Mourning Philology: Art and Religion at the Margins of the Ottoman Empire

Appendix C. Daniel Varuzhan: Poems and Prose

301 The reader will find below a selection from the poetry of Daniel Varuzhan (1884–1915) in English translation. Three volumes of Varuzhan’s verse were published in his lifetime : Sarsur’ner (Shivers; Venice, 1905), Tseghin sirtë (The Heart of the Race; Istanbul, 1909), and Het’anos Yerger (Pagan Songs; Istanbul, 1912). A fourth volume of poetry, Hatsin Yergë (The Song of Bread), saw the light in 1921, again in Istanbul; the manuscript had been confiscated in April 1915, when the poet was arrested, and was recovered by his widow in 1920. There exist several collections of Varuzhan’s poetry in French translation (see the bibliography at the end of this volume). A choice of Varuzhan ’s poems in English translation can be found in the Anthology of Armenian Poetry (146–57), translated and edited by Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian; and “The Light,” a translation by James Russell of the poem “Luysë,” has been published in the winter 1994 issue of the Ararat Quarterly (New York). Unless otherwise specified, the translations offered here are the work of G. M. Goshgarian. Five of them (identified as such) are the work of Lena Takvorian or Nanor Kebranian. In the selection presented below, the reader will find three poems drawn from the collection The Heart of the Race. These are, to begin with, poems about ruined cities such as Ani, Adana, or Ashtishat, marked by the powerful rhetoric of the image characteristic of Varuzhan. They are followed by four poems culled from the 1912 collection Pagan Songs: “Vanatur,” “The Light,” “To the Dead Gods,” and “Anahit.” Placed after this group of poems from The Heart of the Race and Pagan Songs are two prose texts by Varuzhan on which we have commented at length in Part II of the present volume: “The Hero,” the text of a 1909 lecture that saw partial publication in the press of the day, and “The Religions,” a text that was unknown until the eight-page handwritten manuscript was published in the 1987 Complete Works. The text’s editors believe that it was composed sometime between 1905 and 1908, when Varuzhan was a student in Ghent; if so, it might represent notes he took under the immediate influence of his readings in the evolutionary theory of religion. However, this piece can just as plausibly be dated to the post-1909 period, if it is assumed that it represents the text of a lecture delivered in Armenian in Sivas, Tokat, or Istanbul. The manuscript Appendix C Daniel Varuzhan: Poems and Prose 302 Appendix C bears no indication of the date of composition or the use to which Varuzhan may have put it. It should be pointed out that none of the poet’s lecture notes from his days as a student in Ghent (that is, before 1909) or as a teacher in his native country (after 1909) have survived. The reason is doubtless that, in 1920, Varuzhan’s family was unable to recover anything other than the manuscript of The Song of Bread. I have added a few notes to the texts below in order to explain historical allusions that seemed particularly obscure. On one occasion, in a note to “To the Dead Gods,” I took the liberty of criticizing an existing French translation by Luc-André Marcel and Garo Poladian. 18 Daniel Varuzhan “Among the Ruins of Ani” (From The Heart of the Race, 1909; YLZ 1:86–92) I. Be it to weep, to kiss, To evoke, to muse, Be it to utter, onward, we enter. Enter the vast city of a vast corpse, Enter the Tomb of all Armenians . . . Greetings, Ani, cemetery Where rot the bones of a victorious Past. Greetings, Ani, cradle, Where beneath ruins, with black scorpion blood, Our Future grows. Greetings, Carcass, Mother, greetings. Here I come, I, the final Budding head of the Armenian Hydra, I come to cradle your death with your life’s glory— To speak of your greatness, Or the great promise of greatness, you became A luminous steel breast where Savage races, alien to suckling, Came to shred their famished gums. On the seam of Old Asia you were For three centuries the heart, if Greece was the intellect, Living heart, which cunning Byzantium, That bastard of Rome, its eyes frozen in a stare, Daniel Varuzhan: Poems and Prose 303 Betrayed with a ravished appetite. And it betrayed and it conquered—and alas, When...