Bread baked in someone else’s oven

One’s mother tongue is the greatest comfort blanket, an intimacy like no other, in which we feel most at ease and secure alongside others who speak and think in our unique and shared code. Language is also a structure in which the systems devised to organise a given reality are reflected.

More poetically put, every language is a home, in whose nooks and crannies extraordinary and surprising things can be found. It can be considered an entire universe – in the sense of enduring through epochs and generations while simultaneously expanding its boundaries ad infinitum. This is what the Georgian word sopeli, meaning both ‘village’ and ‘world’, refers to. It’s what Wittgenstein meant when he wrote that the limits of one’s language are also those of one’s world.

Incomparably Kartvelian

It was music that originally led me to Georgian culture. It was music that made me stop in the middle of Kraków’s Main Square one August afternoon in the late 1990s. Two lads, one short with black, curly hair and eyebrows like Polish actor Włodzimierz Press, the other tall and bald, used their voices to produce an extraordinary and stirring harmony. I stood there, dazed, unable to recognize anything in that polyphony from the sound of words I had heard before.

It was only later that I realised how right I had been, unable to place the Georgian language within any cultural or linguistic group I knew. The reason is simple: no such group exists. Georgian and its more archaic variants – all the Kartvelian languages (from Kartveli, as Georgians refer to themselves) – constitute a separate linguistic group. Perhaps one day Poland and other nations will manage to free Georgia and Georgians from this toponymic colonialism and speak of the Kartvelians and Kartvelia – just as Polish poet Julian Tuwim did when, with the help of a Georgian friend, he translated the prologue to Shota Rustaveli’s twelfth century epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin.

Kartvelian languages, which in addition to ‘Georgian’ include the languages of Svan, Mingrelian and Laz, are unrelated to any other language, living or extinct. By way of comparison, the Indo-European family, which also includes fifteen Slavic languages, comprises a total of 450 languages spoken by 3.5 billion people. Georgians, therefore, have every right to feel singular in their identity, shaped by a uniqueness that is matched only by their isolation.

To and from Georgia

As it turned out, the artists I had heard in Kraków were cousins from Tbilisi (we’ll come back to how ‘it turned out’ later). They earned a living by playing in clubs, and on that fateful day, had decided to earn a bit extra by busking on the street I was walking down. I had been ruminating on my nineteen-year-old zest for life and the fact that I’d lost my position as an apprentice in a Kraków stained-glass workshop. The workshop was going bust, and along with it, my first ever dream of combining earning a living with practising art. They invited me to a gig. The tall one looked at me intently. He was making sure I’d come.

Georgia had just emerged from three brutal, Russian-backed civil wars. The country was slowly recovering from its collapse – devastated by conflict, grappling with an economic crisis and constant power outages, yet at the same time brimming with new energy and eagerly open to the world. Georgians had freed themselves from Soviet hegemony and were looking outwards towards Europe, in the hope of a better future. Borders were opening; one could enter Poland simply with a letter of invitation. These musicians were among the first Georgian migrants to arrive in search of a better life.

My future partner – one of the musicians – didn’t want to return. He kept saying that life there was too difficult, that the reality would be too much for us. I had my way in the end. I wanted to immerse myself in this extraordinary language and music, to decode the meanings, to understand the principles that governed them. I sought answers in academia but found a total void. In Poland, both linguistic anthropology and musicology are still waiting to discover and study the Kartvelian domain, which was jealously guarded first by Russian and then by Soviet science and ideological doctrines, isolating Georgia from the rest of the world and reducing its profound culture to the level of an ethnographic curiosity.

In literature, the situation was even worse; much like in the case of the Executed Renaissance in Ukraine, many of Georgia’s most outstanding writers fell victim to Stalinist purges. Their names and works, consigned to a hastily dug pit, had to wait nearly a century to be rediscovered by contemporary readers, both in Georgia and abroad.

Delving into Georgian

As I delved into the Georgian language and culture, I came across a wealth of breathtaking discoveries. One by one, words and concepts shed their masks and veils, revealing their unknown facets and leading me deep into the heart of the language, to the places of their birth, to the archaic sources and roots of the Georgian language. Once I stepped outside my linguistic comfort zone, I became increasingly aware of the fascinating connection between language and the way we perceive the world – a phenomenon described by the American anthropologist and linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. His name is associated with linguistic relativity, colloquially known as the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, which posits that human thought is dependent on the language used. According to this theory, it is language that shapes our thoughts, and its characteristic structures serve as a template for our minds: we always think ‘within’ a specific language.

The hypothesis suggests language influences our perception and experience – it shapes what we see, as we project the specific characteristics of the language we speak onto the outside world. Whilst learning the grammar and etymology of the Georgian language, and at the same time gaining a deep understanding of the cultural distinctiveness of its speakers, I have had many opportunities to see this theory in action. As a literary translator and someone who constantly switches between languages and the worlds created within them, this perspective is close to my heart. The process of analysing and deconstructing a source text and reconstructing it in the target language always involves the question of how faithfully these patterns are reproduced and all the consequences this entails on the other side of a given language.

One of the difficulties in describing these phenomena lies, amongst other things, in the lack of specialist literature on the Georgian language. Very little, if anything, has been written in Poland about the grammar of the Kartvelian languages, which is why I draw on Latin or English terms and, or, when necessary, coin my own. The time will come for a proper study on this subject. In the meantime, let us examine a collection of selected phenomena, rarities and curiosities from the recesses of the Georgian language and soul.

When I moved to Tbilisi twenty-five years ago, I was swimming against the tide that was driving thousands of Georgians into exile. Today, around 27,000 people in Poland speak Georgian,1 making it the third-largest group of foreign nationals employed by Polish companies.

On bread and translation

I realise this every time I land at Okęcie and call a taxi. The app’s chat feature often displays those familiar, rounded letters of the Mkhedruli alphabet, with curls like vine tendrils. My phone doesn’t translate Georgian, so I’ve added its alphabet to my keyboard options. I am informed ⁠‘Merab will be with you shortly’. Or Zura, Giorgi or Vakhtang. We start chatting and they ask where I’m from. No, I’m not Georgian, but I live in Tbilisi. The taxi drivers invariably react with amazement; few foreigners in Georgia manage to speak Georgian well enough to even buy bread at a bakery.

It is Georgian bakeries that have become one of the most noticeable signs of the Kartvelian presence in Poland. We have come to love puri, a name that has its roots in the Sanskrit word for bread. Anyone who has been to Georgia knows that you would be hard pressed to find something more heavenly in appearance, taste and aroma than puri baked in a traditional wood-fired oven. One of Tbilisi’s best bakeries is located next to Tatar Square, opposite the former inns, in the basement of the Tiflis Theological Seminary – the very same one from which a young Stalin was expelled for failing to sit his exams.

In other countries, puri is not baked with Georgian flour. It seems to turn out the same but no longer reflects the lightness and acrobatic grace with which the boys in Tatar Square dive deep into the dough, pressing it against the hot belly of the oven. Literary translation is also a bit like bread baked in someone else’s oven; it’s impossible to convey something that exists exclusively in a given language, and Georgian, as you’ve already correctly guessed, consists primarily of idiosyncrasies. Its grammar has nothing in common with the logical matrix of any other language in our beautiful and linguistically diverse world.

Georgian idiosyncrasies

Georgian is notable for its lack of grammatical gender and very complex verb system, which, as opposed to traditional categories, is based on eleven forms known as ‘screeves’, indicating both tense, conjugation and subject, which are split into three ‘series’.

This verb construction can be referred to as a ‘box’ structure: a single verb can contain up to four people or things at once, as pronouns take the form of infixes. For example, the sentence ‘I am singing this for him’ can be expressed in Georgian with a single word: vmgheri. This system results in remarkable conciseness and, consequently, communicative efficiency. A single word spoken quickly replaces an entire sentence. The same applies to the rule for forming reported speech – to indicate someone else’s words, one simply adds the letter ‘o’ at the end of the verb. Quick, discreet, and, most importantly, effective.

Repeating what someone else has said in the Georgian language relates to my favourite linguistic and cultural oddity: namely a tense I call the ‘gossip tense’. Georgians enjoy gossiping, and they rightly consider it as a way of strengthening social bonds; so why wouldn’t they create a separate grammatical category for it? The name of this tense, turmeobiti, derives from turme, meaning ‘it turns out that’, and indicates a past state in relation to the present – or in other words, something happened that we are only just finding out about now. But shush! Keep that to yourself! ‘It turns out’ the language really is full of secrets. The change in verb form is a humble tribute to valuable knowledge and the forging of a special understanding between those in the know.

Similarly, Georgian grammar rewards people and things that have successfully completed a given action. A brave subject in the past perfect tense has a special case form bestowed upon them, known as the ‘ergative’. If a person has achieved something, this should be acknowledged in some way, and in this case, the person receives a proud suffix that glimmers at the end of the word like a badge on the chest of a star employee.

The absence of grammatical gender, one of the defining features of the Georgian language, results in practice in a state of blissful equality – a grammatical dream come true for non-binary people. Thanks to this phenomenon, I have on more than one occasion found myself hounding my authors (who were, thankfully, all alive and well) with phone calls, asking whom they were referring to, as the grammar of the Polish language brutally and mercilessly demanded clarification. Sometimes, Georgian authors play around with this convention and, by concealing the characters’ gender identity, build suspense – in the end it turns out (there’s that ‘it turns out’ again) that no one was who we originally thought they were.

Expressive and lively, Kartvelians love to speculate and engage in heated arguments on any topic. The condensed forms of the language allow for rapid exchange of information and maintain a dizzying pace of discussion. The impression of verbal machine-gun fire is intensified by the phonetics – anyone who has heard Kartvelians in a verbal duel will nod in agreement. This is due to the presence of characteristic ‘explosive’ sounds in the language, so-called ‘ejective’ consonants, which, especially when uttered in a vehement tone, seem to rip open the speaker’s larynx and the listener’s ears like a beatbox from broken speakers.

I first experienced the power of ejectives when, twenty-five years ago, two aggressive young men accosted my Georgian friend on a bridge in Kraków. In response, he graphically listed in his own language what he would do to them and their mothers if they didn’t back off. Georgian non-dictionary expressions are characterized by an exceptional saturation of explosive phonemes – you didn’t need to understand the language to hear the intent. The aggressors’ expressions darkened as they listened, and finally, with a muttered grunt, they left the battlefield.

Like every sound, ejectives also possess word-forming power, yet an untrained ear and speech apparatus cannot perceive or express the differences between the nuances of major and minor eruptions in the larynx. Back when Georgian was still a dark forest to me, inhabited by monsters of inflection, I made the mistake of exchanging one such sound for another instead of offering greetings to a certain family, and I managed to say that I would subject them to brutal sexual violence. A lesson for life: ejectives can become invectives and they must be handled with care.

The rabbit hole of etymology

At this point, I would like to applaud anyone who has bravely navigated their way through the language’s complex labyrinth of grammar and phonetics – you are rewarded with the beautiful ergative case, and I invite the most persistent chosen ones for a quick and necessarily cursory trip down the rabbit hole of etymology.

Let’s start at the beginning – or, as the Georgians would say, from the head. In the Kartvelian languages, tavi means ‘head’ but also ‘beginning’, ‘source’ and ‘summit’. The same word gives rise to the term for a person playing a leading role, standing at the top of the hierarchy: tavmjdomare, literally translated as ‘sitting at the head of the table’, which in colloquial language means ‘chairman’. From the same root comes mtavari, meaning ‘principal’, ‘most important,’ ‘leading’, and tavadi, meaning a ‘person of high birth’. Furthermore, utavo, meaning ‘a person without a head’, is simply a fool, and t’vishi means ‘one’s own’, ‘belonging to a given person’ or, literally. ‘from the head’.

From this root, the Kartvelians coined one of the most important concepts – tavisupleba, or freedom, which literally means ‘one’s own law’ or ‘the law of the head’. But ufleba, meaning ‘law’, derives from the word ufali, which means ‘god’, so freedom literally means ‘being one’s own god’, one’s own sovereign. Freedom, in Kartvelian, is the right to self-determination, for which they constantly have to fight with each successive empire. Because there has always been an empire: Achaemenid and Safavid Persia, Byzantium, the Mongols, the Arabs, Ottoman Turkey, and, for the last two centuries, Russia.

The language of resistance

I often ask myself, and the Kartvelians, how it is that their language and culture have endured, rather than being swallowed up by the maelstrom of successive powers that have occupied this strip of land between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea. Perhaps the answer lies precisely in the strength of cultural codes, interpersonal bonds and identity embedded in the language. However, it also took immense determination and courage to resist the unfavourable fate that placed the speakers of this language and their country in a place where civilizations and religions have clashed since time immemorial, where empires rise and fall. Fate – or bedi.

A lucky person is one who has good fortune. A bednieri is a happy person, literally ‘possessor of good fortune,’ while one who has no luck is an ubeduri – a person experiencing misfortune, or literally ‘lack of fortune.’ Of course, bad fortune must be fought, say the Kartvelians. The word for courage and boldness, gambedaoba, means nothing more than ‘readiness to change fate,’ the will to overcome fate.

As I write these words, over a hundred courageous Georgian citizens are serving long political sentences for resisting the government that is tearing the country from its European orbit and brutally pushing it back into the Russian sphere of influence – a place from which the Kartvelians are desperate to escape. Mass public protests have been ongoing for a year, ever since the authorities announced the suspension of EU accession talks. Protest rallies gather daily on Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s main street, in Batumi and other Georgian cities, despite the government’s bans and draconian penalties for participating. It was during these protests that police arrested journalist and independent media founder Mzia Amaglobeli, actor Andro Chichinadze and poet Zviad Ratiani, who, along with other prisoners of conscience, have been imprisoned for many years.

Despite this, the protests continue. The Kartvelians, in accordance with the code written in their language, are fighting against the perfidious fate that has placed them in the vicinity of Russia, against the evil fate that has condemned this ancient and profound culture to exist as a colony of the most primitive of empires.

The next time you walk into a Georgian bakery to buy bread, wish them victory as you step through the doorway. The Georgian greeting, gamarjoba, literally means ‘may you win’.