[Translated by Boris Pasternak] Baratashvili, N. Poems (Stikhi) / artist G. Kravtsov, 1957. In Russian.

Бараташвили, Николай
Стихи / Перевод с грузинского Бориса Пастернака. Художник Г. Кравцов.
Москва: Государственное издательство художественной литературы, 1957. 86, [2] с.; 14,2×11,8 см.
В издательском переплете цвета охры с тисненым орнаментом и суперобложке. Тираж 10 000 экз.
Переплет - очень хорошее: легкая потертость углов. Блок - очень хорошее: полный, чистый, светлое пожелтение бумаги. Суперобложка - удовлетворительное: утраты нижнего угла и верхнего края лицевой стороны.
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Baratashvili, Nikolay
Poems (Stikhi) / Translated from the Georgian by Boris Pasternak. Artist G. Kravtsov.
Moscow: State Publishing House of Fiction (Goslitizdat), 1957. 86, [2] pp.; 14.2 x 11.8 cm.
Publisher's ochre binding with blind-stamped ornament and dust jacket. Print run 10,000 copies.
Round numbered stamp "134" on the colophon page.
Binding - Very good: slight rubbing at the corners. Text block - Very good: complete, clean, light toning of the paper. Dust jacket - Fair: losses to the lower corner and upper edge of the front panel.

Nikoloz Baratashvili (1817-1845) is the foremost Romantic poet of Georgia. He died at twenty-seven in Ganja, leaving a very small body of work: a few dozen lyrics and the narrative poem Fate of Georgia, which are nevertheless counted among the summits of Georgian verse. The best known of the lyrics is Merani (The Steed), a short poem of restless forward movement that the editors single out in their preface. This compact volume gathers the surviving poems in chronological order, from Nightingale and Rose and Twilight on Mtatsminda to Night in Kabakhi, the plane-tree poem Chinara and the long Fate of Georgia, with notes at the end. The translator is Boris Pasternak, who rendered the Georgian poets of his generation, among them Titsian Tabidze and Paolo Iashvili, and who treated Baratashvili as one of his own poetic kin. Earlier Russian editions of his versions appeared in Moscow in 1938 and in Tbilisi in 1946, and a note by the editors states that Pasternak revised the texts for the present printing. The book came out in the year when Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was published in Milan and a year before he received the Nobel Prize, which gives his translation work of this period a particular resonance. The small format, the stylised decorative lettering on the jacket and cover, and the ornamental headpieces by G. Kravtsov make it a pleasant miniature of late-1950s Soviet book design. The print run of 10,000 copies is modest, and copies that retain the jacket are noticeably less common than bare ones. It will appeal to collectors of Pasternak as translator, of Georgian and Caucasian literature, and of small-format Soviet poetry.