Caucasus Journal of Milton Studies

Editor’s Note

Welcome to the final 2024 issue of our Journal. It comes with our best wishes to our contributors and our readers for the year ahead.

Professor Edward Raupp has given us a timely article for the Christmas season. “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” is one of John Milton’s early works, written when he was only twenty-one. It already reveals the young poet’s deep involvement with Christian theology and classic poetics. We also continue with Professor Raupp’s epic, Ares: A Poem, Books X and XI.

The second article in this issue was written by Lia Sazandrishvili when she was only a second-course student in English Philology at Gori State University. She was required to write a Major Research Paper for a course in Critical Thinking. She relates her personal experience as a young child during the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, how she was soothed by music, and then expands her research to explore how music can influence different mental health conditions. It is challenging for Georgians to write in English, and we are proud of her courage, and her research and writing skills.

Our Georgian-to-English translation from Eter Churadze introduces us to yet another renowned Georgian poet, Vladimir (affectionately known as Lado) Asatiani. Lado was only nineteen when he first had a poem published in a Kutaisi newspaper; later works made him a much-loved poet of the 20^th century. His promising career was cut short after only seven years when he succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six.

We renew our Artwork section with two sketches by another young student of English Philology, Ketevan Gviniashvili. Her digital drawings reflect a Medieval period with elements of fantasy.

The short story by Tedo Sharadenidze, All Is Forgiven, begins with a reflection on the meaning of life and ends with a bulldog. How does that happen?

In our Poetry section, Eliso Khatridze offers two poems that vividly reveal the unsettling, contradictory feelings of the teenage years.

Our final poem is from Elnaz Shanavazi, from southern Iran. She describes Padlock on each Pulse as a depiction “of the struggles between the body and soul, Man's fear of death, and his efforts to evade fate.”

As another year comes to an end, we extend holiday wishes to our faithful contributors and readers. We appreciate your creative efforts and hope that our Journal will encourage others to try their hand at writing in English.

Warm regards,
Danna Raupp
Editor-in-Chief