Four Poems

Punctuation is all too important in poetry, and its use or lack thereof helps readers understand the shape and form that the poet wishes to provide to the rhythm and melody of each work. Without sitting in a warm room full of appreciators of the art listening to the poet read, these markings guide, lure, pause, break, sustain, stiffen, add breath to, and frustrate our reading. Maintaining in the receiving language, in so far as it is possible, the potential quickenings, disruptions, bated inhalations, and discomfort the original can provoke is an essential but complicated process. In “My body grew,” Ohanyan inquires as she lingers through the use of an ellipsis and hartsakan nshan (՞), the Armenian question mark. In English, the question is implied, but in Armenian, she emphatically questions the subject of the poem, the body, and leaves the answer open. Placing a question mark at the end of this line felt like a closing rather than an invitation to consider the decayed corpse, an invitation which underscores her play on the impact between an interior and exterior world, and, more importantly, the texture of the limit between them both. Another formal choice on my part was to combine what was two lines in the Armenian—“I died:” and “unknown birds . . . ”—into one for flow after the full stop in the line above. The mijaket (.) functions more or less like a colon in English, while what the English reader will see in the Armenian as colons, or verjaketner (:), correspond to a full stop in Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages. This inspired me to opt for a shorter pause invited by the colon in English and the mijaket in Armenian, by bringing the lines together, especially given the repetition between lines which adds to the cadence of the piece. 
 
Translating from the Armenian poses a distinct set of challenges, which force consideration at a molecular level of each particle between orthographies and punctuation. Syntax and form, rhyme and melody also emerge through this atomic struggle of language; for example, in “The Clouds Are Melting About You,” what reads as a consistent error—ending every line with “about you”—mimics the strangeness of the Armenian, and is a purposeful rhyme to draw in the reader. In order to maintain the rhythm Ohanyan positions, I translated “The clouds are melting about you” literally, apart from areas where a different syntax would obscure the meaning, such as by changing “The clouds melting are you about” to “The cloud are melting about you,” which remains strange but maintains the form Ohanyan begot. It is a pleasure to read and translate Siranuysh Ohanyan’s poetry, work that embalms the body and heart as it questions existential longing and self-alienation, and which opens a small window into the Armenian poetry scene.