from Book, Untitled

Shushan Avagyan

Photograph by Anahit Ghazaryan

How I Write and How I Would Like to Write

It’s useless, everything is useless.

One day in spring.

You smile at all except one.

My grandmother would often buy tickets to the circus and take the three of us to see the show.

My throat would start to tighten when the ponies, with their beautiful manes, would enter the ring.

The past never returns, but feelings, they do.

Re-cognized. Re-solved. Re-remembered.

They looked depressed.

First, the ponies would appear and run in a circle, one after another.

Then, a man in a black vest and a black English-style top hat would come to the middle of the ring, whip in hand.

The crowd would start to cheer.

He’d lift his right hand up over his hat and crack the whip swiftly on their backs.

The ponies were nearsighted.

In order not to get confused and perform their tricks correctly, cast-iron blinders were placed on both sides of their eyes, right and left, limiting their range of vision.

Drink this and take flight with Herculean might.



*

Today I saw you on the fourth floor, in the literature department of the university.

I’m going to read my wordwork “Letter to Violette” on May 5 in the Circus Ring. Will you come?

At seven o’clock.

The Armenian version of the wordwork is included in one of the chapters of this book.

When I get up on the stage and start reading, I won’t look at the faces of the people sitting in the audience so that I won’t see you.

So that I won’t know.

I’ll just imagine that you’re sitting there amongst the spectators.

I’ll just imagine that my postcards are adorning your bookcase.

 

*

My grandmother with her Chinese fan.

Reader, prepare yourself to jump through iron hoops.

The band rises to their feet; it’s the triumphal moment.

Everyone’s waiting impatiently.

We’re going to jump through a ring of fire now.

Allez, hop!

That wasn’t as hard as I thought.

Applause.

When it was over and we were leaving the ring all together, someone said that it would’ve been interesting to hear the Armenian version of the wordwork.

Somehow, you’re lucky, reader.

Somehow, she was far.

Someone was standing next to her.

Tsvetaeva asks, Who is the “I” in the poem?

“It’s me,” responds Mandelstam.

Tsvetaeva: What’s the poet’s story?

Mandelstam: This is it. Don’t go looking for something else.

Tsvetaeva: How do I wait for TOMORROW?

Mandelstam: Renounce death and TOMORROW will come.

Tsvetaeva: How do I renounce death?

Mandelstam: By writing.

To study the stones, to learn from their demeanors, adopt their hardened expressions.

To be greedy with adjectives.

To describe animate objects so they become inanimate.

A short exercise: write a wordwork based on the element of repetition.

“Dogma.”

Faith is a fox. The fox of all foxes.

Faith accepts the recognition of faith. The recognition of the fox.

Faith cannot exist alongside the fox. It’s destructive. But. Faith is a fox.

This is the truth. Faith is a fox. The fox of all foxes. That’s the way it is. Faith as faith must exist.

The fox nourishes faith. Faith is nourished by the fox. This is the truth. Because.

The fox is the truth. Faith is based upon truth. The truth is what it is. The truth is whatever you want it to be.

Faith says: I. Faith says: I know. Faith says: I know the truth. But.

The fox is what it is. This is the truth. Because. Being is a fox.

Faith is faith that reigns. Faith wants to reign over the fox. Over the fox of all foxes. But.

Of all the truths, the fox is the truest truth. Because the truth is a fox. The fox of all foxes.

That’s the way it is. The fox has no faith. Because.

Violette says that exercises are useful and necessary.

The audience isn’t clapping for the ponies; they’re clapping for their trainers.

I’ve come up with a new title for the book:

“An Exercise.”

To forget someone, and to remember others.

The portraits of Armenian writers from different centuries are arranged along one of the walls of the fourth or fifth floor of the Yerevan Public Library.

Something’s missing.

A lot of things are missing. For example, two sentences from this chapter are missing.

The most important part is missing, but you, my good reader, don’t notice.

You don’t ask questions.

For example, what would they talk about if they’d met each other in 1926, one day in spring?

Or for example, why do some books never get published?

Or why is the State Academy issuing its fifth edition of Wounds of Armenia?

translated from the Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz

Read the original in Armenian

Girk-Anvernagir was written as a literary experiment and published as samizdat in Yerevan in 2006. Over 26.5 chapters of seemingly unrelated vignettes in disparate and unidentified voices, the reader discovers that Shushan Avagyan, while writing the novel as a translator’s diary, is also mapping out a larger archival or archeological site: an imagined encounter between two early twentieth-century feminist writers, Zabel Yesayan and Shushanik Kurghinian, whose legacies have largely been obscured and forgotten as a result of Stalin’s regime and the patriarchal rendering of the Armenian literary and historical canons. Yesayan’s and Kurghinian’s imagined encounter in 1926 is juxtaposed with a contemporary conversation between the novel’s unknown narrator—an archivist and translator referred to as the “typist/writer”—and her friend Lara, who are both piecing together the writers’ fragmented stories.

The lines that separate the narrative plots, past, present, and imagined, are blurred. Each chapter brings readers a new (part of the) story. There are multiple points of view, yet who, in any given moment, is speaking? Several genres overlap across textual fragments: poetry, prose, epistolary, a math equation. Words are censored, authors uncited, text is missing, italicized, as if in draft form, and neologisms are rendered within neologisms. In this multi-authored experiment, penned yet anew by its translator, Girk perhaps is best understood as a work that proliferates meaning through what Bakhtin called a heteroglossic imagination, where “another’s speech in another’s language…express(es) authorial intentions [through] refract[ion].” Book, Untitled, Girk’s English translation, then, is yet another layer of this refraction: not an original; not a copy; it is an/other reading. If the reader finds themselves asking—How can we distinguish voices or why are they indistinguishable? Who has written, and who is writing?—then Avagyan has succeeded in her experiment to “deprivatize words,” enabling them to “belong neither to the typist/writer,” the translator, “nor to you, reader” so that instead, they “unite our past, present and future" (Girk-Anvernagir, 106).

What is Historical, what is imagined? On which terms is this distinction made? What has been, and what is still being censored? Avagyan’s neologisms—that strange Armenian and which in every iteration stubbornly resist translation—might be what she refers to in the following excerpt, as “wordwork.” It is through such “wordwork” that Avagyan provokes readers to question what comes to be narrated as History: բացա-հայտ(նաբեր)ել—“ex-tract(plain)” or “dis-cover/un-cover”—in order to “Re-assume. Re-analyze. Re-remember.” That task, dear reader, is handed over with care to you.

This chapter is a meditation—of the typist/writer, of the author, of Yesayan, of Kurghinian?—on writing. Throughout Girk, Avagyan refers to a number of literary and historical figures. This excerpt features the author Marina Tsvetaeva (1892—1941), a Moscow-born Russian/Soviet poet renowned for her poetry, verse plays, and prose; the Russian Jewish poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam (1891—1938), one of the “foremost members” of the Acmeist school of poets; and Violette Grigoryan (b. 1962), an important Armenian contemporary writer, one of the founders and editors of the literary journal Inknagir.

Shushan Avagyan (b. 1976) is author of the novel Girk-Anvernagir (Book, Untitled, 2006), Zarubyani Kanayk (Zarubyan’s Women, 2014) and co-author, with the Queering Yerevan collective, of Queered: What’s To Be Done with X-Centric Art (2011). She has translated several books into English, including a volume of Shushanik Kurghinian’s poetry (from Armenian) entitled I Want To Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian and Viktor Shklovsky’s A Hunt for Optimism (from Russian). Her articles, interviews, and translations have appeared in Context, Contemporary Women’s Writing, The Book of Saint Ejneb, Asymptote, and Dissidences: Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism.

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz (b. 1987) is a researcher and part-time literary translator. Her articles and translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, The Armenian Weekly, The Armenian Review, Armenia: Imprints of a Civilization, and Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915 (forthcoming, Routledge). Her research focuses on the multi-genre “counter-archives” of contemporary (ethnosexual) dissidents in the Armenian/Turkish contexts. Currently, she is writing a monograph and performance project with Istanbul-based architect Bengi Güldoğan on the legacies of shared family trauma and redactive methods of archiving. She splits her time between Philadelphia and Venice.