The Armenian Weekly Magazine
Dec. 2015: The ARF at 125
Special for the Armenian Weekly
My conversations with senior members of the ARF—no matter which community I may be in—often turn into impassioned monologues about how great certain books on the Armenian Cause are. “This book changed my life,” or “You have to read this book to be a real ARF member,” are words I have heard time and time again. Most of the books they mention were published between the late-19th and first half
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A few notes from the translator of Zartonk/Awakening –
As I have made abundantly clear to many of the organizations/groups that I have worked with in the past to translate, I am personally more than willing to translate as many classical Armenian texts as possible into English. Not just texts related to certain time periods and certain ideologies, but all classical Armenian texts. There are currently several ideas being tossed around regarding the next possible translation, and the Memoirs of Ruben are certainly being considered. Unfortunately, due to the financial challenges that many of these organizations/groups face, the process is often fraught with obstacles and difficulties. But I would be very surprised if more of these works, translated both by me and others, don’t appear in the next few years.
Allow me also to say that in the process of translating Awakening, for example, my concern wasn’t just the English-speaking Armenian reader. Although they constitute a large portion of the readership, one of my primary goals was the introduction of Armenian classical literature to non-Armenian audiences. Dostoyevsky’s books are very Russian in their identity, as is, for example, Awakening, but Dostoyevsky’s have preserved then transcended their innate Russian-ness and are valuable to all, universally. That is ultimately the goal with translating these Armenian texts – preserve their inner Armenian-ness while also making them universal.
Absolutely, there is a need for translation not only of “our foundational texts’ but of Armenian literary works as well.
I have been seeing more and more this picture of Malkhas posted on line. He had personalized it to my parents, Hovhannes and Zvart. I have donated it along with other pictures to the Project Save.
Attached is my take of Zartonk (The Awakening)….http://www.keghart.com/Apelian-Zartonk-Awakening
Yes, yes, yes! We Armenians who don’t read Armenian are hungry for these stories. Thanks for articulating this need.
yes, definitely on my books to read list. To the question why such books “appear to have become irrelevant, unimportant?” maybe the answer rests in the fact that we still have an ARF to compare it to and that makes this work irrelevant. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy write about universal and ever present characteristics of human nature….and that makes it still relevant. I read the french translation of Roupen’s memoir (excerpts were translated) in the late 80s and it made a huge impression on me. It made me dream that we can start all over and bring that revolutionary spirit back to Armenia. But now we are told that the time for revolution is over and so many things have changed as people are more motivated by material things rather than revolutionary courage and fervor.