to fall into line: in stolen small hours in the middle of the night, the joys and cares great and small of the day just past find poetic expression. Her poetry reads like a catalogue of the madness of everyday life and the contrasting sense of rest that emanates from children.

Sarisjvili deals with everyday subjects by referring to concrete objects and actions. Her poetry displays a realistic and materialistic touch that she refashions in her spiritual search for the nature and power of woman. Her work is suffused with images that, because of their directness, corporality and psychological force, have introduced a new sound into Georgian poetry. Maia Sarisjvili writes short, evocative poems that contain everything in one breath.

I constantly surprise Georgians when I talk to them about their female poets. Many of them are scarcely known, they are published in driblets and are not to be found on the wanted lists of TV producers and organisers of literary gatherings. Female poetry in the landscape of Georgian poetry has all the characteristics of a diary: it consists of tough statements of what it is like to live as a woman, wife, mother and daughter. The existentialist tone is perhaps reminiscent of the work of Sylvia Plath, who is a considerable model for many female Georgian poets.

Ingrid Degraeve (Translated by John Irons)

Some of her poems

Again the honey has gone bad,

Again the honey has gone bad,
Taken into the house on the hem of a dress.
There’s a hint of grey and a taste of chintz
And something sizzles magically inside: what?
I stick my wide-open eyes in,
But still can’t see anything.
My rejoicing turns out to be nothing,
Adorning the days with banners of peals of laughter.
Only an unknowing sadness rises from me like smoke –
Stinking, choking,
And I can’t say in anyone’s presence
How my piteous sleep
Is lashed by razor-sharp shrieks,
Because every night
I wave myself about like a hatchet,
So that I can cut off as fast as possible
One more,
And again for something’s sake,
Day that’s been endured.

CIRCLE AND RECTANGLE

As a child I existed in just these two shapes:
Outside – the round yard of the children’s playground,
Inside – the high-windowed loggia’s rectangle.
Anything else was like a pitch-dark tunnel . . .
When I entered the loggia
A thousand drawers would open all at once:
Drawers with medicine, linen, jewellery, sealed papers,
And mischievous smells would waft out of them.
But in the morning, in the playground’s roundness
A whirlpool of evergreen bushes foamed
And down the child’s slide, with shrieks of joy,
Mingling with the children, angels rushed.

How will things be for me this winter?

How will things be for me this winter?
Let’s say, may I get rich,
But I shan’t order any snow in big flakes,
I’ll stock up on unproblematic carefree days,
From the room I shall hound out insolent moles
And I shall diligently fill the cavities in the floor.
For proper things
I shan’t mess up the proper path.
A trusting hand
Will remove the dust with a piece of velvet.
I shan’t compare the sound of the clock
To barefoot children gadding about.
I shall never again compare anything to anything,
But woe if the bridge calls me at night!
(It’s afraid it can plunge right down.)
Its mighty irons crumble my fingers,
When its railings cling to me
And won’t let me go.

It won’t work out this way,

It won’t work out this way,
Even if you tip over a whole forest,
You won’t be able to find a single root anywhere.
The universe, when not fixed to the earth,
Is like a terrible dream.
Towns just lie about on the asphalt,
Seas are turned rigid
Wherever the earth topples over
And drift off afar –
Like colossal razors,
They slide uncontrollably.
And how eagerly all of us,
One by one,
Strip the old-fashioned veins from our bodies –
And very soon
Even the bees can’t sting any more
Our porcelain children, which are meant to be set out
On the grand pianos.

MATERNITY HOME

One’s fingers gravitate there endlessly,
Like rivers of milk.
A thousand times they have changed
My hospital linen,
Soiled with fatty whiteness –
Ten yells hurl
Towards the open door of the ward.
The corridor, trembling in ten bands of delirium,
Tells a fairytale about plastic trees,
Trees decorated with glass-eyed baubles.
Send to me in here
A single hair of my mother’s,
Or a teaspoonful of lilac flowers.
It’s bad here.
Here my children sit
In the carers’ pockets, stuck with navel cord.
And on handkerchiefs full of dried slime,
Their skin is scrubbed.
Why do they take bits of my flesh about in a pocket?
They can’t fit any more faces, swollen with spite,
Into the wards
And they carry the poisonous cheeks
Out of the windows into the streets.
There they amuse themselves
Looking at the endless movement of my fingers
And can’t understand
That I hold the whole world!

MICROSCOPE

Nobody has got so scared as I, for some reason,
Nobody can have caught sight of melancholy exuded by the cells.
The cells of onion skins,
Cells of strands of hairs of fail-grade and top-grade pupils,
The whole class of cellular beings,
Including the view from the window . . .
Suddenly the protective layer has been stripped from the universe,
The path to the house becomes alien.
And the house with all its rooms.
But further off
Dubious alien parents
At dubious work . . .
What melancholy. What spell-casting.
Silent film seen under the microscope.
It’s as though
God calls up something for your eyes
But still won’t tell you the main thing.

Tell my husband

Tell my husband
That this, my veil, grew from the skull,
Like fatty milk leaving crispy clefts.
The veil is chimney smoke.
And I am a dark chimney,
Or a hot veranda, onto which I raise up
These globules of milk fat – wasps –
In places from which there is no return, very high up . . .
Tell my husband, my mother’s soul is a veil
That has flown off anxiously into my hair and sways me –
But this pain
Still lingers in my flesh, like a diamond bullet.
Tell my husband
That I shall set sugar pigeon squabs as a veil on the back of my head,
Or I shall use his letters as a covering instead of a veil,
When I grow so old and changed,
Like a flower unfurling in boiling water.

The child’s roughly used clothes.

The child’s roughly used clothes.
Yes, that’s what let me recognize clarity.
I shall come here, I said,
And silently they dropped me off there.
The things took off their headscarf,
So that I could see how big the ears had grown. Words I had heard
Were watching from there
And I recognized the room, too . . .
Two opaque children
Came up to my bed.

The roots of the objects in the room have rotted,

The roots of the objects in the room have rotted,
And like a bud,
Healthy, tender –
The big table threw off a little table,
And the big chair threw off a little chair.
There are two bookcases,
A dying one and a new one –
With pinpoint-sized books and with tender glass.
But from the thick foot if the Goliath grand piano
Grew out a piano the size of a little finger.
How good!
With just limpid smiles I shall water the rooms
And I shall raise things my own way,
Like flowers.

There was one joy –

There was one joy –
I sat on his lap
And into my eyes
He spilled juice from the orange peel.
Then he forgot me,
When he lit a cigarette
But I still could not walk very well,
I came sliding off his lap
And pressed my cheek to his shoe.
How different is the sound under the table
Of guests’ voices,
Muffled sounds.
Muffled space.
Barely,
Barely had my eyelashes
Dried from the drenching of orange juice.
There was this one joy.

TO KHATIA

I get so tired,
With unimaginable speed
Things, news, my body rush towards me.
Your words can no longer reach me,
They shatter like the hours
In pursuit of me
And pathetically pile up in pieces.
I can no longer stop
To record in your eyes the ray of light’s explanation.
From afar I shoot swarms of dry dyes at you
And I speak to you in a tongue-tied language
Which is entrusted to other dark-coloured adults.
But when you get milk from me
I see calmly swaying
Under the skin of your temple
That silent and pale landscape of ours.

TO NATIA

The pink cream in the cookie
Is very embittered.
It shrieks non-stop at me
From the dark hell of the coffee-coloured biscuit,
And even dreams no longer have
The taste of the jam of the stars.
From the kitchen tap
Fall foxes.
They’ve chewed off my hands.
I sit on the floor and the pot shatters.
Now I keep my eyelids tight shut
So that my sight can quickly come to the boil, and
So that I can see sisters of various heights,
That, like hands of the clock, are fixed
To the dial, their mother.
Happiness is as stubborn as a stone bud
But I cannot worry any more
About those arms of mine –
They were always making hysterical scenes at me.
And like a pill under my tongue I placed a white button
That had broken off my youngest child’s shirt.
Then I felt:
My child’s heart is my walking frame,
When I sometimes forget how to walk,
When nothing can rise up,
And I wish:
Perhaps something may come along
Which will transfer the blood beyond these paths.