Yegishe Charents and Forty Days

In the early nineties Armenia, like myself, was still in its childhood and contending with repeated crises. Tales circulated in the community that whilst someone died for the liberation of Karabagh, a crook in Yerevan had run off with hundreds of thousands of dollars intended to build houses for earthquake survivors in Gyumri who were still freezing in tent cities and whose sons were working hand-to-mouth in some dive in Russia whilst some of their daughters...well...an Armenian poet put it like this

Everyone has a price
That is the law of Istanbul
A price for a whore
A price for a pasha
Are you surprised Charents?”

As a child either I was bored of Armenia or Armenia was boring, I hadn’t made up my mind. Armenia was this place of horror stories, where people had escaped from, barely, where fearsome neighbours did terrible things, where earthquakes happened and wars broke out, where all my clothes had disappeared to in 1988. Armenia was over there, once upon a time, far, far away land...a grisly, macabre fairy tale.

The community newspapers, sent out sporadically – weekly, monthly, biannually, annually – or more simply not at all were filled with stories of loss, destruction, hardship and fundraising events to help out the newborn state. Usually these events entailed some rather large gentleman standing up in front of you and talking non-stop for an hour or two in Armenian, which you didn’t understand and you were too young to appreciate.

He’d droll on for hours, then everyone would applaud, someone would sing, then they’d applaud again, you’d fall asleep just in time for the farewell kissing and then shuttled off to be bed completely oblivious as to what had happened with your evening.

Only one of these events seems to have stayed in my memory. It was an evening dedicated to an Armenian poet called Yegishe Charents - whom you might have guessed already authored the above few lines. This evening sticks in my head because it was perhaps the evening I was least bored, it was the evening when the applause was most genuine and it was an evening of impassioned poetry recitals – the first evening that Armenia interested me.

Charents, I recently declared to a Russian, was the greatest great to come out of Soviet Armenia and is often declared ‘Armenia’s greatest poet’. Charents represents the end of classical Armenian poetry of romantic patriotic sentiments and its replacement by new styles - more descriptively visceral and ascertainably realistic whether employed patriotically, ideologically or laconically. He was held in high esteem by his Russian peers Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, he even earned the epitaph of ‘Armenian Mayakovsky’ (Mayakovsky is considered the intellectual father of Soviet poetry) and William Saroyan described Charents “as a truly great man.”

He is notoriously difficult to translate from Armenian, even to translate between dialects poses problems. Some of his poetry relies upon wordplay or the coining of altogether new words such as ‘arevaham’ which means something like ‘sunny tasting’.

I grew up with Charents, partly because my Grandfather loved him, but also because I actually enjoyed reading him. Charents wrote about experiences and encounters that were relatable back to my own circumstances. In Loveless Romance Charents writes of a sexual encounter between a couple, a verse reads;

“Do you hear!

It’s yes or no

Understand?

Its love or – a nose”

I’ve been posing the latter part as a question to myself ever since puberty!

Loveless Romance was banned for “obscenities” but in it Charents “sexualised” the Armenian language, that sacred ‘sunny worded’ tongue that had been butchered by tired old farts droning on for hours on Saturday evenings about history and economics was alive, fiery and spicy in the ink of Charents’ pen, his prose is juicily edible. Take another extract from Loveless Romance

Stop distorting the nasal language
In your velvety hands
Want to masturbate again?
Can’t get yourself a woman?
Well use hashish, cocaine
(You know, more human)
Because pen is no penis,
Understand

Charents expressed things in his prose that was relatable and recognisable – feelings and sentiments that appealed beyond the patriotic norms of most Armenian poets; he, and a few other Armenians, made Armenian culture living and vibrantly alive for me, infecting me with a love for Armenian.

Born in 1897 in Kars, then part of the Russian Empire, to Armenian parents from Iran Charents was first published in 1912. Three years later he is a volunteer in the Russian army fighting against the Ottoman army. Thereafter Charents commits himself to the revolution, joins the Communist Party and the Red Army. By the time of the USSR’s birth Charents is a refugee in Tbilisi, he becomes an ardent exponent of poetry for the masses and travels extensively.
Charents’ sense rootlessness and the internationalism it bred is best expressed in his poem The Monument

I was born in Kars
But the sun of Iran lights my soul
With an old inextinguishable homesickness
And the whole world
Becomes for my spirit, a fatherland

As a young London born British Armenian with familial links to Iran, Iraq, India etc the last two lines were almost truisms!

One of Charents’ last published poems was an acrostic, the first letter of every line’s second word reading ‘Oh Armenian people, your only salvation is in your collective strength!’ he was found out and shortly thereafter he was arrested and put in a prison camp in 1937. By this stage Charents had fallen out entirely with the Stalinist authorities, whom he heavily criticised, and was a morphine addict – he was said to have died in prison after smashing his own skull against the wall. No one knows where Charents body lies buried.

I learnt much of what I know about Charents from my Grandfather who, a few days before he passed away, asked for a copy of Charents’ poem Yes Im Anush Hayastani (My Sweet Armenia’s) a poem that many Armenians are able to recite by heart. A poem my Grandfather declared was worth all else that had ever been written in Armenian, his reciting of the poem on his death bed comprised some of his last words.

Today is my Grandfather’s Karasunk Hokgehangist – memorial prayers forty days after someone’s death. By way of remembrance of my Charents and my Grandfather I don’t so much quote the first line of Charents’ most famous poem as affirm it;

Yes im anoush Hayastani arevaham barn em sirum
(I love my sweet Armenia’s sunny tasting words)

© Ara Iskanderian