Author of the Week / 16 October 2024

Don’t let my heart turn to stone

Author of the Week: Armenia


In the ninth series of Paris Review Interviews, the interviewer asks Octavio Paz whether the process of writing is enjoyable or frustrating, to which Paz answers talking about writer’s block and the ever-present sense of inevitable failure. ‘Nothing we write is what we wish we could write. Writing is a curse. The worst part of it is the anguish that precedes the act of writing – the hours, days or months when we search in vain for the phrase that turns the spigot that makes the water flow. Once that first phrase is written, everything changes: the process is enthralling, vital and enriching, no matter what the result is. Writing is a blessing!’ he says. There are contested views on the writer’s block – some people accept the overwhelming and undeniable fact of its existence and its being a part a writer’s life, as does Tom Wolfe, defining it as a fear that you can’t do what you have announced to someone else or the fear that it’s not worth it. While others, such as William Maxwell, equate it with ‘loss of confidence’ but certainly not the loss of talent.[1]

‘… and since it’s poetry we’re talking about, we’re bound to wander as near the truth as possible’, says Robert Hass in his What Light Can Do[2] and I think of one exact ‘near-truth’ that I keep secret from those who enquire, I push it under the rug, grow flowers in it, erase it from certain conversations: I haven’t written for so long, not a single poem.

The long dry spell passing without a poem is not what you expect when you publish a debut poetry collection at eighteen. It gives rise to a distinct feeling that you have suddenly forgotten a whole language – its structure, vocabulary, punctuation. Take any word and use it in another poem and it would look like a discovery, an architectural wonder.

Having spent an entire year thinking of writing my second book, I finally decided to dismiss my contract for now to be able to deal with this protracted wordlessness, to find its roots and gauge the magnitude of it.

Poetry has always been my language, the connecting thread between the world and myself. It has always been like this – I should write to get closer to my experience or, as Audre Lord puts it in her ground breaking essay Poetry is Not a Luxury,[3] to give voice to the nameless. To declare love, to rethink the myths, to make myself belong to something, to explain my political views, to help someone drowning to get to the shore, to tell a story, and eventually to ‘rage against the dying of the light’.

And yet, for a very long time I sat in front of a blank paper or a laptop screen and couldn’t get myself to make a declaration. The desperate attempts to finally take things out of me and give them a word form ended in the creation of empty folders.

Where do the roots of this lie, I wonder? Is there a remedy? Schiller’s rotten apples? Spend two and a half hours every morning writing in front of a three-and-a-half-foot-tall desk, as Virginia Woolf did? Maybe write only with a pencil, as Steinbeck did? Or, like Frost, do not use a desk at all, get a big blue chair with no arms, and write on whatever you’ve got? Is there a certain writerly custom I should have followed and internalised?

*

I have tried to answer a series of questions asked in the essays I read, poems I translate daily and the questions arising from my academic background, questions of utmost urgency, such as the ones Sanah Ahsan asks in her essay Allowing Our Hearts to Break: Poetry, Our Embodied Method of Resistance: ‘What is the role of the poet or artist in times of great cruelty? Will we risk a brave sound? Will we craft space for illumination, for revolt, for truth-telling?’[4]

How can my own guilt towards an unwritten, half-written, forgotten text be overcome? Through observation, perhaps. On my journey to understand the endurance of this block, I became a keen observer, admiring the brave and soft-hearted poets and their attempts to write about the open wounds of this world, and the wounds of their own.

If I must characterise contemporary Armenian poetry in a word, the word would be ‘reflective’. Hasmik Simonyan, author of two poetry collections, has a unique way of portraying the personal and the political, often crossing the boundaries of vulnerability. She uses names directly: she calls a lover lover, and a friend friend. In the genderless Armenian language (neither pronouns nor nouns have grammatical gender), when there is a woman in her poem, even in the most intimate ones, she ensures the reader understands it’s a woman. And when a soldier dies under terrifying conditions, she finds the exact words to encompass the grief, like, for instance, in her poem ‘Close Your Eyes, Son’: ‘Because of this continuous insomnia / it’s snowing endlessly beneath my eyelids / and now, my son, you are what I feel with my palm – ash. / Should I tell you that you’re gone? / Or that we haven’t found your body? / The crossfire caught you / and you were so transparent that when we lifted you, / a ray of light shone from the open wound on your forehead.’[5]

In line with the truth-telling power of poetry, poet and translator Karén Karslyan introduces an unfamiliar word, ‘Dəsterakoro͞oys’ (Onewhohaslostadaughter, translated by Karén Karslyan) into the Armenian vocabulary. This word directly addresses Armenia’s troubling place among the countries with the highest rates of sex-selective abortions since the advent of medical ultrasonography: ‘My apologies / Daughters of all the people / I apologise / On behalf of the Armenian language / All the generations / Of its proud carriers / Who have not deemed your demise / Significant enough / To burden its already humongous vocabulary / Of compound words (that can confound even Germans) / To express the tragedy of your interrupted existence / Like that compound word / Commemorating the death of a son.’[6]

Tatev Chakhian, Poland-based Armenian poet and translator, exploring poetry writing as a means to understand the world, writes: ‘Furthermore, / if you can’t find a way to speak of genocide, / of long-gone motherland and enemy / write a poem immediately / so that the textbook of History could be understood easily’ (translated by Tatev Chakhian). Her poem ‘Migrants’ Point’ (translated by Ruzan Amiraghyan) sheds light on the difficulties and dismissal a migrant faces even when it comes to trivial matters, such as the name pronunciation: ‘Europe – / For us to understand each other better / I’ve learnt a few of your languages / but you haven’t even tried to pronounce my surname correctly.’

The deepest inward look is found in Lusine Yeghyan’s poems which wrap her journey and experience in rather long lines and hidden references, as in the poem titled ‘You’ (translated by Anouche Agnerian): ‘the complexes that have grown on me, as the water lily spreads along the lake, are forcing me to toughen up and forget all the people whom I have loved perhaps, just as the dying loves the bed in which she lies / this earth seems like a speck of dust sitting on a flower, where there’s nothing except the atmosphere, except the tiny seeds of love that were falling like manna from the sky.’

Violet Grigoryan’s writing, intimate and explicit, challenging the perceived notions of love, sexuality, and their representation in poetry, has long been discussed and contested in Armenia. An example of this is the poem ‘Love’, translated by Margarit Tadevosyan Ordukhanyan: ‘The love-bed cures everything, doesn’t it? / It makes the blind see the writhing of passion, / it makes the mute speak with the drum of his heart, / the lame rises and walks the valleys of the body, / and a kiss will awaken the beauty from her sleep. / Kiss me and… / I’ll never die.’

Deeply personal, inward-looking contemporary Armenian poetry that doesn’t let me forget what it means to write ‘I’ and make a poem belong to the world.

*

While in Modern English, the word ‘poet’ comes from the Greek poietēs, meaning ‘creator’ or ‘maker,’ the Armenian word for ‘poet’ is banasteghts (բանաստեղծ) which translates as a ‘creator of a word, a speech; a word-maker.’ A namer of the things. A carrier of meanings and descriptions. A signifier of the small, the unknown, the unbothered. A singer of the wider, the obvious, the devastating. A seeker of words. One who won’t let our hearts turn into stone.

*

Sometimes a line comes to my mind when I’m showering, sometimes I must get up at night to write it down for the morning – my sweet little illusions of bringing back the word.

*

My mind goes to Palestine, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Jammu and Kashmir, Myanmar, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Libya, Lebanon, Kurdish people and all the suffering people on Earth, but I cannot write. I say my heart is aching, my body is sinking into the bed, making a promise of eventual verbal rebellion, but I have nowhere to open my heart safely and I find no way to show all the places that hurt, as the text isn’t opening up for me yet. Not just yet.

My body goes through the most clear-cut manifestations of a migrant’s experience – spending days on end without loved ones, continuously speaking in a foreign language, seeing an entirely different landscape, experiencing sharper memory of taste and smell – and nothing is uncovered yet.

My heart never skips a beat in loving D., and yet talking about it makes me think of an untranslatable text from an ancient language, not yet studied enough. It makes me open new dictionaries, make collages out of dried leaves and tiny scraps of paper and interpret dreams.

I use the word ‘yet’ as a promise, a celebration of the future in a word.

To keep my heart softer.

To write this poem. And then another one. And then another.

 


[1] Plimpton, G. and Updike, J. (eds.). Writers at work: The Paris Review interviews. 7. Secker & Warburg, 1987.

[2] Hass, R. What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (1st ed.). Ecco Press, 2012.

[3] Lorde, A. Sister outsider. Penguin Books, 2019.

[4] Ahsan, S. Allowing Our Hearts to Break: Poetry, Our Embodied Method of Resistance. (‘Allowing Our Hearts to Break – TL/TH’). Issue 2, 2023.

[5] Simonyan H. (n. d.) Close your eyes, son, translated by Anahit Ghazakhetsyan [unpublished translation].

[6] Karlsyan, K. (n. d.) ‘Dəsterakoro͞oys’ (Onewhohaslostadaughter), translated by Karen Karslyan [unpublished translation].

Author

Anahit Ghazakhetsyan

Anahit Ghazakhetsyan (1999) is a poet, essayist and translator. At the age of 16, she received the prestigious Revelation of the Year award from Granish, a prominent and largest Armenian literary community. The following year, Anahit was granted funding by the Ministry of Culture to publish her debut poetry collection, Dilemma.

 

She studied at the Russian-Armenian University, the University of Salzburg and the University of Copenhagen, focusing on politics and global development. Her dedication to bridging cultures through literature has made her a contributor to the literary landscape, translating works by Mark Twain, Marcus Zusak and Kate Atkinson, as well as contributing to the translation of contemporary English-language poetry. Her own poetry has also received international recognition, with translations available in Italian, Ukrainian, Persian, English, Russian and more. She participated in Parole Spalancate – Festival Internazionale di Poesia di Genova in 2023.

 

She lives between Armenia, Denmark and Poland.

 

Photo by Anahit Hayrapetyan

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