CRRC, American Councils, and ARISC are pleased to announce the 5th session of the Spring 2025 Tbilisi Works-in-Progress series!
This week’s session will be in hybrid format in-person at the CRRC Georgia office and online via Zoom.
Officially Unofficial: Hebrew Translation and the Soviet Georgian Writers’ Union
Benjamin Arenstein, University of Chicago
Wednesday, March 5, 2025 at 18:30 Tbilisi time (9:30 am EST)
In 1966, the Kutaisi-based editor and translator Boris “Dov” Gaponov finished the first complete Hebrew edition of Shota Rustaveli’s medieval Georgian epic, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin (Vephkhistkaosani). As Gaponov later noted, he had hoped that this translation would serve as part of the commemorative festivities in the Soviet Union for the 800th anniversary of Rustaveli’s text. Unfortunately for Gaponov, though, such an ambition was not to be. Besides the issue of timing (the translation was first released three years after the Rustaveli commemorations had taken place), there was a larger, political problem: Gaponov was translating Rustaveli’s text into a language that had been all but completely censored in the USSR.
Examining Gaponov’s relationship to the Soviet Writers’ Union as he undertook his Georgian-Hebrew translation project, this paper seeks to complicate our understanding of how official cultural institutions functioned in the late Soviet period. Although Gaponov’s translation should have been prohibited according to the official ideological stances of the Soviet authorities, Gaponov nonetheless regularly engaged in lectures and meetings and at the Georgian Writer’s Union to speak about his work. Spending time with Gaponov’s case sheds light on one instance of how a writer in Georgia during the last decades of the Soviet Union engaged with the official cultural sphere while simultaneously transgressing its norms.
Bio: Benjamin Arenstein is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago completing a joint-degree in the departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Middle Eastern Studies. His dissertation project explores the nature of Jewish underground cultural expression in the late Soviet Union. In particular, it examines how Jewish underground culture functioned on the Soviet periphery in cities such as Riga, Latvia; Tbilisi, Georgia; and Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
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Works-in-Progress is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the CRRC office at Chavchavadze Ave. 5 and online. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC), the American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC).
All of the talks are free and open to the public. In observation of the spirit of the Chatham House Rule, the talks will not be recorded, and we courteously request that the other participants refrain from recording and/or distributing recordings as well. The opinions expressed in WiP talks are those of the speakers alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRRC, ARISC or of American Councils.
