Live from Holy Cross: George Wallace reading Daniel Varoujan

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George Wallace - photo by Khatchik Turabian

Working Girl

BENEATH my window, as each morning dawns,

You like a wandering ghost go flitting by, 

And on your beauteous virgin head there fall

Tears from my rose vine, leafless now and dry.

I hear your footsteps in the silent street,

And the awakened dog that barks at you;

Or in my sleep I hear the constant cough

That racks your lovely bosom through and through.

I think that you are hungry, robbed of sleep,

Your body shivering in the breezes cold,

And on your tresses, O my sister! Lies

The frost, like jewels, glittering to behold.

Or else, I think, your shoes are torn and rent;

The water from the street is oozing through;

Or impudently, as you pass along,

Some scoundrel Turk is whistling after you.

I think that ill at home your mother lies,

And that the oil which fed the lamp is dry,

And to the factory you go, to toil

For light and life. I think of it, and sigh!

I think of it, and madly then I wish

I might come down, my pallid sister dear,

Come down to you, to kiss your thin, frail hand,

And whisper low, "I love you!" in your ear.

I love your sorrow, which is mine as well-

My grief of griefs, all other woes above;

I love your shattered breast, where still your love

Sings on and on-a skylark wild with love.

Pale girl, I long to press you to my heart

Like some poor banished dove, forlorn and lone-

Give you my strength, my prizes won from fame,

And my untarnished name to be your own.

Fain would I be your honor's veil and screen,

My breast a shield for your defenceless breast.

If I could guard, with arms as granite strong,

Your sex and your grave beauty, I were blest!

Fain would I give you all that I have won

In life's hard struggle, all I have of good-

Crown you with roses of my victory,

Roses that wear the color of my blood;

Only that never more, my sister dear,

You should be pale and hungry, coughing sore,

And that your mother's lamp should not go out,

And to the factory you should go no more!

Based on the translation by Alice Stone Blackwell 

ANDASTAN

At the Eastern part of the earth
Let there be peace…
Let sweat, not blood, flow
In the broad vein of the furrow,
And at the toll of each hamlet’s bell
Let there rise hymns of exaltation.

At the Western part of the earth
Let there be fecundity …
Let each star sparkle with dew,
And each husk be cast in gold
And as the sheep graze on the hills
Let bud and blossom bloom.

At the Northern part of the earth
Let there be abundance …
In the golden sea of the wheat field
Let the scythe swim incessantly
And as gates of granaries open wide
Jubilation let there be.

At the Southern part of the earth
Let all things bear fruit…
Let the honey thrive in the beehive
And may the wine run over the cups
And when brides bake the blessed bread
Let the sound of song rise and spread.

Daniel Varoujan 1914

Translated by Tatul Sonentz

Live from Holy Cross: Nancy Agabian reading Zabel Essayan

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Nancy Agabian- photo by Khatchik Turabian

In the Ruins (excerpt)

Two children had gone off by themselves and were talking.

"Do you have a father?"

"No."

"A mother?"

"No."

"I don't have a mother or father, either."

"Did they kill them?"

"Yes."

"They killed mine, too."

A long, grief-stricken silence reigned, and then:

"Do you want us to be brothers?"

And they adopted each other.

That was the general tenor of the conversations of hundreds of children between five and ten. Sometimes, too, brothers and sisters found each other again and rediscovered, in one another's eyes, the hours of terror they had spent together and did not dare come closer, as if held apart by the awful memory of the corpse of a butchered mother or father. For, almost without exception, driven by an instinctive passion for life, they wanted to forget, wanted desperately, frantically to forget; thus they saw an enemy in anyone who tried to expose the passions of their bleeding hearts, or simply stirred up the memory of that hour by his or her presence.

One evening I expressed a desire to visit the children after they had gone to bed, and was ushered to their dormitory. A terrible, unforgettable sight met my eyes. In that spacious hall, on mats arranged in rows on the floor, was a welter of young, half-naked limbs. . . . Because there wasn't enough room for all of them, the children seemed to be piled up on each other. What with their breathing and all their other exhalations, the air was stifling and unbreathable. Something unnameable, something nightmarish and unsettling drifted through the semi-obscurity. The children's bodies were indistinguishable from the blackness of the sheetless beds; only the outlines of their limbs could be made out here and there, an arm, a leg. . . . Those rooms seemed as sad to me as desecrated, devastated graveyards.

Sometimes one of the children, prompted by a bad dream, would raise his head and look right and left, shuddering. One cry of his would be enough to throw all those shapeless, almost undifferentiated piles into agitated motion and, sometimes, uneasy heads would be lifted here and there. In the first few days, it sometimes happened that the ravings of one of the children rattled all the others sleeping in the same room; Still hall asleep, not knowing where they were, they would all jump to their feet screaming, in the belief that they were reliving the hours of the massacre.

Although I had resolved to maintain my sangfroid, I was deeply shaken by that throng of children, deprived of affection and a mother's love and care. ... I decided to leave so that we wouldn't disturb their sleep with our presence. Some were sighing, and all had woken up and were casting uneasy glances our way....

We were getting ready to leave when I noticed a little slip of a girl almost directly at my feet. Two bright, unblinking eyes were looking at me. Her blond hair was strewn over the pillow, and her emaciated neck and emaciated arms and legs spoke of such severe mental and physical suffering that I lost control of myself, and started to cry. And, although I managed to stifle my sobs, the children heard me and woke up. For an instant, a strange stillness prevailed: they were all holding their breaths; then heads were raised, and a child started to cry. At that, as if on a signal, all at once, hundreds of children overcome by a terrifying attack of nerves suddenly began sobbing, screaming, and weeping, twisting and turning their frail, strengthless limbs on their shabby straw mats and calling out to the parents they had lost...

It took us a long time to calm them down. When their tired heads at last came to rest on their pillows, the little girl's two bright eyes were still looking at me. Before leaving, when I stepped closer to see why she hadn't gone back to sleep, she stretched out a pair of arms toward my neck and held me close for a long time.... Before I left, I looked at all the children again. The room was quiet and peaceful. I was assured that now they would sleep soundly till morning. It seemed to me, however, that those children would dream unceasingly, with relentless insistence, of the days of horror they had lived

through, and that the nightmare would hover constantly over then dark-haired heads.

(excerpt)

Translated by G.M. Goshgarian

Live from Holy Cross: Norman Manea reading William Saroyan

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Norman Manea - photo by Khatchik Turabian

William Saroyan: Seventy Thousand Assyrians (excerpt)

I hadn't had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work. You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party. We barbarians from Asia Minor are hairy people: when we need a haircut, we need a haircut. It was so bad, I had outgrown my only hat. (I am writing a very serious story, perhaps one of the most serious I shall ever write. That is why I am being flippant. Readers of Sherwood Anderson will begin to understand what I am saying after a while; they will know that my laughter is rather sad.) I was a young man in need of a haircut, so I went down to Third Street (San Francisco), to the Barber College, for a fifteen-cent haircut.     Third Street, below Howard, is a district; think of the Bowery in New York, Main Street in Los Angeles: think of old men and boys, out of work, hanging around, smoking Bull Durham, talking about the government, waiting for something to turn up, simply waiting. It was a Monday morning in August and a lot of the tramps had come to the shop to brighten up a bit. The Japanese boy who was working over the free chair had a waiting list of eleven; all the other chairs were occupied. I sat down and began to wait. Outside, as Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises; Farewell to Arms; Death in the Afternoon; Winner Take Nothing) would say, haircuts were four bits. I had twenty cents and a half-pack of Bull Durham. I rolled a cigarette, handed the pack to one of my contemporaries who looked in need of nicotine, and inhaled the dry smoke, thinking of America, what was going on politically, economically, spiritually. My contemporary was a boy of sixteen. He looked Iowa; splendid potentially, a solid American, but down, greatly down in the mouth. Little sleep, no change of clothes for several days, a little fear, etc. I wanted very much to know his name. A writer is always wanting to get the reality of faces and figures. Iowa said, "I just got in from Salinas. No work in the lettuce fields. Going north now, to Portland; try to ship out." I wanted to tell him how it was with me: rejected story from Scribner's, rejected essay from The Yale Review, no money for decent cigarettes, worn shoes, old shirts, but I was afraid to make something of my own troubles. A writer's troubles are always boring, a bit unreal. People are apt to feel, Well, who asked you to write in the first place? A man must pretend not to be a writer. I said, "Good luck, north." Iowa shook his head. "I know better. Give it a try, anyway. Nothing to lose." Fine boy, hope he isn't dead, hope he hasn't frozen, mighty cold these days (December, 1933), hope he hasn't gone down; he deserved to live. Iowa, I hope you got work in Portland; I hope you are earning money; I hope you have rented a clean room with a warm bed in it; I hope you are sleeping nights, eating regularly, walking along like a human being, being happy. Iowa, my good wishes are with you. I have said a number of prayers for you. (All the same, I think he is dead by this time. It was in him the day I saw him, the low malicious face of the beast, and at the same time all the theatres in America were showing, over and over again, an animated film-cartoon in which there was a song called "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", and that's what it amounts to; people with money laughing at the death that is crawling slyly into boys like young Iowa, pretending that it isn't there, laughing in warm theatres. I have prayed for Iowa, and I consider myself a coward. By this time he must be dead, and I am sitting in a small room, talking about him, only talking.)     I began to watch the Japanese boy who was learning to become a barber. He was shaving an old tramp who had a horrible face, one of those faces that emerge from years and years of evasive living, years of being unsettled, of not belonging anywhere, of owning nothing, and the Japanese boy was holding his nose back (his own nose) so that he would not smell the old tramp. A trivial point in a story, a bit of data with no place in a work of art, nevertheless, I put it down. A young writer is always afraid some significant fact may escape him. He is always wanting to put in everything he sees. I wanted to know the name of the Japanese boy. I am profoundly interested in names. I have found that those that are unknown are the most genuine. Take a big name like Andrew Mellon. I was watching the Japanese boy very closely. I wanted to understand from the way he was keeping his sense of smell away from the mouth and nostrils of the old man what he was thinking, how he was feeling. Years ago, when I was seventeen, I pruned vines in my uncle's vineyard, north of Sanger, in the San Joaquin Valley, and there were several Japanese working with me, Yoshio Enomoto, Hideo Suzuki, Katsumi Sujimoto, and one or two others. These Japanese taught me a few simple phrases, hello, how are you, fine day, isn't it, good-bye, and so on. I said in Japanese to the barber student, "How are you?" He said in Japanese, "Very well, thank you." Then, in impeccable English, "Do you speak Japanese? Have you lived in Japan?" I said, "Unfortunately, no. I am able to speak only one or two words. I used to work with Yoshio Enomoto, Hideo Suzuki, Katsumi Sujimoto; do you know them?" He went on with his work, thinking of the names. He seemed to be whispering, "Enomoto, Suzuki, Sujimoto." He said, "Suzuki. Small man?" I said, "Yes." He said, "I know him. He lives in San Jose now. He is married now."     I want you to know that I am deeply interested in what people remember. A young writer goes out to places and talks to people. He tries to find out what they remember. I am not using great material for a short story. Nothing is going to happen in this work. I am not fabricating a fancy plot. I am not creating memorable characters. I am not using a slick style of writing. I am not building up a fine atmosphere. I have no desire to sell this story or any story to The Saturday Evening Post or to Cosmopolitan or to Harper's. I am not trying to compete with the great writers of short stories, men like Sinclair Lewis and Joseph Hergesheimer and Zane Grey, men who really know how to write, how to make up stories that will sell. Rich men, men who understand all the rules about plot and character and style and atmosphere and all that stuff. I have no desire for fame. I am not out to win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize or any other prize. I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language things they already know. I am merely making a record, so if I wander around a little, it is because I am in no hurry and because I do not know the rules. If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man. This is a big statement and it sounds a little precious. Generally a man is ashamed to make such a statement. He is afraid sophisticated people will laugh at him. But I don't mind. I'm asking sophisticated people to laugh. That is what sophistication is for. I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governments. I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth. Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretense, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength . . . . But a baby is a baby. And the way they cry, there you have the brotherhood of man, babies crying. We grow up and we learn the words of a language and we see the universe through the language we know, we do not see it through all languages or through no language at all, through silence, for example, and we isolate ourselves in the language we know. Over here we isolate ourselves in English, or American as Mencken calls it. All the eternal things, in our words. If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language. The heart of man, the unwritten part of man, that which is eternal and common to all races.     Now I am beginning to feel guilty and incompetent. I have used all this language and I am beginning to feel that I have said nothing. This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said. Any ordinary journalist would have been able to put the whole business into a three-word caption. Man is man, he would have said. Something clever, with any number of implications. But I want to use language that will create a single implication. I want the meaning to be precise, and perhaps that is why the language is so imprecise. I am walking around my subject, the impression I want to make, and I am trying to see it from all angles, so that I will have a whole picture, a picture of wholeness. It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work.     Let me try again: I hadn't had a haircut in a long time and I was beginning to look seedy, so I went down to the Barber College on Third Street, and I sat in a chair. I said, "Leave it full in the back. I have a narrow head and if you do not leave it full in the back, I will go out of this place looking like a horse. Take as much as you like off the top. No lotion, no water, comb it dry." Reading makes a full man, writing a precise one, as you see. This is what happened. It doesn't make much of a story, and the reason is that I have left out the barber, the young man who gave me the haircut. He was tall, he had a dark serious face, thick lips, on the verge of smiling but melancholy, thick lashes, sad eyes, a large nose. I saw his name on the card that was pasted on the mirror, Theodore Badal. A good name, genuine, a good young man, genuine. Theodore Badal began to work on my head. A good barber never speaks until he has been spoken to, no matter how full his heart may be.     "That name," I said, "Badal. Are you an Armenian?" I am an Armenian. I have mentioned this before. People look at me and begin to wonder, so I come right out and tell them. "I am an Armenian," I say. Or they read something I have written and begin to wonder, so I let them know. "I am an Armenian," I say. It is a meaningless remark, but they expect me to say it, so I do. I have no idea what it is like to be an Armenian or what it is like to be an Englishman or a Japanese or anything else. I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive. This is the only thing that interests me greatly. This and tennis. I hope some day to write a great philosophical work on tennis, something on the order of Death in the Afternoon, but I am aware that I am not yet ready to undertake such a work. I feel that the cultivation of tennis on a large scale among the peoples of the earth will do much to annihilate racial differences, prejudices, hatred, etc. Just as soon as I have perfected my drive and my lob, I hope to begin my outline of this great work. (It may seem to some sophisticated people that I am trying to make fun of Hemingway. I am not. Death in the Afternoon is a pretty sound piece of prose. I could never object to it as prose. I cannot even object to it as philosophy. I think it is finer philosophy than that of Will Durant and Walter Pitkin. Even when Hemingway is a fool, he is at least an accurate fool. He tells you what actually takes place and he doesn't allow the speed of an occurrence to make his exposition of it hasty. This is a lot. It is some sort of advancement for literature. To relate leisurely the nature and meaning of that which is very brief in duration.)     "Are you an Armenian?" I asked.     We are a small people and whenever one of us meets another, it is an event. We are always looking around for someone to talk to in our language. Our most ambitious political party estimates that there are nearly two million of us living on the earth, but most of us don't think so. Most of us sit down and take a pencil and a piece of paper and we take one section of the world at a time and imagine how many Armenians at the most are likely to be living in that section and we put the highest number on the paper, and then we go on to another section, India, Russia, Soviet Armenia, Egypt, Italy, Germany, France, America, South America, Australia, and so on, and after we add up our most hopeful figures the total comes to something a little less than a million. Then we start to think how big our families are, how high our birthrate and how low our death-rate (except in times of war when massacres increase the death-rate), and we begin to imagine how rapidly we will increase if we are left alone a quarter of a century, and we feel pretty happy. We always leave out earthquakes, wars, massacres, famines, etc., and it is a mistake. I remember the Near East Relief drives in my home town. My uncle used to be our orator and he used to make a whole auditorium full of Armenians weep. He was an attorney and he was a great orator. Well, at first the trouble was war. Our people were being destroyed by the enemy. Those who hadn't been killed were homeless and they were starving, our own flesh and blood, my uncle said, and we all wept. And we gathered money and sent it to our people in the old country. Then after the war, when I was a bigger boy, we had another Near East Relief drive and my uncle stood on the stage of the Civic Auditorium of my home town and he said, "Thank God this time it is not the enemy, but an earthquake. God has made us suffer. We have worshipped Him through trial and tribulation, through suffering and disease and torture and horror and (my uncle began to weep, began to sob) through the madness of despair, and now he has done this thing, and still we praise Him, still we worship Him. We do not understand the ways of God." And after the drive I went to my uncle and I said, "Did you mean what you said about God?" And he said, "That was oratory. We've got to raise money. What God? It is nonsense." "And when you cried?" I asked, and my uncle said, "That was real. I could not help it. I had to cry. Why, for God's sake, why must we go through all this God damn hell? What have we done to deserve all this torture? Man won't let us alone. God won't let us alone. Have we done something? Aren't we supposed to be pious people? What is our sin? I am disgusted with God. I am sick of man. The only reason I am willing to get up and talk is that I don't dare keep my mouth shut. I can't bear the thought of more of our people dying. Jesus Christ, have we done something?"     I asked Theodore Badal if he was an Armenian.     He said, "I am an Assyrian."     Well, it was something. They, the Assyrians, came from our part of the world, they had noses like our noses, eyes like our eyes, hearts like our hearts. They had a different language. When they spoke we couldn't understand them, but they were a lot like us. It wasn't quite as pleasing as it would have been if Badal had been an Armenian, but it was something.     "I am an Armenian," I said. "I used to know some Assyrian boys in my home town, Joseph Sargis, Nito Elia, Tony Saleh. Do you know any of them?"     "Joseph Sargis, I know him," said Badal. "The others I do not know. We lived in New York until five years ago, then we came out west to Turlock. Then we moved up to San Francisco."     "Nito Elia," I said, "is a Captain in the Salvation Army." (I don't want anyone to imagine that I am making anything up, or that I am trying to be funny.) "Tony Saleh," I said, "was killed eight years ago. He was riding a horse and he was thrown and the horse began to run. Tony couldn't get himself free, he was caught by a leg, and the horse ran around and around for a half hour and then stopped, and when they went up to Tony he was dead. He was fourteen at the time. I used to go to school with him. Tony was a very clever boy, very good at arithmetic."     We began to talk about the Assyrian language and the Armenian language, about the old world, conditions over there, and so on. I was getting a fifteen-cent haircut and I was doing my best to learn something at the same time, to acquire some new truth, some new appreciation of the wonder of life, the dignity of man. (Man has great dignity, do not imagine that he has not.)     Badal said, "I cannot read Assyrian. I was born in the old country, but I want to get over it."     He sounded tired, not physically but spiritually.     "Why?" I said. "Why do you want to get over it?"     "Well," he laughed, "simply because everything is washed up over there." I am repeating his words precisely, putting in nothing of my own. "We were a great people once," he went on. "But that was yesterday, the day before yesterday. Now we are a topic in ancient history. We had a great civilization. They're still admiring it. Now I am in America learning how to cut hair. We're washed up as a race, we're through, it's all over, why should I learn to read the language? We have no writers, we have no news- well, there is a little news: once in a while the English encourage the Arabs to massacre us, that is all. It's an old story, we know all about it. The news comes over to us through the Associated Press, anyway."     These remarks were very painful to me, an Armenian. I had always felt badly about my own people being destroyed. I had never heard an Assyrian speaking in English about such things. I felt great love for this young fellow. Don't get me wrong. There is a tendency these days to think in terms of pansies whenever a man says that he has affection for man. I think now that I have affection for all people, even for the enemies of Armenia, whom I have so tactfully not named. Everyone knows who they are. I have nothing against any of them because I think of them as one man living one life at a time, and I know, I am positive, that one man at a time is incapable of the monstrosities performed by mobs. My objection is to mobs only.     "Well," I said, "it is much the same with us. We, too, are old. We still have our church. We still have a few writers, Aharonian, Isahakian, a few others, but it is much the same."     "Yes," said the barber, "I know. We went in for the wrong things. We went in for the simple things, peace and quiet and families. We didn't go in for machinery and conquest and militarism. We didn't go in for diplomacy and deceit and the invention of machine-guns and poison gases. Well, there is no use in being disappointed. We had our day, I suppose."     "We are hopeful," I said. "There is no Armenian living who does not still dream of an independent Armenia."     "Dream?" said Badal. "Well, that is something. Assyrians cannot even dream any more. Why, do you know how many of us are left on earth?"     "Two or three million," I suggested.     "Seventy thousand," said Badal. "That is all. Seventy thousand Assyrians in the world, and the Arabs are still killing us. They killed seventy of us in a little uprising last month. There was a small paragraph in the paper. Seventy more of us destroyed. We'll be wiped out before long. My brother is married to an American girl and he has a son. There is no more hope. We are trying to forget Assyria. My father still reads a paper that comes from New York, but he is an old man. He will be dead soon."     Then his voice changed, he ceased speaking as an Assyrian and began to speak as a barber: "Have I taken enough off the top?" he asked.     The rest of the story is pointless. I said so long to the young Assyrian and left the shop. I walked across town, four miles, to my room on Carl Street. I thought about the whole business: Assyria and this Assyrian, Theodore Badal, learning to be a barber, the sadness of his voice, the hopelessness of his attitude. This was months ago, in August, but ever since I have been thinking about Assyria, and I have been wanting to say something about Theodore Badal, a son of an ancient race, himself youthful and alert, yet hopeless. Seventy thousand Assyrians, a mere seventy thousand of that great people, and all the others quiet in death and all the greatness crumbled and ignored, and a young man in America learning to be a barber, and a young man lamenting bitterly the course of history.     Why don't I make up plots and write beautiful love stories that can be made into motion pictures? Why don't I let these unimportant and boring matters go hang? Why don't I try to please the American reading public?     Well, I am an Armenian. Michael Arlen is an Armenian, too. He is pleasing the public. I have great admiration for him, and I think he has perfected a very fine style of writing and all that, but I don't want to write about the people he likes to write about. Those people were dead to begin with. You take Iowa and the Japanese boy and Theodore Badal, the Assyrian; well, they may go down physically, like Iowa, to death, or spiritually, like Badal, to death, but they are of the stuff that is eternal in man and it is this stuff that interests me. You don't find them in bright places, making witty remarks about sex and trivial remarks about art. You find them where I found them, and they will be there forever, the race of man, the part of man, of Assyria as much as of England, that cannot be destroyed, the part that massacre does not destroy, the part that earthquake and war and famine and madness and everything else cannot destroy.     This work is in tribute to Iowa, to Japan, to Assyria, to Armenia, to the race of man everywhere, to the dignity of that race, the brotherhood of things alive. I am not expecting Paramount Pictures to film this work. I am thinking of seventy thousand Assyrians, one at a time, alive, a great race. I am thinking of Theodore Badal, himself seventy thousand Assyrians and seventy million Assyrians, himself Assyria, and man, standing in a barber shop, in San Francisco, in 1933, and being, still, himself, the whole race.     1934

Live from Holy Cross: Catherine Fletcher reading poems by Indra

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Catherine Fletcher- photo by Khatchik Turabian

Indra (pen name of Diran Chrakian (1875-1921) 

HOME, AFTER A LONG ABSENCE

In my room, near the cypress grove

the dark is crowded up, pushed into the light,

while shadows creep up on my walls

and untranslatable murmurs rise,

I see another, earlier place

where the father of a lost boy calls,

and where the boy chooses to hide

to worship his enthusiasms alone.

Home.  And once more I wear

the evergreen shadows that are infused

with incense like an exultation shared.

The heart of giants still holds a secret animus

whose truth I do not grasp,

although I am its heir.

MISTLETOE—a plant known for its medicinal value

Here in this grove of giant cypress

where the trees lean forward to press

the last drop of turquoise from the sky,

as they stand on the hill

I enter like a reaper of mistletoe

who cuts with a golden scythe

berries and vines he believes

will cure every human ill.

Like him I linger in the breath

of the sweet forest

on the edge of night

looking for an antidote, a faith

in the darkness of cypress, looking

for a harvest of undying light.

Both poems translated by Diana Der-Hovanessian

Live from Holy Cross: Ralph Nazareth reading Vahan Tekeyan and Siamanto

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Ralph Nazareth - photo by Khatchik Turabian

Vahan Takeyan: The Country of Dust

Small. Miniaturized, yet you insist

on shaking your canyons and cliffs with huge

spasms as if you were the centre of the earth

and the magnet that draws out and fills every sea.

So small. A corner. Not even a corner.

Scattered points, dispersed and dispersing lines

of fallen walls, walls you imagine the palace

you once raised from this mantle of dust.

How can you dream of old architecture

today when every edifice caves in

to make way for new shapes?

Any shock can erase you forever and no eye

will even blink. Yours alone the concern. But hope

rises like the sun. Accumulate. Dust consolidates into stone.

Translated from the Armenian by Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian.

Grief by Siamanto

You, stranger soul mate
Who leaves behind the road of joy,
listen to me.
I know your innocent feet are still wet with blood. Foreign hands have come and yanked out
the sublime rose of freedom
which finally bloomed from the pains of your race.

Let its divine scent intoxicate everyone,
Let everyone—those far away, your neighbor, the ungrateful, come and burn incense
before the goddess of Justice
that you carved from the stone with your hammer.
Proud sowers, let others reap with your scythes
the wheat that ripens in the gold earth you ploughed. Because if you are chased down by raw Evil,
don't forget that you are
to bring forth the fruitful Good.

Walk down the avenues of merriment
and don’t let the happy ones see in your eyes
that image of corpse and ash.
Spare the passerby, whether a good man or a criminal, because Armenian pain
rises up in the eye’s visage.
As you walk through the crossroad of merriment
don’t let a speck of gladness or a tear
stain grief’s majesty.
Because for the vanquished, tears are cowardly
and for the victors, the smile is frivolous, a wrinkle.

Armenian woman, with veils darkening you like death.

You, young man with native anguish running down your face,

walk down roads without rage of hate and exclaim: what a bright day,

what a sarcastic grave digger...
What a mob, what dances, what joy
and what feasts everywhere...
our red shrouds are victory flags.
the bones of your pure brothers are flutes... with them others are making strange music. 

But don’t shudder, unknown sister
or brother of fate.
As you study the stars,
take heart, go on.
The law of life stays the same
human beings can’t understand each other.

And this evening before the sunset
all of you will go back to your houses, whether they are mud or marble,
and calmly close the treacherous 

Shutters of your windows.
shut them from the wicked 

Capital, shut them to the face of humanity,
and to the face of your God...,
Even the lamp on your table
will be extinguished

by your soul’s one clear whispers.

Translated from the Armenian by Peter Balakian and Nevart Yaghlian

Live from Holy Cross: Aida Zilelian reading Daniel Varoujan

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Aida Zilelian-Silak - photo by Khatchik Turabian

In My Father’s Prison

I was a little boy when I visited you

In your dark cell in the prison;

Mother had taken ill. I was wandering

Between the prison and her bed.

They informed you of my visit.

You came to the iron-bar gate

That blocked our passionate embrace – what a crime –

You were silent and sad.

You were frail and so longing to see sunlight.

Your beard, as if grown on bone, concealed your face. Oh,

Father you were a dead man.

You smiled when you saw me,

But that kind smile was a fake;

Like a blossomed water lily wrongly placed

On a lake of tears.

From behind the dark iron bars,

You stretched your lips to kiss mine.

Alas, our lips could not come close to touch.

We were like a cradle and a coffin.

Oh, how I wished to embrace you warmly,

Grant you the free world outside the cell,

Flood your eyes with the boundless sky seen

Through my own small pupils.

And to empty into your heart my days spent under the sun.

I wanted to flood your cell with roses and spring

And bury my youth and my future in your cell.

Oh, what a sad hour indeed.

I told you bit-by-bit all of the sufferings of our home:

The passing of granny; the illness of mom with her cough

That bursts the silence of the nights.

I told you that owls are dancing under the moon

On our roof;

That our rose vine withered this year

From the dry winds of the cemetery.

You were listening with an inquiry of questions.

When suddenly a cruel command,

- A command so evil – came to separate us;

- You left without  kissing me.

Standing there, gazing at your departure,

I cried there. Lonely and alone, I cried, Dad.

- A new vengeance was born in my chest –

The tears in my eyes were the echoes of my heart.

Oh, love of life, honest labor, thorny hearts,

Saintly things all thrown into filth.

They are like collapsed veins

In the much needed paths of survival.

Along with you, drowned in genocides,

I saw, lilacs and saints of all religions,

And Christs who were spit upon.

Translated by Herand M. Markarian

Live from Holy Cross: Arthur Nersesian reading Krikor Zohrab's Magdalene

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Arthur Nersesian - photo by Khatchik Turabian

Magdalene

by Krikor Zohrab

A

The heavy make-up on her face could not quite hide the natural beauty of a girl barely seventeen years of age. The flamboyance of her careless attire—the gaudy blues and reds of her dresses, the black loose stockings that had to be constantly hitched up—was, it seems to me, her own simple-minded way of avenging herself by offending the sensibilities of ladies. When she gazed at you with those large and luminous eyes of hers you almost felt a velvety touch on your skin. The tresses of her abundant and artificially blond hair which were nearly always in disarray, tumbled down about her shoulders giving her head a slight backward slant as if by their weight.

She ushered me into her tiny apartment on the fourth floor of a tenement building and assuming the droll air of a barker drumming up customers, she showed me her bed—a big, wide, deep bed that occupied nearly half of the room—and the clean white sheets and pillowcases; after which she forced me down on it and laughing all the while like a street urchin, took hold of my head and said: “Won't you give us a kiss then?'”

She was an experienced girl and in her earnest efforts to dispel the timidity of a raw youth, she overwhelmed me with proofs of her affection. There was something inebriating in the aroma emanating from her body.

“I am the youngest tenant in the whole building," she said. "I'll be seventeen on Easter Day.”

B

She sat curled up beside me, making herself as small as a kitten, her head nestling against my chest. I had known her for only five minutes, yet she spoke as if we were old, intimate friends, wanted to know all about me, asked endless questions, but before I had a chance to answer any of them, she began telling me her own story—the usual sad story of her kind of unfortunate girl that may be summed up in a couple of sentences.

“My poor little mother died two years ago,” she began, investing that word ‘little’ with such tenderness that it pierced my heart. “I never got to know my father. I have a younger sister aged fifteen, and an even younger brother; also a grandmother. They are all I've got. My sister and brother go to school. I support them.”

She delivered the last phrase with evident pride, as if to say: I am the head of this family; I am responsible for them; they depend on me.

“Enough of this talk,” she suddenly burst out trying to dispel the gloom that her words may have created, and for an instant I felt the entire weight of her body on top of me, her lips pressing very hard against mine.

C

That was as far as things went that day however. She stubbornly refused to satisfy my youthful ardor. “Nothing doing,” she kept saying. “Today is Good Friday. What are you, an infidel?” It was indeed Good Friday. I must confess nonetheless that I was taken aback by her piety.

“Do you plan to take communion?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know… I guess so," I mumbled. “And you?”

She gave me an astonished look as if I had asked an impertinent question.

“They don’t give communion to the likes of us!”

“Why don’t they?”

“Because we can't repent knowing that on the next day we will be committing the same sin. And if I don’t sin, who will look after my brother and sister, and my old grandmother?”

She seemed to be familiar with all the rules and regulations of the Church and spoke with the self-assurance of a priest and was even more unsparing on herself than a priest would be, I thought. I remember to have reflected then that if the Church’s regulations were applied consistently, businessmen, shopkeepers, journalists, and lawyers should not be allowed to take communion either because they too were compelled to sin every day by lying and deceiving for professional reasons.

“How old are you?” she said,

“Twenty.”

And as she went on hugging and kissing me, I kept raising all kinds of objections against the Church’s discriminatory practices. The Church was, after all, a human rather than a heavenly institution, I thought, and like all such institutions, it was bound to be riddled with all kinds of inconsistencies and injustices.

“I'm going to church now,” she said after giving me a last, dismissive kiss. “Come back after Easter. I’ll be waiting for you. We are still friends, aren’t we? Promise you won’t see another woman in the meantime.”

I promised—the promise of a twenty-year old.

After that we loved each other for about a year. She may have been unschooled and plebeian, her love may have been of the mercenary kind, but she was herself a thoroughly honest and decent person, which may explain why she enjoyed wide popularity among men of all ages, nationalities, and classes.

When I got to know her better, she would occasionally express embarrassment over her lack of education, but never her work. And all the while she took care of her little brother and sister from a distance and did so with such exemplary selflessness that I am sure it never occurred to her that she was sacrificing anything by selling her body to total strangers.

D

There was a mob at the entrance of her building and I recognized among them thieves, murderers, and similar riffraff jostling one another in their efforts to get in and satisfy their curiosity. A couple of policemen stepped out with pen and paper in their hands—probably having just registered the crime that had been committed earlier that day. When I asked the people nearest to me the reason behind this commotion, I was told: “They hit one of the girls in the building.”

My premonition, which never fails me in such moments, sent a cold current down my spine. Breaching the wall of humanity that stood between me and the entrance, I rushed up the staircase and into her tiny flat which was now jammed by tenants. I saw a doctor leaning over her bed. And there, lying in her bed, I saw her for the last time.

Contrary to her habit, she was now dressed in white—a white as pure and as dazzling as snow. Only on her left breast I noticed a red stain, like a rose in an immaculate field.

As soon as she caught sight of me she tried to smile. I heard the doctor stating that her condition was hopeless. She expressed a final plea to take communion, at which some people ran to the nearest church, but returned soon after saying the priest had refused to come. A little later she breathed her last and except for her little brother and sister, no one shed a single tear for her.

E

Years later, when I recounted this incident to a church dignitary, a theologian, he explained in some detail the doctrinal reasons why she had been refused the sacrament, pointing out the difference between adultery and promiscuity on the one hand, and prostitution on the other, adding that in the first instance the Church was prepared to make certain allowances, but in the second, it must take a more uncompromising stance.

Though I could not refute them, his explanations seemed to me specious as well as cruel and unconvincing.

And never, I shall never forget her lying there in that wide and deep bed of hers, with a red rose on her breast.

  

(1902)

Krikor Zohrab, “Magdalene,” in Ara Baliozian, trans. and ed., Zohrab: An Introduction, Cambridge, Mass.: National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, 1985, pp. 61-66.