Time is as tangible as the whole world. Place the image of the century’s beginning beside today’s, and time proves palpably tangible, like this tree, this field, this homeland, from which one can move away, towards which one can draw near.
Sahyan and his generation carried the cradle of our present in their hands. It was a tragically beautiful generation, the generation that held a rifle like a spade and itself smashed and crushed fascism, which it might have called “pashism”. In utter solitude it buttoned its trousers, embarrassed before itself; sat down to bread, embarrassed before bread as before its equal. They had grown together in the field: one made the other human, the other made him bread, and after that mutual creation, eating one’s companion from the field was betrayal. With the same forge hammer that generation would beat out a shield for an atomic reactor, not knowing what it forged or why. Yes, today’s times were brought by a generation forged on the old anvil of morality, but a person’s deed always outruns both heart and mind. Rutherford had split the atomic nucleus, stood amid the enormous energy issuing from it, and considered even the bare acknowledgement of that fact delirium. That is how Sahyan and his generation split time in two.
Time did not split in the poet’s Hamlet-like heart: it truly split, and the graceful image of Sahyan’s poetry emerges from that chasm. He strives, wishes, labours to fill the gulf with himself, because one cannot be the father of a family between grandfather and grandson and let them live so estranged beneath one roof, because… What is “because” when speaking of poetry? It is beautiful, it exists. The very fact of its existence, its existence in this way, lays a deep respect within a person for this unmasked confession, dressed in no latest fashion, defended by no advocate, justifying its existence by no armies, appearing in the public square openly unprotected: “I am here, but my heart is in the Scottish Highlands.”
This seems a fragile creed. At any rate, by it the poet exposes himself to being challenged, or at best remaining unnoticed. It seems he should have entered a dialogue with the age in the age’s vocabulary; should have drawn the wave of social, national, public agitation beneath his short poetic stature and found himself… on Mount Masis’s summit. But then the wave passes, revealing the abyss that has swallowed so many giants of a day.
To avoid becoming such a figure, one must not race another, whether that other is a great poetic personality or “the voice of the multitude”. One must not be a philistine or become philistinism’s mouthpiece. Though philistinism is omnivorous and devours hatred as readily as love, pantheism as readily as urbanism, the “philosophy of poverty”, the “philosophy of luxury”, even the work The Philistines written against it; though it will also devour your private poetic torments, unrelated to its demands—answering its demand and imposing your poetic self upon it are nevertheless entirely different things. In the second case one can hope for the philistine’s humanisation.
Hamo Sahyan imposed himself. It seemed he should not have been able to: the set of symbols he brought, the intermediary language between the polar chart of a poet’s soul and the poet himself, was old and itself already needed deciphering. Yet Sahyan imposed himself.
Because what matters is not so much, not at all, how new or old that set of symbols is, but only how truly his own it is; how truly his own are the image-words that pull poems like male camels, turning verse into poetry. The ox, rainbow, youth, longing, alarm, migration, cliff and care are old, of course. But they are merely old in grammatical or even conversational language, old even in a mediocre poet’s good poem, because they have entered it unchanged. A bell without a bell tower does not ring well, of course. Those old words must receive the new meaning the poet gives them, become images again, become his messengers on his mission. And then—
…The song is truly a song,
What is old and what is new?
Many write poems, even good poems, but few enter poetry: those who come with their own set of symbols, images, words and stresses, their own alphabet. Of those few, the rare ones who become great and are called great are those whose set, whose alphabet recreates their own soul’s polar chart—yes, precisely that—with the greatest possible accuracy and completeness. Otherwise, how many people are rich in soul, inwardly poets, yet never become poets because they cannot approach themselves. The black ram carries them sometimes into Tumanyan’s kingdom, sometimes Lorca’s, sometimes Charents’s or Narekatsi’s. Those are beautiful kingdoms, but here they are called the dark world, because poetry is a journey towards oneself, the poet’s self-discovery and, through it, the discovery of a new world. In those cases, instead of discovery there was destruction, caused by the absence of one’s own means of travel and the adoption of another’s. That is equivalent to leaping onto a black ram to emerge into the world of light. While the comparison suggests it, let me say that Sahyan each time, continually, so continually that it seems once and for all, leapt onto the white ram’s back and each time, always, emerged into his kingdom of light. Since Songs and Wounds, our poetry has seldom known a surge like Cliffs. Or like Before Sunset, or Sesame.
The unified image of his poetry and himself as creator is in a certain sense very like the labourer who does his own work, everything from beginning to end: the figure in his magnificent Grandfather—
My grandfather ploughed,
My grandfather sowed,
And at harvest time
In the hand that held the sickle
His wrist ached…
Had this splendid tale not existed—for a thousand reasons it could not fail to exist—I would have compared the poet to a tree for clarity: a tree among bare rocks, relying on its own roots’ strength, calling dead lifelessness into trembling life solely through its own power. Yet it turns out that trees, bushes, grass, ears of grain, plants in short, do not come into being only through that mysterious effort and suffering. There is also mistletoe, which embeds itself in the tree’s already living body and feeds on ready-made sap. This is uncommon in the plant world, common in poetry. Botanists call them parasites; literary scholars, regrettably, only epigones, merely epigones—that is, poets, albeit epigones. Yet the first and only condition for being called a poet is how much lifelessness you have called into life, what new plantations you have wrested for poetry from reality’s jungle, how much you have increased poetry’s “national wealth”. More concretely: have you increased the quantity of gold on earth?
Hamo Sahyan has entered the gathering and conducts his lavish trade in words solely with his own ringing gold stamped “SAHYAN”, gold he alone has mined, refined, smelted and stamped.
Sahyan is a great poet, although by some strange logic it is hard to apply that epithet to someone who “does not speak of great things”, but considers himself called to “decipher the mystery of the ear of grain”. That seems unrelated to patriotism, yet is as lofty a patriotism as Tumanyan’s writing for children. He seems out of his time, but is out of it precisely as Metsarents was:
There was blood in the world. There were genocide and battle.
Enormous forces rose like mountains, fearsome against each other.
In a village far from the world, having cut a reed flute,
This sick, brilliant young man sang of sun and spring.
That is to say, he is his time’s most sensitive instrument of response.
Sahyan is more the poet of tomorrow than of today.