Deanna Cachoian-Schanz was awarded one of the prestigious PEN Translates grants earlier this year for her work on Shushan Avagyan’s Girq-anvernakir: a rich, experimental novel that speaks to repressions, literary legacy, and the expansive collisions between disparate writings, voices, times, and lives. Soon to be released as A Book, Untitled through Tilted Axis, Avagyan’s work is emblematic of literature as an act of congregation and communality in giving voice to the silenced, and in this following interview, Cachoian-Schanz speaks on how translation furthers that textual power.
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Shushan Avagyan is also a translator; did this affect the way you worked with the text, and were there conversations between you two about how this translation should be approached?
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (DCS): Of course! As I intimated in the Translator’s Afterword, my translation style tends to keep as close to the text as possible, prioritizing the words on the page and not what I imagine as the “author’s intent.” As Barthes famously declared in 1967, “the author is dead!” However, when working with contemporary literature, the elephant in the room is that the author is still speaking! How can we not, as responsible translators, take the authors’ voices into consideration, especially when they are fluent in the target language?
In the final instances of the English-language text, Shushan and I were in close and caring contact to make the final touches, together. When I first started to translate the book back in 2010, it was a way for me to work on my Armenian—to carefully improve my vocabulary and language skills through a text I was invested in knowing deeply. However, because Book is in part a translator’s diary, sometimes I felt as if the author was already telling me how to translate her work, or even trolling me, her future translator. It’s hard to not take certain lines to heart when you’re that deep into the text; when you’re translating, you really get into that mindset, as if the author is speaking directly to you, for you. Perhaps translation is in part some kind of mania. . .
In any case, in Shushan’s novel, some of those lines read: “Question: How does one choose the right approach? How does one remain faithful to the text? / Answer: Gradually, step by step; in the beginning read the whole thing through, familiarize yourself with the writer’s style, internalize their unique voice, see the world through their eyes. . . Finish their unfinished sentences, / certain that your additions only balance or straddle their gaps. . .” The whole passage reads like a lesson in how I should approach the translation of this work. Helpfully didactic, or utterly audacious?! Other passages were near demands: “If you don’t know what it’s about, then I beg you please don’t distort the essence and meaning of the work! / Don’t make it ‘comprehensible’!” Those lines really ate at me. Eventually I realized, however, while moving through the translation, that these lines were less demands at the reader than the pleas of a translator against what she felt as the guillotine of the editor’s pen, especially in a work of poetry.
Ten years later, when we finally sat down together to go through the translation and send it out to publishers, our editing process became a well-oiled machine. Working so closely and affectively, I think, we both tried to create a different kind of editing process to the usual guillotine—one that was a give and take on both ends, and ultimately, formed through a huge trust and confidence between the two of us. We’d send chapters back and forth to each other, editing one every month or so between Yerevan and Istanbul/Venice/Philadelphia and wherever I happened to be. . . This book really traveled with us, and me, on many circular returns. When I’d visit Yerevan, we’d try to get through five chapters in one sitting, working side-by-side on her living room couch with some coffee, dried apricots, and the light coming through the paned windows; the shadows of the tall pine trees outside her front window casting onto the living room floor. We took advantage of that proximity, and over the course of translating and editing, a real friendship formed. I can say what has grown over those years of translating, writing, and editing, has truly been one of the most generous working relationships I’ve experience thus far in my professional life.
We definitely had some disagreements: I really wanted to translate the Armenian gender-neutral third person singular pronoun na as they. I thought it could be an interesting, queer experiment, especially because I thought: This novel is so fragmented that honestly I don’t really see how even the Armenian-language reader could keep track of who’s who amongst the cast of characters. And, How cool is it that Armenian—perhaps over and against culturally ingrained heteropatriarchy, is, on the level of language, gender neutral? Ironically, it’s English that in this sense is so restricting—it constantly imposes gender! But indeed, using they in the English translation would have perhaps been too distracting or confusing for the English-language reader. In the end, the text is not as arbitrary as it might seem. There’s a very clear sense of who’s speaking in the novel, even though it’s not always perceptible; that’s part of the puzzle, or the reader’s task of disentanglement.
Another point Shushan made—and with which ultimately I agreed—was that one of the book’s main purposes is to discuss the silencing of women authors in the Armenian literary canon. If we didn’t use she/her pronouns, and instead privileged a non-binary rendition, we’d risk re-silencing these voices. The censorship Book is writing against, in, or through, is not about breaking or challenging the gender binary as such (though I’d certainly say that the book is very aware that the gender binary is the context for the gendered violence and erasure that the protagonists faced). Instead, however, the book is about giving voice to those who were marginalized on the very basis of that structural, binary system: so, those who are called, raised as, and become “women” (however construed).
A translator can and indeed, by necessity, always does intervene through their own reading of the text, which is subjective and based on their own embodied experience. The translator’s never invisible. Translators, readers, always approach a text through the material-discursive conditions through which we’ve learned how to understand the world. Sometimes I hear historians say that rendering a text through the translator’s present lens is anachronistic, but none of us, including historians, can read with and through the eyes of the past, no matter how “objective” or “past-oriented” we think we can be. Indeed, “oriented” is the operative word here, because all readings are present readings, influenced by and through the lifeworlds that surround and condition us. They’re always oriented somewhere or to sometime. Always.
Shushan constantly reminds me, This is your text, Deanna. I’m not sure how much I really can fully agree with that on an emotional level, but to have her encouragement and confidence, both as an author and translator, has been a privilege. I can say that I came into my own voice as a translator while working through Shushan’s work, but that is also partially attributed to having her simultaneously as my translation mentor. Over these ten years, this book has intertwined our lives. . . This, I think, is how translation should be approached. I suppose Shushan was right: “Read their rough drafts, see and understand their mistakes. / Finish their unfinished sentences, / certain that your additions only balance or straddle their gaps.” Sometimes Shushan and I do that now, each with the other and in both directions. Perhaps, with a living author, in the best of worlds, this is how translation can be approached: ուսումնասիրով—ousoumnasırov—through a love of learning, not just about a text, but about and through an affection and respect for one another.
XYS: This work is fragmentary, occasionally aphoristic, and branching outwards as secretively as an ongoing investigation. Working with a text that has so many references and interconnective tissues, how did you feel the English language evolve in response to the original Armenian? What was happening on the linguistic level that fascinated, perturbed, or moved you?
DCS: Oh goodness, where to start? “Disentangle yourself. / And disentangle me.” These two verses encapsulate the sense of how the English language evolved in response to the Armenian text, but also how the Armenian evolved through the English translation of Girq—and also how I felt the dance between author and translator: each disentangling the other as she tried to understand her(self). A true relationality. Shushan came up with a series of neologisms in this book, which were challenging to translate: batsa-hayt(naber)el was perhaps the one with the most possibilities in English. The word, a mix between the verbs batsel (to open) and haytnaberel (to make known), means something like “open-seen/known(bring it forth).” Translation options included “ex-tract(plain),” “dis-cover,” “un-cover,” “un- fold.” In the end, I translated it as “dis(un)cover.” I think that what potentially comes out in the English through the Armenian is this idea that, in order to uncover what’s been covered up, a spirit of “discovery” is needed to make connections amongst the gaps—or to quote from the title of one of Yesayan’s novels, among the ruins. So, in a sense, perhaps the Armenian helps to disambiguate or delve more deeply into the etymologies of both languages, re-newing our understandings of the past in the present. “To comprehend something new one must learn another language, customs, culture; in a word, they must live another way of life . . .” I think this is true, and translation is the bridge to those worlds, in part. “Just like, for example, when you live in foreign milieus and in other circumstances, in different cities; a person’s being doesn’t change but is reinscribed with new meaning.” I think it’ll be up to the readers now to see what might be reinscribed with new meaning for them. This process of disentanglement, both linguistically and personally, was most moving to me.
XYS: Shushan has previously spoken about diasporic existence and the incorrect perpetuation that rootlessness is an inevitable condition—when really, new roots, histories, and traditions are necessarily formed as a result of the diaspora. This speaks pretty potently to how and what she writes about in A Book, Untitled, which addresses authorship, internal and external exiles and returns, and all the very different ways a story about life can be told. What do you think this text can tell us about borrowing from the past, or the choices we make in deciding what to take with us into the future?
Well, perhaps I’d read the book in a different way: not so much as a remaking of tradition, but as deviating from tradition and posing questions that might challenge our canonical understandings of it. I think what this book can tell us about the past is that our present is conscribed by it, always, and so the questions we must ask of it are not what can be recovered, but how we might seek to tell the story of its dis/appearance. So, it’s not a question about content but about method. We need to learn to ask different questions. What happened is an important question, but not nearly as important as the question How was it made to disappear, or How/why is it that I don’t know. When you start asking that question, then it’s about understanding power and its influence in what we have come to know. “The past never returns, but feelings, they do.”
What is the difference between “the past” and “feelings”? The book doesn’t give an answer, but I think this is the nodal point through which to ponder how we act on those feelings about the past in the present, in order to bring us towards the future. So, the nexus between How do I know what I know/don’t know and How does that make me feel and How will I act differently to bring about a different outcome are all a part of the same set of questions that might bring us into a (more hopeful, more equitable?) future.
Regarding re-making tradition or re-planting roots in a diaspora or in a condition of exile, I’d say that it’s kind of like translation. The same story is told slightly askew, very familiar but in a new way because it’s fed by new plants, watered by new rains, shaded by new trees, inspired by new springs. I suppose in regards to method, it’s not for nothing that this translation itself arose of my own diasporic condition as an Armenian woman who grew up in New York. I arrived to Girq through that condition, and through translation, told the story of yet another dis/appearance, my own: why is it that Armenian was not my mother tongue as an Armenian-American, as opposed to Armenians in the Middle East who grow up speaking Armenian as their mother tongue? Of course, this is both a story of exile, and of how racialization works in different ways in different geographies: in the American model, assimilation to whiteness is the de facto method of erasure and dis/appearance, whereas in the Middle East, Armenians are a distinguished community ethnoreligiously, and language and identity are distinguished (and othered) in different ways there.
Just to give some perspective on the transnational positionalities of “Armenianness” in different geographies, I’ll iterate something my colleague Veronika Zablotsky points out in her dissertation, which is that Armenians are “white” in North America, “Middle Eastern” in Western Europe, “European” in the Middle East and South Asia, and “black” in Russia. . . So, I wonder to what extent this book would exist in English if it weren’t for my own diasporic melancholia or longing towards a tradition that was severed, or nearly made to dis/appear through whiteness, in the United States. What’s more, the process of translating and editing this book took place in three very important cultural centers for the Armenian world: I was given the book in Yerevan, I started to translate in New York, took that project up seriously in Venice, and then finally, edited in Istanbul. Istanbul, of course, is what makes the circle actually incomplete, or slightly askew: it’s the center of the former empire from which my own family fled. . . and here I am, bringing Armenian to this place, in a strange, diasporic condition. . .
So, what brings the reader this English translation, then, is a process of exile and return in and of itself. Just as Girq is a product of its writer writing in self-imposed exile, Book is somehow originating in unchosen exile and longing to return to something or somewhere. Of course, returns are never full or complete, or rather, they never take us back to their place of origin. They always lead us somewhere different, yet never completely foreign.
XYS: Shushan has in the past been a part of Queering Yerevan, a collective that aims to disrupt hierarchical and heterogeneous sociopolitical structures, thereby providing an alternative, radical mode; do you see the mutuality, estrangement, subversion of A Book, Untitled as working alongside such (re-)constructive and imaginative constructs of queerness?
DCS: I’m not exactly sure what you mean by the “(re-)constructive” and “imaginative constructs” of queerness, as I understand queerness first and foremost as a process of subversion with a never-stable referent. In that sense, I don’t see queerness as concomitant with (re-)construction, because it never (should be) in the business of construction. Better stated, I think the power of queerness (and perhaps this is a more old-school or “orthodox” sense of queerness à la Sedgwick) lies in its investment in deconstructing or toppling hegemonic frames of knowing and being, specifically related to the hegemonic interpretations of gender and sexuality. The power of queerness, queer gestures, and queer politics, can certainly be applied to other realms of life, but I think we shouldn’t forget its “roots,” so to speak—regarding its “originary” contentions with normative gender and sexuality—as it ventures into new diasporas of its productive iteration. This might be an unpopular idea, but I think that using queerness too liberally so that it is a catch-phrase or gesture of deconstruction or general disruption for anything and everything—that is, completely outside of its investments in critiques of gender and sexuality—risks vacating its significance and the important work it still has to do in those realms. Of course, we can look and see queerly about just about anything, but that “queer eye” or “queer critique,” I think, holds its most powerful meaning when it’s not just about looking at something askew or untraditionally, but because it is coming from a subject or structural position invested in deconstructing heteronormative ways of being.
If by “imaginative constructs” you mean a gesture towards queer futurity, a future we imagine as possible, as queers, then yes, I would say that the text does—in certain ways, and in ways immediately not so perceptible—create that queer future through estrangement and subversion. Indeed, I think we can say that Book is a great example of what Halberstam called “queer time.” It sees time otherwise, it is structured by many timeframes, and each of those timeframes and places turns the other on its head. In my reading, Book might create that queer future you suggest because it performs postponement: the postponement of the arrival of histories, as well as the readers’ perceptual postponement. To whom are these love letters written, actually? Think carefully. Think queerly. Disentangle them. Read them on their own, separate from the rest of the text.
XYS: A Book, Untitled is built around the silences—both the silences of the imaginary correspondence within, the oppressive silences of the state, and the silent disappearances of who-knows-what. As a translator, how did you negotiate with these silences?
DCS: On a technical level, I don’t think I had to negotiate them too much, as my primary job was to give voice to how Shushan’s gaps and silences in Armenian would echo in English. So, my primary task was to render voice, to give words and the gaps between them an echoing effect in a different language. In this case, I think that the project of rendering those silences is attributable only to Shushan and her “wordwork.” Of course, putting my academic’s hat on, I wanted to give English-language readers greater access to the context of these oppressive silences and the characters that have been constructed through them—hence the chapter guides, the introductory Note on Book, and the Afterword. As a writer who wishes constantly to trust her reader, Shushan was wholly against footnotes, which I totally respect and agree with, but the literary scholar side of me bore out in wanting to give readers as much background knowledge as possible, so at least they could better follow the fragments.
On an emotional level, of course, the silences of the state, of the disappearances, of the correspondences, of beloved ones lost in my own life over the course of making this translation, were all lived anew. Re-remembered. Re-lived. As the love-letters concluded, I too said goodbye to a life partner, my life starting anew, in a type of self-imposed exile, one that brought me from my diasporic context “back” to the lands of my ancestors. . . I brought this project to conclusion while living here in Istanbul—the hometown of Zabel Yesayan, one of Book’s protagonists; but also, the country from which my own family, the ones who survived against indescribable horrors, escaped over one hundred years ago. The effects of those silences came flooding in. “Nostalgia is more torturous in spring.”
What’s more, the period of finalizing this book coincided with yet another ethnic cleansing and erasure campaign against Armenians, backed by pan-Turkish nationalist sentiments between Turkey and Azerbaijan. By the time this interview is published, the autonomous republic of Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh will have officially ceased to exist (come January 1, 2024). To live through the prose of Book in this particular moment has been a painful reality, a surreal echo of the past in my present. Some of the passages about the silences of the past reverberate now through state denialism and support of the military industrial complex, which uses ethnoracism as one of its primary tools of destruction. So, the silences the book re-vitalizes have been especially present for me from this side of the border.
A section from Chapter 3 (the most moving chapter for me) is one of the book’s first imagined discussions between Zabel Yesayan—an Armenian writer from Istanbul who dodged the April 24, 1915 roundup of Istanbul Armenian intellectuals at the start of the Catastrophe—and Shushanik Kurghinian—an Armenian writer from Gyumri who was also on the tsar’s blacklist and went into a self-imposed exile. This imagined conversation haunts me here in Istanbul, as if the silences of the past, and what happened to these ancestors, constantly whisper to me through these pages, reminding me that unfortunately, they still continue today.
XYS: Existing too alongside the silence is a big what-if, as you articulated in your afterword: “What form might the development of political and feminist thought, or literary aesthetics in an Armenian context, have taken had there been unobscured access to or the complete archival preservation of some of Armenian literature’s most consequential writers?” What do you think this book, from its post-Soviet, Armenian context, gifts to the Anglophone in terms of political understanding or reconciliation with history? How can the what-if work when transposed to different arenas?
DCS: I think I’ve in part already responded to some of what you ask here, but to expand, I hope that the translation of Girq-anvernagir will provide a sense of expanded history, geopolitically and socioculturally speaking. I hope that bringing Book into English will allow readers to access not only the different and vibrant literary forms, styles, and projects from geographies less known to (or indeed marginalized by) the Anglophone context, but also, in terms of political understandings, I hope that it will give an expanded sense of the histories and hierarchies of power that structure other parts of the globe, in both similar and different ways than in the West. Perhaps in this sense, by understanding the throughlines and common themes of how domination is wielded on a global scale, new possibilities for solidarity can be formed. In this sense, the Armenian reality is so rich. It is a lens through which we can better understand some of the terms that animate the regions of the South Caucasus, ex-Soviet republics, and diasporas of the Ottoman Empire and Middle East: as a transnation, Armenia straddles—and disrupts—all these categories.
For example, the question of racialization—it’s not one of the explicit themes of the novel, but certainly, the events around the novel are implicitly structured through ethnoracial oppressions in Soviet and post-Soviet colonial contexts, as well as in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman imperial contexts. These references to regimes subtly pepper the text, yet still arrive as powerfully acerbic to the reader, and some of Book’s language (for example, its use and references to Armenians’ “blackness”) invites the English-language reader to examine how diverse regimes of racialization as subjugation traffic on a wider global stage.
The same, I would say, goes for feminism, for feminist struggles, and for how queer writing or subversive creative works are rendered in other contexts—different from the Western liberal frame which privileges visibility, transparency, or the public declaration of “coming out.” Instead of obliging to regimes of seeing and hearing as inherently liberatory, I think Book invites us to be in tune with different models and gestures of resistance, subversion, and change: ones that are more focused on form, on moving through silences, of re-casting queer life as partially exposed—not oppressed while still obfuscating full visibility, and preserving, perhaps, the play and the pleasure in not (being forced to) exposing everything but still joyfully existing in and through it. When something is queerly pleasurable, I think it’s because the pleasure comes from its non-normalization, its non-conformity with the heteropatriarchal hegemon or status quo. I think book shares in that sentiment. At least that’s how I read it.
So, perhaps when transposed into different arenas, the “what-if” can become a “what-now”? A change from the conditional tense to actionable possibility in the present.
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is a feminist scholar, part-time literary translator, freelance editor, and project consultant for exhibitions, creative projects, and academic works. Her work can be found here.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, writer, translator, and editor. Born in China and living on Vancouver Island. then telling be the antidote won the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize and will be published in 2023. How Often I Have Chosen Love won the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in 2019. shellyshan.com.
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