SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Eight
NENE GIORGADZE
Wound
Check if you've got the key.
Open the door, step into the wound.
You can sit on the couch and relax,
Or go to the kitchen and quench your hunger.
If you want me to go for a walk, don't interfere.
Or would you prefer me to cook you dinner?
I will turn the music on, draw the curtains.
Don't forget, the wound is deep, scarcely healing.
If you grab it, it will bark like a dog
Or bite like a cat.
At the very least, we can play doctor –
On one condition: we won't invest too much in our roles.
Don't pretend you perceive the wound as a real one;
Remember: all wounds are doors, open or closed.
The key is in your hand.
Upside-Down Fireworks
With colourful, speedy paint-brush strokes
Fireworks draw all over the silent
Solitude of the canvas.
As though the lines fall not into the sky depths
But into a deep pitch-black pit –
People above, their glances
Trace the trajectory of dancing fireworks
From below.
Above, a noise;
Below, a deafening silence begotten by the smoke,
As though in war-time.
Fireworks explode in some remote spot;
A bomb goes off elsewhere.
In some other place, a silent torch of loneliness
Burns somebody's thin fingers.
Sad Song #2
A porthole room.
A couple of yellow pears.
Pale words
wrapped in rose petals.
The black path ends
where the stars sleep.
Translated from Georgian by Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Nene Giorgadze is a contemporary Georgian poet, writer, and translator. She was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1971, and lived in the USA from 1999 till 2011. Since 2011, she has been a resident of Saint Petersburg, Russia. English translations of her poems appear in Modern Poetry in Translation, Frontier Poetry, The Scores, Poesia, Rhino Poetry, The Raleigh Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Deus ex Machina, Ann Arbor Review, Satori, etc. She has published a poetry collection titled People and Traffic Lights (Nodar Dumbadze Publishing, Tbilisi, 2018) and a collection of short stories titled A Triangle (Pegasus, Tbilisi, 2011), both in Georgian. Two books of her poems have been published in Russian translation, and a collection of her poems in Italian ttranslation, Una linea spezzata su un foglio di carta, has been published by Fermenti Editrice in 2020. In 2019, her Georgian translations from Ryan Van Winkle were published in book form in Georgia.
