Human Sadness (Dedalus Europe)

Human Sadness is a classic Georgian novel translated into English for the first time. Set in the harsh mountain world of Soviet Georgia, Goderdzi Chokheli’s 1984 novel is a journey through life, where ‘every character is a story’, where the real and the magical intermingle. The story is narrated by five distinct voices, each of which was translated by a different translator in order to preserve its individuality.

The book begins as a frustrated young novelist comes across a collection of notebooks and letters documenting a strange military campaign, of which his grandmother was a part. One winter, the inhabitants of Chokhi, a remote village – primarily women, children and old men, as most of the young men are away tending to their flocks – decide to reassert their power over the neighboring villages in Gudamaqari Gorge. Traditionally, Chokhi has reigned supreme in the region, with Chokhian men enjoying the right to claim any women from the surrounding villages as their wives. When a Chokhian boy is turned down, his mother enlists the other villagers in a campaign to conquer the other villages. Along the way, the Chokhians document their progress and collect the worries, memories, folktales and philosophical musings of both their fellow conquerors and the villages they conquer.

Goderdzi Chokheli was born in 1954 in a small village north-east of Tbilisi, and died in Tbilisi in 2007. He was one of the most important filmmakers and prose writers of his era.He published one novel Human Sadness and five short stories. His films and screen plays won many awards both inside Georgia and abroad.

His unique place in Georgian society and culture is encapsulated by Levan Berdzenishvili: 'Goderdzi Chokheli did not write anti-Soviet literature, he wrote non-Soviet literature. This is something that nobody else was able to do.’

Lia Chokoshvili has been teaching Georgian at the University of Oxford for twenty-seven years. With her student various classic texts were translated and in 2021 the first ever English translation of one of the masterpieces of 20th century Georgian literature Human Sadness by Goderdzi Chokheli was completed. The novel is narrated by five different characters each with a distinct voice which the translation seeks to emulate by having a different translator for each individual voice.