Teimuraz I of Kakheti - Poetry

Poetry

Teimuraz I’s literary works addresses a wide range of topics and includes his original poems as well as translations and adaptations from Persian. This king-poet had such a universal knowledge of Persian and Georgian literature and was so proud of his innovations into the Georgian poetry, that, in his old age, Teimuraz proclaimed himself the greatest poet of Georgia and thought himself superior to the celebrated medieval Georgian author Shota Rustaveli. Although no such claim has ever been accepted by the critics of Georgian literature, there can be no doubt that his courtly and rather mannered lyricism had a certain influence on the 17th-19th-century Georgian poetry. Educated at the Safavid court, he was proficiently fluent in Persian, and his poetic language was full of Persian imagery and allusions, loanwords, and phraseology. Commenting on his interest in Persian poetry, he wrote: "The sweetness of Persian speech urged me to compose the music of verse." During his first creative period, 1629–34, when he was relatively secure on his throne, Teimuraz translated and adapted from Persian the romances of Layla and Majnun (Georgian: ლეილმაჯნუნიანი, Leilmajnuniani), Yusuf and Zulaikha (იოსებზილიხანიანი, Iosebzilikhaniani), The Rose and the Nightingale (ვარდბულბულიანი, Vardbulbuliani), and The Candle and the Moth (შამიფარვანიანი, Shamiparvaniani).

The second period, 1649–56, was in exile at the court of his brother-in-law, Alexander III of Imereti, when Teimuraz, in his own words, used poetry as therapy: "Tears flowed mercilessly like the Nile from my eyes. To overcome I wrote from time to time, I threw my heart into it." In his poems, Teimuraz laments the destruction of his kingdom, condemning the "transient and perfidious world", and mourns the fate of his family and friends, cursing the cause of his own and his people’s misfortunes, the "bloodthirsty king of Persia."

Teimuraz's most elaborate and painful poem, however, is his first, The Book and Passion of Queen Ketevan (წიგნი და წამება ქეთევან დედოფლისა, ts'igni da ts'ameba k'et'evan dedop'lisa) written in 1625, seven months after his mother, Ketevan, was martyred in Shiraz on September 22, 1624. The poem, which in the words of Professor Donald Rayfield proves that "whatever Georgia lost in the king, it gained in the poet", is influenced by the medieval Georgian hagiographic genre, vividly describing the tortures to which the queen mother is subjected after she refuses to follow Shah Abbas’s order to renounce Christianity. Teimuraz quotes her prayer to the Holy Trinity and the Archangel Gabriel for the strength to endure and spares the reader nothing of the horrors of Ketevan’s execution. Teimuraz's immediate source were the eyewitnesses of the event, the Augustinian missionaries from Iran, who brought the king his mother's remains. The same source is shared by another description of Ketevan's martyrdom, the classical tragedy Katharine von Georgien by the German author Andreas Gryphius (1657).