Hye Sharzhoom Armenian Action
Carina Tokatian
Staff Writer
“Small peoples have a right to survive, with our languages, our heritage, and our poetry, too: we contribute our verse to the great play of human life on God’s earth,” stated Prof. James Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Emeritus, at Harvard University, as he reflected on his latest work Misak Medzarents: The Complete Lyric Poems.
Translated and edited by Prof. Russell, Misak Medzarents: The Complete Lyric Poems is an English translation and commentary of Western Armenian poet Misak Medzarents’ works. It has been printed as Volume 12 of the Armenian Series of The Press at California State University, Fresno. Profs. Der Mugrdechian and La Porta expertly shepherded the publication of the book.
Prof. Russell’s scholarship primarily focuses on Ancient Near Eastern, Iranian, and Armenian studies. When asked what piqued his interest in this field, Prof. Russell traced his curiosity to the year 1969 when he visited Yerevan in the course of a summer high school study trip in the Soviet Union. It was at that time that he became fascinated by the architecture, alphabet, manuscripts, and food of the Armenian people.
“It was a romantic obsession that led to a lifetime of research and teaching that involved the other cultures of the region with which Armenians interacted over millennia, principally Iran,” recalled Prof. Russell.
Since then, Prof. Russell has dedicated much attention to the Armenian literature of the Classical, medieval, and modern periods, from pre-Christian mythology and folk epics such as David of Sasun to the Soviet Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents. However, when he learned that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had classified the Western Armenian language as endangered, Prof. Russell felt a moral obligation to devote greater attention to Western Armenian literature. He produced the first translation and commentary, in any language, of Bedros Tourian’s complete lyric poems and other works in his book Bosphorus Nights.
It was because of a wedding that Prof. Russell was first introduced to the Western Armenian bard, Misak Medzarents.
An acquaintance in Boston had asked him to translate one of his poems for the ceremony. “It is not, in my opinion, one of Medzarents’ best poems, but it is well crafted and got me hooked, and soon after one found the really good stuff,” he acknowledged. Consequently, this began Prof. Russell’s years-long labor towards the translation of all of Medzarents’ poetry.
Misak Medzarents was born on January 18, 1886 in the village of Pingian near Akn in the Armenian highlands. Prof. Russell explained that Medzarents, like many other Armenians, “moved because of the circumstances of security and the necessity of a livelihood to the great cosmopolitan capital, Constantinople.”
In Constantinople, Medzarents attended the Central High School (Kentronakan) and became acquainted with Armenian historical and religious writing, including texts in Grabar (Classical Armenian). He also became actively engaged with the literature, society, and political life of Armenians there during his teenage years. Although his birth name was Misak Medzadourian, the young poet soon adopted “Medzarents” and “Dziadzan” (which means “Rainbow”) as pen names.
“The core of his work is a happy childhood full of mystical, supernatural feelings: unlike much Armenian poetry, Medzarents is cheerful, even luminous,” remarked Prof. Russell. In contrast to other Armenian poets, Prof. Russell highlighted Medzarents’ warm and friendly voice. “There is always the image of the sun breaking through the clouds and the raindrops turning to crystal,” he said admiringly.
Another aspect that distinguishes Medzarents’ writing is the rich and broad vocabulary he employs throughout his works. “There are overtones of the pagan song of Vahagn, of the revels of King Arshak II in the fourth century, of the medieval spiritual hymns called sharakans, of his mother’s lullabies and the songs of plowmen, and of the folklore of his native village Pingian,” said Prof. Russell. Embedding themes from all those sources, he equated Medzarents’ writing to a “polyphonic symphony heard as one travels in a time machine.”
Just like his language, the content of Medzarents’ poems is extensive. Prof. Russell noted that Medzarents “writes about sunrise, village fields, hearing a song, home, his mother’s prayers, spirits who live in the water, reveries when he’s sitting alone at night dreaming of feasts and dances and beautiful girls, but also hunger, poverty, cruelty, the Armenians’ struggle for freedom, and revolution.”
Towards the end of his life, however, Medzarents adopted a “new, sharper, bleaker style” that reminded Prof. Russell of poets such as the Russian bard Vladimir Mayakovsky or the young Charents.
“Misak Medzarents: The Complete Lyric Poems is a significant work because it is the first English translation of the entire works of Medzarents,” said Prof. Der Mugrdechian, general editor of the Fresno State Armenian Series. He asserted how “this work will be an important addition to the study of the early twentieth century Western Armenian poets and writers.”
The book begins with a few of Medzarents’ poems that were published in his lifetime and then follows with a chronological arrangement of his additional works. Arranging the poems in the same order as the Critical Edition published in Yerevan in the former Soviet Armenia, Prof. Russell explained how native Armenian speakers can easily refer to the original texts. Alongside his translations, are commentaries in which Prof. Russell delves into some of the linguistic and thematic features of each poem.
“Prof. Russell’s annotations of the poetry put Medzarents’ work into the context of world poetry,” Prof. Der Mugrdechian noted. “Armenian poetry is part of world poetry and Medzarents is a noteworthy poet, whose work is now accessible to a larger audience.”
To finish the book on Medzarents, Prof. Russell headed to Jerusalem on a sabbatical in 2015 where he lived an apartment that overlooked the village of Ein Kerem, where his relatives live, to complete the book.
“The English Medzarents really could come to be, only in a part of the world near and like his own, the Middle East,” stated Prof. Russell. But it was not solely the climate and atmosphere of Jerusalem that Prof. Russell found compelling. He felt he was helping to resurrect a poet who needed to be known to the world. He had edited, translated and published a series of poems from a cache of manuscripts that Charents buried before his arrest and murder in 1937 by the Soviet secret police.
Years later, Prof. Russell discovered that one of his own Jewish ancestors, a Hasidic Rabbi in the Warsaw Ghetto, buried his own manuscript. Rabbi Shapira was murdered in the Nazi Holocaust, but his book survived, and is studied in both Hebrew and English.
The architects of the Armenian Genocide wanted not just to kill the Armenians but to erase their literary heritage as well. Now Tourian and Medzarents can be read, not only in the original, but in English translations whose accompanying commentary introduces the reader into the world from which they came.
Prof. Russell recalls the words of the late Prof. Eric Hamp, a linguist from the University of Chicago, at a conference in Soviet Armenia many years ago.
Hamp “got up at a banquet to raise a toast to small peoples, who have a right to survive.” The “small peoples” still need friends and defenders. Their literatures have a right to survive. Prof. Russell would like to translate next the collection of poems entitled Nojastan (“The Cypress Grove”) by the Western Armenian poet and mystic Diran Cherakian, also known by his anagrammatic pen name “Indra.”
Ultimately, Dr. Russell believes that he has achieved a translation of the works of Misak Medzarents that “is both accurate and songful, and commentaries that guide the reader through the intricacies of the poet’s workshop.”
When asked what he would like readers to know after reading the poems, he explained that he has no specific agenda. Instead, he feels that “each reader has a particular soul, a path and purpose in life that God has made for them alone.” Therefore, he hopes that “this volume of all of Medzarents’ work, like any good book, can be a companion for them.”
With a concluding reference to Walt Whitman’s well-known poem, “Oh Me! Oh Life!”, Dr. Russell added that he hopes the book may inspire readers to “contribute your verse, the one that is uniquely yours, the one you were made, here and now, to say.”