Rati Amaglobeli
- Georgia -
Georgian poet and translator Rati Amaglobeli was born in 1977 in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied philology at the Tbilisi State University. Rati Amaglobeli has been publishing his poems in anthologies and literary magazines since 1994. His debut The Verb was released in 2000. His other poetry books include “The Circle”, “Angelarium”(Intelekti publishing), “Seasons of the year” (Ziari publishing).
Rati Amaglobeli is a master of experimental poetry. His live performances, often accompanied by electronic music, have made him a star of contemporary poetry in Georgia and a welcome guest at various international literary festivals. He is co-founder of the SABA literary award and was the President of Georgian Pen Centre from 2011 to 2018.
Rati Amaglobeli translated poems by Goethe, Morgenstern, Rilke, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova and Brodsky into Georgian. He appeared on CD with Post Industrial Boys.
Rati Amaglobeli lives in Tbilisi and teaches at several universities.
A Starman
By Tamar Zhghenti
If you Google Rati Amaglobeli, you will invariably find him described as “a shooting star of contemporary Georgian poetry.” His unparalleled popularity in Georgia, spanning almost three decades, has been fuelled by his live performances, experiments with electronic music, and fierce civic activism for liberty and equality. However, his evocative poetry proves that Rati’s stardom is also literally connected to the stars. Among the rich tapestry of mythological, religious, political, romantic, and soul-searching themes, there is an exquisite cosmic thread that weaves through the entire body of work of one of Georgia’s most exuberant poets.
Exploring how Rati Amaglobeli perceives celestial bodies offers profound insights into his literary prowess and unique worldview. An overwhelming desire to experience the stars can be traced back to one of his earliest hits, ‘The Sequence,’ written more than twenty years ago, where he sees the characters of Georgian alphabet through the prism of the stellar math, fervently declaring:
“I want to blaze in every star,
I want to traverse every star,
I want to transmute in every star.
I want to get out of a moment
and get into the boundless firmament.”
To Rati, stars serve many roles: guiding portals, means of healing, the spirits of flowers; even lovers’ blushed cheeks transform into glowing morning stars. A peacock, in his eyes, resembles "a laced print of August’s starry sky," while the night sky at Christmas becomes "the gilt of God's gown." Though it is common knowledge that the sun is a star, Rati remains uncertain whether it is fire, a garden of glow, a temple spun from rays, or God's ever-open eye. However, he is certain that snow is Christ’s breath, scattering the dandelion of stars.
Exploring the manifestations of Christ is one of the key features of Rati’s poetry, with stars playing a significant role in guiding this exploration. In his early poems, he compares Jesus’s birth to a shooting star, the word that becomes a star. As his characteristic verb-centered ornamentation puts it:
“The word has expanded, now starring and flashing,
Holding a man in the sky's depth,
And the sky's depths - within a man."
Elsewhere, he asks: “Where is the God, the spirit of the stars?” and finds it in the morning disappearance of stellar glimmer: just as stars vanish in daylight, so too does God remain unseen, abiding within us invisibly to grant us freedom from the external pressures of His presence. In the poem ‘Christ of August,’ Rati describes the night sky as a medium for speaking with God. By choosing a segment of the sky and following the shining of “the fruitful stellar orchard,” sorrows and anxieties become distant and transform into beaming universal ripeness. The poet invites you to “turn into the sky yourself and exchange a word with the Saviour.”
Transformation into the sky, internalization of the sky are central metaphors for acquiring transcendence in Rati Amaglobeli’s poetry, especially in Four Seasons. While in ‘Sometimes’ Rati believes that the entire universe, with its cosmic web and stellar lumens, all is him, “morphed into a humongous human,” he does not reserve being a star for himself alone. In ‘The Internal Sky,’ he encourages readers to think big, or rather feel big: “I feel these stars are you, people, and you should feel this too.” Elsewhere in the book, he argues: "Never forget - you are not small. If you open your heart, you can corral the whole starry sky within you.”
He even has the most unusual way of cheering up, stating:
“When tears flow,
the universe reaches for you,
and stars shimmer in your tears.
Are you weeping?
It means that the universe cares,
Trying to touch your soul,
to shrink towards you
so you can expand into its vastness.”
Stars, as a means of metaphysical communication, are a recurring metaphor in Rati’s works. In ‘Winter,’ they are seen as the whispers with which the universe talks to itself. While in his early poem, ‘Morning Climbed Up the Sky,’ the blue azure is depicted as “an empty notebook”, in Four Seasons, he convinces readers that: "What you call poems are in fact the secret stellar whispers.../What you call stars are the traces of gods’ footsteps." And in ‘Polyhymnia,’ he even presents his entire poetry as a stellar smithy:
“The sky is the summit of my thoughts,
I disappear into clouds like stars...
I long to melt the night sky into a word,
and forge this celestial alloy into a dark-piercing sword."
Interestingly, not only is his original work woven with stellar motifs, but even his most acclaimed translation shines with the brilliance of stars. In the current struggle of the Georgian people to secure their European future, Rati’s Georgian rendition of the Anthem of the European Union, particularly the resonant final line, “Our unity ignites the gleam of golden stars”, has become a steadfast chant for tens of thousands of demonstrators, fuelling their fight against oppression.
Maybe with all this crazy cosmic jive, Rati embodies the Starman David Bowie sang of. Yes, He'd like to come and meet us, but he doesn’t think he'd blow our minds. Instead – he believes we are here on earth to tune in to what the stars are singing about.
Poetry
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Roger Moseley / როჯერ მოუზლი
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A Human / ადამიანი
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A Sequence / სეკვენცია
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Sometimes / ტანჯვის სონეტი
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A Sonnet of Suffering / ხანდახან
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A Slip / წამოცდენა
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Street layouts / ქუჩების წყობა
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The Pieta in a subway / პიეტა მიწისქვეშა გადასასვლელში
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Ode to SSS (State Security Service) / ოდა სუსისადმი