The outline of one of our folk tales is this: while taking bread to her betrothed, a girl falls into the hands of robbers on the sunlit road through the fields, but saves herself with pleas and an oath. She has sworn to come to them even from her bridal bed, but first she must bring her purity unsullied to the young man she is to marry. Later it is night; the lights and songs of the wedding house have been left in the distant village, and the girl follows dark forest paths to those to whom she gave her oath. Before her light, her innocent purity, even the foulness within the robbers naturally withdraws into its darkness, and the virtuous bride returns to her worthy husband.
I am certain that, writing about any other of our worthy living contemporaries, I would not have recalled this tale of purity at once defenceless and powerful — only about the woman whose anniversary we celebrate today. In each of Maro Margaryan’s poems, and throughout her poetic course, there is an anxious, unsettling tremor that recalls the girl’s journey through the night. The anxieties of this poet of uniquely acute perception are, of course, those of her time and homeland. Yet they are joined by your own anxiety as a reader for the poem itself: each time it seems that the poem will not come into being as a poem, will not breathe, cry out or reflect. Yet each time, or almost each time, it is born and breathes.
William Saroyan said that one should write to be inscribed on stone: one must envision hard stone of limited dimensions and write by cutting down the utterance, choosing and refining the words. And although the poet’s fifty years of writing have produced many unquestionable treasures that could be transferred to stone, and although you return for the umpteenth time to long-familiar, dear and authentic images that form part of your inner wealth, the anxiety of that effort to exist still does not leave you. The poet always speaks only of the most precious, most important, least noticed things, things seen by her alone. And you want the word to achieve its artistic form — in other words, immortality. This is where that enduring empathy between her, the poet, and you, the reader, comes from.
Poetry is an ascetic discipline, perhaps the most ascetic of all. Architecture’s thousand-year march brings forth just one pyramid and one Hripsime; poetry does the same. It sets thousands on the road, even entire generations and peoples, but only a chosen few live to see how stern and unyielding poetry’s face is, a face that seemed so promising and enchanting at the start. One of those fortunate few is Maro: a kind of “blind monk” who, feeling her way, falling, faltering, yet always driven onwards again, has reached poetry’s place of pilgrimage.