For a long lifetime of the entire nation, they have driven us, with blow upon blow, fathers, grandfathers and grandchildren, into our fold: to find our modest place, to stretch our feet no farther than our blanket. And many of us — soldiers and politicians, historians and poets, painters and public figures — have already found our modest places and sing to our own little sun.
Our strength as a nation, the strength of us all together, would strengthen each of us in our place, each and all of us. Our national weakness corrupts and distorts the ascent of each and almost all of us.
Those among us who step into this world with the right and will of a son and a master are not corrupted, distorted, broken or left unfinished: an Isahakyan, a Charents, a Saryan and Khachaturian, a Tumanyan.
It seems that the higher imperative of the spirit is as powerful a factor in our conduct and work as the reality that measures us and brings us down to our earthly dimensions. It seems that those among us who enter this world with a son’s and a master’s confidence must have seen, in that other kingdom within them, the image of their God, perceived his soundless whisper. That communion gives their entry into our world the dignified assurance of a pilgrim who has completed the hajj. They have been to their Mecca; they come from their Mecca; they are messengers, filled with the whispers of their God; in their make-up there is no room for other wills.
Razmik Davoyan’s arrival was assured, his voice firm. Such a confident arrival, such justified confidence, such immediate maturity — our poetry had perhaps recorded it a few times before, but my generation had not. Razmik came from other spheres, other times. True poets really do come from another time and live by that intensely condensed time of their own.
Razmik Davoyan is sixty.
Razmik Davoyan’s Requiem is forty. To write lines, fill pages at twenty that, from the very moment of their birth, set out with you, exuberant and ringing; and in the hours of weariness, despair and your falls, to be ashamed of nothing and no one in this world except them, that exuberant, ringing caravan of yours — this means that the twenty-year-old youth really came from Mecca, really read his firm lines, his splendid pages from heaven, from the great Poet called God.
And, in Saroyan’s words, true poets do not die only once. If they die once, they die once and for all. The sixty-year-old Davoyan has died once or twice. At his next, present-day resurrection, he will of course not be the same Razmik: with our whole homeland, as though with an entire continent, we have moved away from ourselves, and from our present distances everything and everyone in yesterday appears in an entirely different, less significant form and meaning. Yet even at our still peaceful resting place of yesterday, it was he, Razmik Davoyan, who, anxious at the collapsing horizons of the future, wove a song of hands he had not taken and lines he had not given voice.
Today we are in the distances foreseen not by any of us, but by him. Today we live his nightmares, which means we live in his times; and in these times the new Davoyan’s step will be a little ahead of ours, as on shores unknown to us and well known to him.