“Language is the undeniable condition of our being, our existence. This small land and people won through language their little place on the world’s map and the earth’s vast expanse, the names Armenian and Armenia written upon the brow of the centuries. Language is a way of living; language is a world, nourishment and a means of struggle, a way to express and manifest oneself.”
“What is language to you?”
“Language is homeland. One might think different approaches are required for me and for some peasant woman, that I feel strong in language through my knowledge of Vahan Teryan, Movses Khorenatsi, the epic, the rural and cultural layers. Yet we must not forget that the pleasure of language is experienced, if not by the whole people, then at least by many who perceive language as music, theatre, play, painting. For them too, language contains the cultural layers of their Vahan Teryan and Khorenatsi; for them too, language is homeland.”
“Language is a world. But my attitude today ought to differ from yesterday’s. Under the shared life of the former Union’s peoples, with losses of language and even the disappearance of small nations’ languages, my words took an entirely different tone. I was militant about protecting language, with aggressive appeals to the authorities to return to the linguistic homeland and, as foreign-language and Russian-language schools multiplied, to bring them into that homeland. That was my attitude then; it is not so now. Yet my position as a citizen was more favourable then. There was a definite platform: citizenship in the great Soviet country also enabled me to become an opposition force and fight for something. Now my footing is a little unstable. It is as though neither the stability the Union brought nor its danger remains. Ultimately, a complete language is the union of different linguistic domains: administration, the army, factories, the street, various jargons. You have no military industry, so you have no vocabulary for that domain; your offices work in other languages, so your whole language grows poorer. I envy the Georgians’ and Estonians’ determination to make every domain Georgian-speaking or Estonian-speaking under intense competition. I had moments of jealousy. Small nations such as the Georgians and Estonians already then set aside people from among their own, sat them down and had them translate Joyce, tried to transfer the summits of world culture into their small linguistic territories. They had a stronger awareness that the loss of language is the loss of a people. That danger has not disappeared among us. Today the Armenian language, the intelligentsia and the people live in other dimensions. A tiny portion of the nation lives through the language, enriches it and puts it to use. The rest are occupied elsewhere and, in effect, are not children of Armenian. Will our intelligentsia manage to issue an invitation to return to writing and language, as the small contingent of Armenian clergy did over fifteen hundred years? By preserving Classical Armenian, it was effectively able, within the bounds of church and language, to call the nation back to itself, to its language.”
“Our task will be the same as our ancestors’ if we can issue that invitation. Scattered across the world, we have many who are outside our cultural sphere. This is one of our difficult times. Yet the largest contingent of the intelligentsia is here. The potential is here. If, in today’s conditions, Armenia could become a Mekhitarist congregation and send its light, its writing, to the four corners…”
“The existence of a great domain, rural language, is endangered. One day I went into the late Sahyan’s home and found him sweating, papers strewn around him, sitting and grunting and puffing, probably uncomfortable too. He had written down five hundred words connected with bread: furrow, yoke, yoke bow, ox, chaff, ear of grain, sowing, threshing floor, winnowing, going to one’s parents’ home, stack, mill, flour… On and on they came. And at the end he said: today’s child knows just two words in place of all those—kopeck and loaf. That is how far the Armenian reader draws away from biblical texts, estranging himself from peasant, rural, agricultural Armenian. Yet Christianity spread as much in the countryside as in the marketplace. And the greatest part of that vocabulary concerns rural work. By becoming estranged from this large linguistic region, a person estranges himself from the light brought by the Bible and medieval culture. If we say that medieval, world and our own literature are largely woven from it too, then to that extent this literature becomes difficult to digest and needs annotations.”
“Language has a biography of its own, which writers also create.”
“We must not forget language’s biography. Look: even Tumanyan was not puritanical towards Turkish, was no linguistic purist. Peoples lived together, languages mingled, and language’s biography took shape. See what literary history teaches us: all masterpieces arose from the people’s living language. Remember Abovyan’s ‘Wounds of Armenia,’ Sundukyan’s titanic presence with Tiflis’s flavourful, savoury language. And on the other side, what did the purists do? There is something: in poetry it seems to work. In works of short breath, a pure language takes shape: Varuzhan, Metsarents, Teryan…”
“And the language’s division… However necessarily the gulf between Western and Eastern Armenian arose, it nevertheless swallowed and carried off many colours.”
“There will be a great, unified Armenian language based on Eastern Armenian. It is Eastern Armenian that will preserve the memory of Classical Armenian and the dialects, preserve Western Armenian culture. I understand our Armenian brothers in the diaspora. They know language is a world, that you cannot take an author out of his language, just as you cannot move from one language to another without losses. Even taking a world author, say Shakespeare, into Armenian without losses, bringing Pushkin into Armenian without losses, taking Tumanyan out of Armenian or Sundukyan out of his dialect is impossible. Nevertheless, this is the path. Eastern Armenian must incorporate the enduring values that have been created. The great ones, the titans, become laws; they give shape to a vague mist. Papazyan did it, did he not, gave a brilliant example of fusion? Goethe did it, created a unified German; Bismarck and Goethe did it, did they not? Pushkin brought the Russia of fleeing, disappearing dialects into the Russian language. I recalled a beautiful saying of the great Ferdowsi: ‘Through thirty years of effort, in Persian I brought Persia to life.’ Without Teryan, Tumanyan and Metsarents there would have been no Armenia. That is how it is: they brought the homeland its true substance.”
“What is a word’s value to you? What weight and measure does it have?”
“When I was still sensitive, an author revealed himself to me on the first, second, third page. Suddenly I would see the page awaken because of some word he had found. The word settled precisely onto the thing, and… the thing, the movement, the epithet, reality, thought rose from the page, and the text came into being as such. Remember how you read your Mahari: a slightly dead, lifeless text, then a flicker, as though a short circuit occurs. His is not Tumanyan’s calm, even warmth; he is an author of sparks and flashes.”
“Who else do you consider an author of verbal fireworks?”
“Mushegh was like that—Mushegh Galshoyan. The word was his secret. The same word does not save other people’s texts. No, it does not. I told Mushegh then: ‘What a great and beautiful storehouse you have.’ The Sasun dialect, the epic, is the whole people’s symbolism, a treasury. That is how you read Mushegh—as though you have entered a treasury. But look: for others it is not there. That is how the great create their own laws.”
“In your literature too the word crackles. Where do the sparks of your feeling for language originate?”
“From the beginning I loved Mahari’s and Bakunts’s prose. They saved my adolescent years, gave me texts in Armenian. But the path of calm narration in prose is Zoryan. He has no epithets of blazing colours.”
“The presence of literary greats—Teryan, Tumanyan, Charents, Varuzhan—led me towards the language of literature. After I had drunk my fill of them, I returned to the life-giving source.”
“Without wishing to compare it with the scene of decades ago, I cannot help saying that today, on the lips of a substantial portion of our people, our language sounds like the unpleasant rasp of cracking sunflower seeds. Like frames of film running backwards, our cleansed, pure Armenian has tumbled onto shelves, fallen asleep in the pages of closed books. Market-breathing towns and villages have erupted in beer-scented talk; in streets devoured by trade, the sounds of our rich, savoury language have tangled and knotted… Is this a fever caused by a foreign bacillus, or a conjurer’s trick?”
“An epoch is closing, the epoch of the humanities. Not merely the seventy-year Communist past, but the two-hundred-year past within our field of vision is closing too. After all, Tsarist Russia and the Catholicos’s Armenia were also ideological societies. These were times of an idea whose components were painting, song, theatre, language, language… From tsar to peasant, the people’s march was towards the idea of humanism and beauty, in contrast to the pragmatists of the new period. That is the epoch now closing. Language, with all its attributes, faces a grave situation. Social life in all its components faces a test. But whatever happens, the instinct of self-defence will drive us towards distinguishing and preserving ourselves. Etchmiadzin never became Byzantine, never became Muscovite. That was yesterday, was it not? There was resistance; self-awareness spoke: I must have my national religion. So it is today. The way towards distinguishing ourselves will open: my letter will not be uglier than yours, my poem will be better than yours. This is the situation, this is the path. Lagging behind in our time, taking as teachers the nations that entered it earlier, we will nevertheless ‘betray’ them. We are not in their march. We will ‘betray’ them as we always have; we will not merge with them. There will be a return to ourselves.”
“You say, and we say too: language is homeland. Today we all know that, with or without justification, many leave their homeland. That is to say, we abandon language. Does the feeling that the language is their own die in their souls, beneath their skin?”
“Certainly. As much as school taught me Armenian, our home and street taught me too. In a foreign environment it will grow poorer. Our cultural centre, our San Lazzaro, will be Armenia, because the nation’s head is here.”
“And what about someone born and raised by fate on other soil? What is that person’s linguistic homeland?”
“There is language’s compulsion, its dictate. Saroyan is nevertheless a son of American English, of English. American writers fought against English because they knew that the culture created in it did not enter American life, did not reflect American life. They wanted to create their own American English.”
“The imperative of our language here will compel us to create a real Armenian culture, a homeland of Armenian culture towards which people will come and aspire from their estrangement.”
Interview by Vardanush Torosyan.
“Hayutyun”, No. 6, 1996.