During our fall break, I met with Khatuna mas in Zoom, where we talked about various topics. Khatuna Tskhadadze is an English department member at GZAAT. Teaching Italian previously, she has been a part of our school for around five years now. Her love of literature came from a young age, in school she was ahead of her classmates and had a unique vocabulary: “I was around 10 years old and my Georgian teacher said to my mother, ‘She uses strange words’. Of course, she meant it as a compliment, but my mother didn’t get it. As she has a passion for more technical subjects, she didn’t really understand and thought that I’ve said something bad to my teacher”.
Because of her strong interest in literature, Khatuna mas could never favor one language over another, however she has always had a special place in her heart for Italian. “Italian is my life, just like literature in general."
As a young mother in University, she had just quit her job and decided to try learning a new language when her friend recommended it.
“I was studying at the Tbilisi State University, where the Italian language was introduced to me. The students were not motivated and nobody really attended the lessons, so I decided to pursue studies on my own. I took private lessons with a teacher my friend recommended, who became one of my closest friends later on”.
After only ten months, Khatuna started working as an interpreter with a man from Brescia, a small wealthy city in Italy. At that point in her career, she had still not visited Italy. She flew there only after passing the C2 proficiency exam and stayed in Siena, near Florence. Her longest visit in Italy was for a year, when she started working on her PhD, which is still incomplete.
Working with the man for Brescia was a rare chance to practice Italian. “His Italian was, of course, very good, even if he had this very specific northern accent. Then I started meeting other people who thought that I was Brescian, too, because I also adopted that accent. But I had no idea, I thought my Italian was perfect”.
Khatuna mas worked as an interpreter for two years, after which she was offered the position to teach at the Tbilisi State University at the age of 25. This was a huge opportunity professionally, but less financially. “It is crazy to think about it, our salary was 50 Lari a month, which today is like two- or three hundred Lari. It was definitely not convenient, but a great experience, which led me to my brilliant students, whom I’m friends with today”.
Teaching on its own was unbelievably hard, but Khatuna also had to juggle it with being a mother and another job. “I was working for the embassy then, but I was sort of independent from it at the same time. The Italian embassy opened in 2000. I was reporting directly to the central office in Rome and the big office in Moscow”.
She said that this working experience was especially interesting, as she was mostly dealing with the commercial and economic section and it was intriguing seeing all the diplomatic relationships up close. Khatuna went to work with the embassy full-time in 2007, “It was my first year and I helped as the interpreter at many important meetings between heads of different countries and other meetings, it was an interesting period politically”.
Despite always having a full workload, Khatuna never once complained. “I probably said I was tired for the first time in my 40s, I swear, I was always amazed when people complained like that. Now, I kind of feel ashamed when I think of how judgmental I was”. She also took on the job of translating books and stories from Italian, and it became a huge part of her life. “I loved writing and I just started translating some stories in my university years, but just for myself. At first, I didn’t even publish them, but later I did, somebody started noticing me and telling me that I’m good”.
Khatuna also spoke about her love for teaching, having experience as a university and a high school teacher, “you see people growing and changing, it is natural for young people to think they know everything, it happened to me as well. I had people at the beginning of Junior year transform into completely different students at the end of the academic year. They changed right in front of me and I think it’s wonderful," she said.
Edited By: Elene Mansvetashvili
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