This is Tumanyan:
You are an unknown Poet, never seen before today,
Pouring out songs without words through your radiant eyes.
And I, let us say, am an extraordinary, fortunate Reader,
Reading those songs so easily and so deeply.
But this is not Tumanyan; this is Zahrad:
Together with the poet we set out to sing:
He sings; we act as though we are singing…
We poets are, of course, recorders of divine sound, readers of the divine text, decipherers of the divine writing that is the whole world. And Tumanyan’s reading of God’s text needed another reading: less exalted, less lofty and heavenly, more earthly. That other reading would, of course, find its voice in Western Armenian and in Constantinople, where the pride of our princely, upturned nose had been most thoroughly rubbed away.
Freed by then from the temptation to be a nation of any significant presence beneath these heavens, bearing no mark of the power of a country or state of his own, or of any mission—and thus with his nerves exposed beneath the open sky, his eyes and ears clear—it was surely our Constantinopolitan son of Armenian literature who would see the earth as an anthill and us as nameless ants. It was surely Zahrad who would become our creatures’ whisper and quiet conduct. Through him our literature would present the small and the great human being; through Zahrad the little great human being would become dear to us. Not through Charents, not through Sevak, not through anyone else of our nation or another—only through Zahrad.
How wonderful that Constantinople, the weary, stilled heart of Armenian literature, continued to beat beneath Zahrad’s warm breath. How wonderful that Armenian did not fall silent in the field of modern poetry, but spoke, and became understandable and beloved through Zahrad.