La Jalousie - Qartulad
The word jalousie in French directly names the slatted window blind. Georgian has no single equivalent. The closest might be shalisa (a half-drawn curtain) or baghinda (a trellis). But the concept is deeply familiar. In old Tbilisi balconies, carved wooden latticework (bazari) allowed women to observe the street without being seen. This architectural feature, born of a patriarchal honor code, is the perfect materialization of La Jalousie’s narrator. He is the lattice: present, seeing, fragmented, and forever separated.
A Georgian adaptation of the novel would emphasize this architecture. The narrator would not simply sit at a desk; he would stand behind the darichi, counting the seconds his wife’s hand rests on the neighbor’s arm. The novel’s famous repetitive descriptions — “the sun is now at the same height as the third banana tree” — would become “the shadow of the grapevine has moved one stone’s length across the courtyard.” The obsessive cataloging of objects would mimic the ritualized geometry of Georgian table settings: the precise placement of the khinkali folds, the order of drinking horns, the exact angle of the mtsvadi (skewer) as Franck pulls it from the grill.
The Georgian language belongs to its own unique Kartvelian family, unrelated to Indo-European languages. This means concepts like jealousy are built from completely different roots. In Georgian, the primary word for the emotion of jealousy is:
The novel’s plot is famously minimal. A narrator — likely a jealous husband named A… — obsessively watches his wife, Franck, and their neighbor, a plantation owner. The action takes place on a banana plantation in an unnamed tropical colony. Yet the true setting is not the plantation but the grid of the narrator’s perception. Every object is described with geometric precision: the veranda, the dining table, the centipede crushed on the wall, the row of glasses, the half-open shutter. Nothing is narrated subjectively. We never read “I felt jealous.” Instead, we read the same scenes repeated with microscopic variations: Franck and Franck talking, laughing, touching a glass, entering a car.
If we read La Jalousie Qartulad, the sterile colonial bungalow transforms into a sachinko (Georgian summer house) in Kakheti or a dukan in old Batumi. The whitewashed walls become the aged tuff stone of Tbilisi. The banana plantation outside becomes a vineyard or a pomegranate grove — but the humidity remains, and the buzzing flies remain. The true transformation is cultural: the French suspicion becomes a Georgian shishvili (shame-based suspicion), where jealousy is not a dramatic explosion (as in Othello or in a Georgian sadghegaro lament) but a slow, internal rot hidden behind elaborate hospitality.
If you are traveling in Georgia and want to express jealousy (in a light, romantic, or serious tone), here is your cheat sheet:
| English | Georgian (Qartulad) | Pronunciation | |---------|--------------------|----------------| | I am jealous (of a rival) | მე მშურია (me mshuria) | meh m-shoo-ree-ah | | I am suspicious (of partner) | მე მეჭვიანება (me mechvianeba) | meh meh-chvee-ah-neh-bah | | Don’t be jealous (friendly) | ნუ მშურდები (nu mshurdebi) | noo mshoor-deh-bee | | These blinds are broken | ეს ჟალუზები გატეხილია (es zhaluzebi gat'ekhilia) | ess zha-loo-zeh-bee gah-teh-khee-lee-ah | La Jalousie Qartulad
Notice the fascinating split: you must choose the right word based on whether you envy someone’s success (shuri), fear a partner’s betrayal (echvianoba), or are literally pointing at a window covering (zhaluzi).
"La Jalousie" is a French word that translates to "Jealousy" in English. In Georgian, "Jealousy" is translated as გრძნობა შური or უფრო ხშირად გამოიყენება როგორც შური.
თუ თქვენ ეძებთ კონკრეტულ ტექსტს ან თარგმანს, გთხოვთ, მიუთითოთ რა არის კონტექსტი ან რომელ ნაწილზეა საუბარი, რათა უფრო ზუსტი პასუხი მოგცეთ.
The story is set on a tropical banana plantation and is told from the perspective of an unnamed, "invisible" narrator—a jealous husband. The narrator obsessively spies on his wife, known only as , and their neighbor, . He suspects they are having an affair. Narrative Style:
The book is famous for its "nouveau roman" (new novel) style. There are no descriptions of the husband's feelings; instead, the story is told through cold, meticulous descriptions of objects and repetitive movements, like the layout of the plantation or a squashed centipede on a wall. Double Meaning: The title is a play on words; in French, la jalousie
means both "jealousy" and the "jalousie window" (slatted blinds) through which the husband watches his wife. The Film: Philippe Garrel (2013) The word jalousie in French directly names the
This black-and-white film is a more traditional drama about romantic relationships and infidelity. A struggling 30-year-old theater actor named leaves his wife and young daughter for a new mistress, , who is also an actress.
As they live together in a small, impoverished apartment, Claudia becomes increasingly unhappy with their life and eventually begins her own affair with another man.
The film focuses on the cycle of love, the pain of being left, and how passion eventually fades into practicality. Georgian (ქართულად)
translation of these summaries, or a specific place to watch or read them in Georgian? January | 2023 | Tony's Book World
La Jalousie (translated into Georgian as ეჭვიანობა or simply referred to by its French title) is most famously recognized as the 1957 avant-garde novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The title is a clever French pun, meaning both "jealousy" and "venetian blind" (the slatted window shutter), both of which are central to the story's voyeuristic themes. The Novel: A Masterpiece of the Nouveau Roman
The book is a cornerstone of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel) movement, which aimed to strip away traditional narrative elements like plot, character backstory, and emotional analysis. La Jalousie Qartulad is not a translation but a haunting
The Setting: A tropical banana plantation where a husband (the narrator) obsessively watches his wife, known only as A..., and their neighbor Franck.
The Narrator: Uniquely, the narrator is "absent"—he never speaks, acts, or is even named. His presence is only felt through his meticulous, almost mechanical descriptions of what he sees through the jalousie windows.
Atmosphere: The narrative is repetitive and fragmented, mirroring the distorted perception and suspicion of a jealous mind. Film Adaptation LA Jalousie (French and English Edition) - Amazon.com
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La Jalousie Qartulad is not a translation but a haunting. It asks: what happens when the coldest French experimental novel enters the warm, tragic, wine-soaked house of Georgian storytelling? The answer is a new genre — the paranoid supra, the geometric lament. The husband still watches. The centipede still cracks. The shutter still casts its striped shadow. But now, in the distance, a chonguri (lute) plays a sad melody, and no one mentions why. The silence, finally, is the same in any language: the silence of a man who suspects everything and can prove nothing, standing behind a latticed window, watching his world crumble into perfect, repeatable geometry.
To read La Jalousie Qartulad is to confront the impossibility of pure translation. The French Nouveau Roman rejects psychology. Georgian literary tradition, from Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther’s Skin to contemporary prose, thrives on psychological excess — love, vengeance, loyalty, exile. A Georgian jealous hero would likely confront his rival or weep at a grave. Robbe-Grillet’s hero does nothing. He watches. He records. He repeats.
And yet, this silence is not alien to Georgia. Beneath the loud toasts and passionate laments lies a deep culture of jigri (endurance) and shenultsva (long-suffering). The widow who sits by the window for decades, the father who never speaks his son’s name after a disgrace — these are Georgian jalousies made of stone, not words. Robbe-Grillet’s novel, in its obsessive, object-bound way, becomes a modernist icon of that same withheld scream.

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