Reading Rustaveli in Hebrew: Boris Gaponov’s Translation of 'The Knight in the Panther’s Skin'

• In Event: Literary Babel: The Multilingual Institutions of Soviet Jewish Writing

Abstract

This paper examines Boris Gaponov’s 1969 Hebrew translation of Shota Rustaveli’s medieval Georgian epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. Gaponov’s translation was composed throughout the 1960s as part of his unofficial literary activity in the USSR and, subsequently, published in Israel. By reading Gaponov’s Hebrew edition of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin in conjunction with his official writings as editor of the Lenineli newspaper, I consider how Rustaveli’s epic poem, which constituted an important part of the Soviet-Georgian literary canon, serves to articulate the project of the Jewish literary underground in Georgia.

Author

• Benjamin Arenstein, U of Chicago