One of his evening poems, among the most enduring images in our culture, once had this second stanza: “On the threshing floors, wrapped in a cloak that smelled of straw, / The summer day, its labour done, was sinking into sleep.” It was neither a very good nor a bad stanza. It did not itself contain the magic “Sesame” that opens the palace of poetry, but neither did it hinder the resurrection of the image of the Armenian Christian household—that thousand-year-old family-state. Every word was his, Sahyan’s, unmistakably Sahyan’s; the capacious image of “the summer day, its labour done” was an especially unique discovery. The stanza could have lived, unobtrusively, in that elegy of Tagorean power, “The Day Grew Dark,” or served as a shrine for one of the family group portraits revealed once and for all and looking out from the many pages of the great book of Sahyan’s song. But the cloak of the peasant summer caught a straw-coloured blaze or a purple glow from the sunset sky and the threshing floors, and in subsequent editions the stanza was cut.
Is this an isolated instance, a matter of the craftsmanship one must possess? Yes, of craftsmanship that directs Sahyan’s entire beautiful body of work towards one and the same principal aim: to be content with revealing people’s inner light and warmth, to worship that fire rather than go about as an illuminator among people no less luminous than oneself.
Festive splendour, the theatre of revelry, spectacle, keeping the black within and showing the red without, turning tears into laughter before friend and foe—none of these has ever been alien to our Armenian spirit, or to Sahyan’s spirit within it. But the point is precisely that our spirit, “averse to everything metaphysical,” always and everywhere seeking and creating a harmonious dwelling, is much more inclined to temper laughter with sorrow and tears with a smile, to “give our pain to the southern wind,” to turn forty years of penance into as many days, and as many days into forty hours. And those who sent Sahyan into Armenian poetry—the Armenian individual, the Armenian home, the Armenian land, whose envoy Sahyan is in this great concert of the world—asked him to tell of them without adding or taking away; taking away, but never adding, never dazzling, telling it in their language: humble Armenian.
His poetry speaks of true things in their own words, releases those words into the shared life of the Armenian language, and makes those things into renewed images belonging to the whole nation. That profound drama of muted colours, hushed voices, wordless beauty and unspoken suffering, far more concerned with what remains silent in every creature of God—this poetry is among the most serious studies of our human nature, among the truest decipherings of the hieroglyphs of our soul. As such, it is indirectly borne out by other facts of the cultural world and by every day of our people’s life.
Sahyan’s Armenian is very like the nameless Armenian described by Xenophon, who welcomes the retreating soldier and gives him his son as a guide; and they take the child of that silent Armenian away, and away for good. He is very like our national song and our stone monuments, too.
Only yesterday, Sahyan’s people were being put to the sword. The pounding hooves of armies turned into herds likewise pointed towards Sahyan’s ancestral home, and the poet clasped that most precious thing to himself and was crucified upon it for ever. The image of the ancestral home, of the native land, seemed to be a passing sensitivity sharpened by war and the fear of loss. It became clear that all hostile arrows, in every age, had been and would be aimed precisely at the ancestral home; that our Armenian language knows no curse more bitter than “May your house fall”; that only the ancestral home keeps a human being sovereign, and that for Sahyan its destruction is the destruction of the human being altogether. Over the decades, the scraps of memory and longing of the soldier in exile grew into a demand for the homeland and for the human monument standing upon his own land.
Captivated by no name or definition, measuring illustrious names and splendid definitions against his national experience and his sole creed as an Armenian poet—THE HUMAN BEING IN HIS HOMELAND—Sahyan chose from the many those few as his teachers and forebears for whom the inviolable identity of the individual is the greatest of ideas. And he will become a teacher and forebear to many, since time, after all, is working under the same motto.