Tea Topuria
- Georgia -
Born in 1977 in the city of Sokhumi, Abkhazia (now occupied territoriy by Russia), Tea Topuria is a contemporary Georgian writer and poet. She graduated from Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University with a degree in journalism. She has worked and still works for a variety of media outlets and non-governmental organizations. Her works are printed in literary periodicals, with her short stories and poems being included in prose or poetry collections of Georgian authors. She has been nominated and is a laureate of various prestigious literary competitions and she has also been presented a few times for the international Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award . Tea Topuria is the author of six books, which differ radically from each other in terms of genre: a prose-poetry collection The Mint Threshing Floor, a collection of short stories Two Rooms in Cairo, a poetry collection Ecocide, Why the dogs don’t go to heaven, and two books in children’s prose: Parade Vacations ; Fairy Tales for Waking Up. Young adult novels - One Long Day On Another Planet and The Invisible House. A novel By Jacob’s Well.
Her works are translated into 15 languages.
Tea Topuria – Death’s Correspondent
By Shota Iatashvili
Tea Topuria is an extraordinary storyteller, novelist, poet, and at the same time, an experienced journalist for Radio Liberty. Sometimes her journalistic experiences might seep into her stories and prose, yet her poems are fully devoid of any such traces. Her poetry touches upon death, an all-embracing sadness, and hopeless love. Sometimes with a bit a humor, but firmly holding on to these themes and mired in everyday routine. Still, in principle, it’s not all like this. For example, she has a poem “Correspondent on Assignment”, where armed with a mic, appearing completely unexpectedly before the interviewee and inconveniencing them, the journalist likens herself to death. This is one of the rare cases when the poet’s profession manages to be blended into one of her leading themes. One thing’s for sure: equating herself with death is quite a natural poetic act for this author. For example, “When I was a kid, my eyes looked like death”, she says in one spot, such is her attitude:
“I liked it,
I’ll grow up, be death, I thought,
Or vice-versa,
I’ll be death and grow up.
To this day I still don’t remember what I decided.”
In another place, however, the poet even longs for this, “I wish to be death.” Whereas the text ends with this kind of figurative phrase:
“The people having the worst luck,
Are the living and those in love.”
By the way, this poem is metered. Tea Topuria usually writes in free verse, laconic, intonationally balanced, sonorous, but sometimes she gets the desire to express her thoughts with greater musical brilliance. At such a time, a poem of 2-3 lines, 8 syllables each, is written, succinct, effective, with some level of impromptu, thus remaining in one’s heart and mind and having some resemblance to works of folk poetry. On rare occasions there are poems with 10-syllable lines, but they are less folk-like, they’re more “classically modern”. This might be a feature of this meter in Georgian poetry to evoke a mood and nothing more.
In summation, these two lines of her poetry are like Lobachevsky’s parallel lines, and they intersect at the points of death, sadness, and love. No thematic alterations are brought about by the change in form. The difference might be that these eternal feelings or dimensions in free verse may bear a metaphorical resemblance to domestic items as well. Like this, for example: “Some clothes are like unrequited love, / They’re tight everywhere on you, / You wriggle out of them and can breathe.” Or another: “This worry – like a ripped sock inside a shoe, / No one else can see it and yet you know.” It isn’t like this in her conventional poems: there Tea Topuria acts according to “the early rules”, stuffing no means “defining modernity” into them. The heaviness of heart in her free verse just suddenly becomes somewhat easy-going and impersonal, lacking the author’s signature, it’s like the ancient nature of poetry.
The free verse, however…is somewhere on the line between the present world and the hereafter, sometimes pulling more this direction, sometimes in that direction… It’s a conversation with spirits… The discovery of a dead person’s traits, like that of spare time, for example. She hadn’t once visited her second cousins while alive and after death she goes to them and says: “Now I’ll listen to you, / I’m like a resigned president - / I’ve got lots of time.” It’s a thought about love being like opening a poor man’s empty fridge: “You’ll open it in the morning, there’s nothing, / Open it in the afternoon – still nothing.” Having sunk into depression and she softly sings a melancholic lullaby: “Go to sleep, my unsleeping worms, / Worms of sadness, teeming on my veins.” If she slips away from her eternal themes, they sometimes might even get paradoxical, like this one here:
“A strong person is so pitiful,
If she has any troubles, who can she lament with?!
She’s everyone’s hope!
She gets fazed and can’t ask anyone to make sense of these troubles,
Here she is expected to reason with them.
If she goes broke, she can’t borrow any money either,
People must borrow from her…”
In all, it can’t be said that she is a representative of in vogue poetry, despite a poem titled “Ecocide” being found among her texts, for example. Still if we attentively read it, it’ll turn out that it’s really more about love than ecological problems. More correctly, ecological catastrophe is used here as a metaphor for hopeless love. Wars and even worse social problematics appear at times with Tea Topuria, but there aren’t any attempts of theoretically analyzing or evaluating them. No poetic concepts are created through Tea Topuria using the untethering of taboos, sexual openness, and similar feminist methods. In other words, there is none of that which figures in today’s poetry, and that which is needed and natural, and simultaneously quite forced and turned into profitable subject matter. Yet, as an experienced Radio Liberty journalist and a person constantly dealing with such themes, she probably could have written poetry of this caliber without a problem, but she resolutely chose a completely different path of poetic intrigue and thus manages to be one of the best poets in modern and present-day Georgia.
Poetry
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UNTITLED *** / უსათაურო ***
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BONSAI / ბონსაი
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A Chinese Proverb / ჩინური ანდაზა
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UNTITLED *** / უსათაურო * * *
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UNTITLED *** / უსათაურო ***
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UNTITLED *** / უსათაურო ***
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UNTITLED *** / უსათაურო ***
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UNTITLED *** / უსათაურო ***
