“The Sweetness of the Persian Tongue”: the Limits of Poetry in Medieval and Early Modern Georgia

Abstract The history of medieval Georgian poetry is long and complicated. Placed between Persian and Byzantine commonwealths, the unification of the Georgian kingdom under the Bagratids in the eleventh century brought about a dramatic cultural revival. The formation and development of what is known as secular poetry was a reaction to the simultaneous adoption and adaptation of Persian and Byzantine elements by Georgian culture. As a result, over time, a distinct literary genre was shaped, with its own linguistic, graphic, and poetic registers – emerged, which was often contrasted with ecclesiastic writing alongside a a rigid differentiation between secular and religious writing generally and poetry specifically. The present paper identifies the origins and reasons for such a differentiation in early modern and modern political and literary discourses. While it mentions many poems from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, two relatively early theories of poetry are discussed in detail: Ephrem Mc‘ire’s (twelfth-century) reference to the “form and substance” dichotomy in poetry and Shota Rust‘aveli’s (twelfth- or thirteenth-century) vision of what does and what does not constitute proper poetry. In subsequent centuries, these discussion about the limits of poetry were integrated into identity discourses, as illustrated by the numerous sequels to and emulations of Rust‘aveli, and fed into a certain anxiety over Georgian culture within the context of total Persian dominance