The Black Sea in the Representation of the Coastal Population of Georgia

According to François Bellec, the sea, vector of discoveries, exchanges, is also a powerful engine of creation and inspiration at the literary and artistic level. The objective of this article is to continue the study of the symbolism of the Black Sea in Georgian poetry, the subject to which we have already devoted two investigations, the results of which have fueled the publication of two articles. In the first, we carried out a comparative analysis of the symbolism of water [of the sea, in this case] in Georgian and French poetry, in the second, we studied the representation of the sea, in general, of the Black Sea, in particular, in the folk poems collected in the regions of Eastern Georgia, the population of which has no maritime experience. Therefore, in the poems analyzed, the sea is used to create different symbolic images expressed in metaphors and comparisons, more particularly, in hyperboles, without addressing the pragmatic side of the sea. Unlike the representation of the sea in the popular poems of Eastern Georgia, in the poems collected in the littoral regions of Western Georgia, the vision of the sea is rather commercial. As a result, the popular singers of these regions, in-cluding the Lazes, whose poems are the subject of our analysis, deal more particularly with themes of fishing and navigation, while offering the ambivalent symbolism of the sea., in these poems, we find the pragmatic functions attributed to the sea – to feed, to stock up, to trade.