Lela Samniashvili
- Georgia -
Lela Samniashvili (born in 1977 in Gori, Georgia) is a contemporary Georgian poet, translator. She studied English Language and literature and took post-graduate simultaneous translation courses at the Tbilisi Ilia State University (1994-2001). In 2002-2004 she was a visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley researching American Literature. Later She completed her MAPhil in Higher Education at Oslo University and received her PHD in Education from Tbilisi State University.
Lela Samniashvili started publishing her poems and translations from English and American literature at the age of 12. She is the author of seven collections of poetry awarded with numerous national literary prizes including Saba and Litera. Her poems are translated into English, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Armenian and Azerbaijani languages. Lela Samniashvili’s poems often make political, social and feminist commentary, though they mostly put the discourse in universal philosophical paradigm.
Lela has translated Hamlet by William Shakespeare, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath’s Poems and autobiographical novel “The Bell jar” along with other pieces from English and American literature. She currently lives in Tbilisi and teaches Literature and Educational policies.
Review of Lela Samniashvili’s poetry: AN ABSTRACT PRAYER
An Abstract Prayer is Lela Samniashvili’s fifth collection of poetry. In all five collections, which cover her creative work over more than fifteen years, it can be said that the author has never ever deviated from her basic path. Poetic frivolity or laxness is not her custom. She is always severe and skilled. We will find only precise and true metaphors in her work, you won’t come across last-minute improvised images and phrases. You can never mistake her voice for anyone else’s.
Lela Samniashvili can be very sharp and very refined, her poems often take a well-defined position, and quite often deal with social and political topics of our times. Sometimes she can almost be too cold: she doesn’t lay herself bare, as other poets do, her images are new, we don’t find clichés, and she only uses a cliché in order to deconstruct it.
In some poems Lela seems to have placed a delayed-action bomb, and she quietly and convincingly arranges for it to explode. The structure and graphics of her poems are peculiar. Tiny little bridges of dashes might remind you of Dickinson or Tsvetaeva. The formal side of the poems is another matter: sounds, musicality, rhythm. Lela very often chooses a difficult path, walking a tight-rope so as to avoid banalities in rhythm and rhyme.
In a word, Lela Samniashvili is an author in filigree, even though the filigree nature is rather rare at first. She has some tendency to formalism, the poems of this collection remain natural throughout but obviously, at times what each one of them has to say is set out at a conceptual level. The book consists largely of conventional poems, there are just two or three poems in blank verse, and there is something intermediate, when the convention dies out in mid-poem and then reappears, only to disappear again… The stanza forms are often very skilled, ever-changing, the rhymes are basically ones of assonance or consonance, and quite frequently are barely noticeable, alliterations appearing here and there like mirages, but none of this creates the impression of artificial device.
There is a high degree of concentration everywhere: the poet’s syntax doesn’t allow a single superfluous word in the text and extracts the meaning to the last drop.
- Shota Iatashvili, poet
Poetry
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A Run in My Stocking / წინდას თვალი წაუვიდა
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Military Drills / სამხედრო წრთვნები
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Before Coming Back / დაბრუნებამდე
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The Whispering / ჩქამი
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The Caesarian Cut / საკეისრო კვეთა
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Flying Away. Lilith / გაფრენა. ლილიტი
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A Night Letter / ღამის ბარათი
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The View of Gori, August 2008 / ქალაქის ხედი. აგვისტო 2008
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Thirty- seven / ოცდაჩვიდმეტი
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Glass baubles / მინის ბურთები
