“The Man who Loved Emily Dickinson from Afar”

The Bosphorus Review Of Books 

Mikheil Nishnianidze offers this introduction to his memoir of his father: “The following piece is a memoir about a Soviet Georgian translator who fell in love with Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Giorgi Nishnianidze’s poetic and literary translation legacy leaves us with a few hundreds of pieces by several dozen Anglophone poets and writers. The regime reluctantly accepted western creative work, forcing it through the prism of Marxist ideology, despite never encouraging independent artistic expression in minority languages. An eye-witness account by the son of the translator, the essay offers a retrospective analysis of the 70 years of the USSR. The author speculates about the artistic freedom and the agility required from Soviet artists who tried to circumvent strict communist censorship.”

Giorgi Nishnianidze

I first heard of Emily Dickinson from my father, Giorgi Nishnianidze, a well-known translator of English poetry and prose into Georgian during the last thirty years of the Soviet Union. By the time he discovered her poetry he was already famous for his translations of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Jack London and many others. His works earned him the renowned translation award – the Ivane Machabeli Prize – offered by the Union of Writers of the Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Link to Essay: https://bosphorusreview.com/the-man-who-loved-emily-dickinson-from-afar