A Man Was Going Down the Road (1972, English translation 2012) is an epic that combines legendary Greek mythology with a tragic Georgian love story. Georgian author, Otar Chiladze (1933-2009), writes the story of the Golden Fleece when the King of Greece’s second wife orders the slaughter of his previous children, Phrixos and his sister Helle. “But just when the priest had a sharpened knife in his hand, out of the blue a ram came flying in – not running, but flying” and carried the children away on its back to safety. But, alas, the children fall into the sea. Bedia, a fisherman from Vani, a coastal city of Colchis (modern-day Georgia), rescues Phrixos from the sea, still clinging to the winged ram with the Golden Fleece, but his sister Helle drowns. It is the story when Vani was a city by the sea and “the first Greeks set foot on Colchian soil and humbly asked for asylum.”
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Written
in three parts, spanning generations, Part I, AEetes, tells the story of Phrixos and his upbringing by King
AEetes, the king of Colchis. In his new land, Phrixos would always be an
outsider “like a cuckoo’s egg” and forever in debt to the people who saved him
and reared him. This is also the tale of Jason, the Argonauts, and the Golden
Fleece. Jason arrives from Greece to steal the golden wool, but kidnaps Medea,
the daughter of King AEetes, as she drugs her father in order to also steal the
golden fleece of the winged ram. Young and handsome, Jason is regarded as a
hero, although a “wrongdoer.”
Part
II, Ukheiro, is of a warrior, who
breaks his leg in battle. His wife Marekhi dies in childbirth and Ukheiro’s
10-year-old daughter Popina looks after her father and the new-born boy,
Parnaoz. While waiting for death – for he can no longer fight as a warrior –
Ukheiro takes up embroidery. His son Parnaoz falls madly in love with Ino, the
seventh daughter of black-eyed Malalo. But theirs is a troubled relationship,
and he has a competitor. Parnaoz’s sister Popina has a son, Popeye, whose
father flees at news of the pregnancy. As Popeye grows, he too falls in the
love with Ino. The rivalry between Parnaoz and his nephew Popeye is intense,
and Parnaoz eventually leaves Colchis for Crete.
Part III, Parnaoz, is the story of Parnaoz’s return to Colchis after about 10 years in Crete. But Ino has not yet married, and the rivalry between Parnaoz and Popeye continues. Parnaoz marries childhood friend, Tina, but he “didn’t care whom he married” for he was “looking for a refuge … somewhere to hide from Ino.” Tina and Parnaoz soon have a son, little Ukheiro, but Parnaoz now wants to leave his wife. “Parnaoz knew only one thing: whether he got together with Ino or not, he could never accept not being with her, or any substitute life offered, or anything from life.” Interwoven in this section is also the tale of Icarus and Daedalus. In Greek mythology, father and son attempt to flee Crete with waxed and feathered wings. Icarus does not heed his father’s warning, and flies too close to the sun. The heat melts the waxed wings, and he falls into the sea and drowns. What follows Parnaoz’s disillusionment with his wife, and his constant pining for Ino, is the tragedy that comes from not heeding any warning, and from idealistic and obsessive love.
Chiladze
is a consummate storyteller. Right from page one his evocative imagery
entrances the reader. First with the imagery of the landscape, Dariachangi’s
garden, and the city of Vani, where “the land was as moist and wrinkled as a
new-born baby: it gradually grew and spread all along the shore like a black
mourning ribbon.” And second, with his vast array of characters – where every
person is vividly brought to life. From the black-eyed Malalo from Babylon,
with seven daughters and a parrot, who “could know a man just by glancing at
him” but where “every love of black-eyed Malalo, sooner or later, ended in
failure” – to the broken-legged warrior Ukheiro who embroiders the history of
his life on a massive canvas cloth. He does not die from his battle wounds;
instead he embroiders while “persistently devoted to a self-sacrificing effort
not to break down, not to accept his misfortune.” And to Tina, who was devoted
to Parnaoz, whom she had loved since childhood, and yet “was doomed, but
innocent.”
Each
page is intense, absorbing, enriching, and stirring. Greek mythology and
allegory are richly entwined in a version that takes conquest to subtle, but
intellectual, depths. This is not an epic in which the reader loses track of
the plot, for the plot is firmly embedded in the rich soil of Dariachangi’s
garden where “when buds unfurled at one end … fruit was already ripening at the
other end.”
As
a note, Georgians believe the Golden Fleece may have existed. Vani, not now on
the Black Sea, but inland and lowland in the Imereti Region, on the western
bank of the Sulori River, is the site of extensive archaeological excavations.
Over the past 100 years of diggings, many artefacts have been unearthed – and
not just gold.
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