Page:Man in the Panther's Skin.djvu/14

 The following transliteration of a quatrain will give an idea of the verse, and may help to remove from the language the reproach cast upon it by some writers who had not even an elementary acquaintance with it:

The Europeans who have heard of Georgian think it a cacophonous assemblage of consonants with many gutturals and a sparing use of vowels. It is true, indeed, that groups of consonants repellent to a Western eye and ear are frequently found, and herein lies the vigour of the language. A modern Turkish poet addresses a Georgian lady thus: "O thou whose speech is like a lion's roar!" This, however, is but one phonetic aspect of a tongue which in its love lyrics and lullabies can be as soft and caressing as Italian, ("sweet-sounding Georgian," 692) in its rhetorical and philosophic passages as sonorous and dignified as Castilian. Georgian has been a highly-developed literary language from the dawn of the Christian era, and students of cuneiform are engaged in the task of tracing it back to the earliest periods of history; it has a vocabulary so rich, a flexibility so great, that it renders metaphysical Greek works not only word for word, but sometimes syllable by syllable. In the monastery of Petritzos, now called Bachkovo, in the Bhodope, founded, or renovated, by Georgians in 1083, and still bearing traces of their occupation, was a philosophic seminary where many Neo-Platonist and other translations were made. One of the monks, John Petritzi, in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, wrote thus: "In the translation of difficult speculative and philosophic works I consider myself obliged to apply all possible simplicity, and follow the peculiarities of the language (of the original) to the utmost." In commenting