from Unpeopled Language

Krikor Beledian

(Number 11)

they have not
lost—river and reed—
their sometime beauty


there up the hill
                            by turns
                            the sky
                            green blue
                            by turns orange
                            without obstacle
                            to the unyielding horizon
and those lavish lines of black collapse
lacking memory’s hold
lacking crime’s offense
from nothing barely born breathless to the world
wiped clean
some shrubs perhaps foretell a kindly spring
 

a film of ash perhaps a mold-encrusted comb
dust only black dust to the sky and a dawn
that burns traces of extinction’s end


but how?
and when?
and what place on earth
denied you forever the light of land and home?

translated from the Western Armenian by Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis

Read the original in Western Armenian

Listen to the original read by Taline Voskeritchian:

The 1915 genocide of Armenians took particular aim at eliminating the intellectual and literate class, with the goal of obliterating not just a people and their culture but the one tool left to survivors: the language itself. In “Անժողովուրդ լեզու” (“Unpeopled Language”), Beledian’s medium—and, to a large extent, his subject—is the language of Western Armenian in its spectral survival; the poem is a landmark in modern Western Armenian literature.

“Unpeopled Language” is part of Beledian’s magnum opus, Մանտրաներ (Mantras), a 600-page volume of poetry written over more than twenty years. Beledian recasts the mantra as a disruptive tool against what in the volume’s preface he calls “the game of expression.” His aim is to create a “work without contours, held in a ghostly state.” 

“Unpeopled Language” is the final poem of Մանտրաներ (Mantras); the section featured here is the eleventh of the thirteen self-contained sections that make up the poem. 

The challenge of translating Krikor Beledian’s poetry into English has two faces: the face of Beledian and that of the Armenian language. 

Beledian operates outside the boundaries of English-language poetry. Despite all that is haunting and imagistic, Beledian’s verse is neither lyrical nor narrative in any traditional sense. It is also syntactically fractured: phrases are ruptured by interjections, perspective shifts, time seesaws between present and past, and number itself conflates you plural with you singular. In addition, multiple speakers and voices cohabit the same poetic space. 

The beauty of “Unpeopled Language”—in its sounds and in their sequencing—creates a majestic despair, which has guided all our efforts.

Krikor Beledian is widely regarded as the most important literary figure of contemporary Western Armenian literature and one of its most innovative practitioners. A prolific novelist, essayist, and literary critic, he is the author of more than thirty volumes that have been published in the Middle East, Europe, Armenia, and the United States. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, and a long-time resident of Paris, for the last half-century Beledian has chosen to write almost exclusively in Western Armenian, a UN-designated endangered language. Beledian has lectured widely in Europe and the United States.

Taline Voskeritchian has published widely in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East; her prose and translations have appeared in the London Review of Books, The Nation, Bookforum, The Daily Star/International Herald Tribune, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Alik. She is a co-producer of Վահէ Օշական՝ Միջնարար (Vahé Oshagan: Between Acts), an experimental documentary on the modernist Armenian poet Vahé Oshagan, to which she also contributed as translator.

Christopher Millis is the author of four books of poetry, including Impossible Mirrors (Singular Speech, 1994) and the translator of poems by Umberto Saba in The Dark of the Sun (University Press of America, 1994). He has authored four off-Broadway productions, including the libretto for Jean Erdman’s The Shining House (Theater of the Open Eye, 1980). His one-man show Garbage Boy has been staged at the New York International Fringe Festival (2006) and the Saratoga Springs Summer Arts Festival (2008).

As a team, Voskeritchian and Millis’ translations have appeared in the London Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, and International Poetry Review. Their translation of Beledian’s essay “The Bridge” appeared in displaced (Kehrer Verlag, 2022), which represents the first major prose work by Beledian to appear in English.