David Guramishvili's Metrics

Abstract

The article discusses important aspects of the metrics of the outstanding 18^th-century poet David Guramishvili. It is said that not a single Georgian poet enriched Georgian poetry with such a variety of meters as Guramishvili, although the vast majority of these meters were not used in the Georgian poetry of subsequent periods. This diversity is largely explained by the fact that Guramishvili wrote his poems based on the “voices” of Russian and Ukrainian songs. The poet himself indicates in which “voice” he wrote this or that poem. Does this term – “voice” – mean poetic meter? We analyzed Guramishvili's poems of this type and found that the meters of the Russian-Ukrainian songs referenced by the poet in most cases do not align with the meters of the corresponding poems by Guramishvili.

According to some researchers, Guramishvili's "voice" refers to musical rhythm, and Guramishvili's poems were intended to be recitated or even sung, although this view has not been confirmed through an analysis of Guramishvili's poetic texts. We have established that the characteristic heterometry of Guramishvili's poetry requires an isochronous reading of heterometric lines in stanzas, with short segments of individual lines being equated to the long segments of other lines. This suggests that Guramishvili did not base his poems on the texts of Russian-Ukrainian songs, but rather on their musical rhythm, adhering to the isochrony of musical bars. We can conclude that Guramishvili’s poetry is inherently synthetic - it is not purely a product of versification, but it is closely linked to music. This explains why most of the meters introduced by Guramishvili were not adopted in the Georgian poetry of subsequent eras: the poetry of those eras was not meant to be sung, and thus could not assimilate and apply Guramishvili’s verse meters. In Guramishvili’s poetry, the so-called new “meters” were not versification innovations, but are specific structural elements characteristic of this unusual poetry itself. These elements became verse meters only as a result of their reproduction in the works of other poets, when they became elements of Georgian metrics as a system.