Growing larger and faster, the ball of cares is rolling towards us: already the cares of the century’s end. Yet Vahagn Davtyan’s poetry contains an inspired peal from the distant, sad and joyful twenties.
Davtyan is his homeland’s son and heir to its literary greats. His homeland’s effort to retain its face and weight, to avoid distortion in the new realms of existence, in this “weightlessness”, passes through Davtyan too. That effort gives his poetry its sinew.
It has been said: “We are all sailors aboard this little ship called Earth, and beyond the ship the cosmic wilderness is nothingness. We must cherish the Earth with reverent love.”
Poetry must cherish its homeland and its homeland’s language with that same reverent love. Above all, this is a question of poetry’s own existence: beyond its languages and homelands, there is a desert equivalent to the cosmic wilderness, and Esperanto will not give birth to poetry.
Davtyan is the singer of his reborn homeland and of its rebirth. Of his Little Homeland within the larger homeland. Precisely his Little Homeland: for urging people to live by love for the large, while fearing to love the small, is merely a great clipping of poetry’s wings, if not great irresponsibility, if not rootless wandering. Yes, Davtyan’s homeland is Armenia, his love is love for it, his arsenal its culture, in knowledge of which few among us can match him. No, Davtyan did not change our poetry’s substance, nor did he agonise over renewing its forms. He was not lured by the latest great figures of world literature, and so did not join those pioneers’ baggage train, the rearguard of the avant-garde. In other words, he did not become an inhabitant of their spiritual province. He preferred to remain Armenian, himself and provincial, firmly convinced that an old domestic craft like poetry would never be industrialised; that literature is divided into provinces and capitals only in the heads of ignorant, dazzled hangers-on; that literature has many capitals, or is a world of changing capitals; that the centre of that world is my province, and within that province, my unique Self.
Davtyan’s poetry grows out of his own biography and that of his homeland.
His poetry has an image… Ask an Armenian painter to portray the poetry of Tumanyan, Isahakyan, Teryan, Charents, Varuzhan and Metsarents in a single painting, and he would paint Davtyan’s poetry too… This poetry has an image, and that image is a light-drenched, unresentful, pure blue. No, this is not an attempt to avoid looking into blind justice’s eye sockets. For him, life—and especially life with a homeland, for this son of the Armenian people—is a sudden discovery. That is the abundant wellspring of light; that is why light continually trembles over his poetry. Had not everything possible been done to ensure that neither he nor his homeland existed, that no light fell upon his fortunate poems and verse narratives?
He was born in Arabkir on the Euphrates. Born a boy, as though timed precisely to reach conscription age in 1941, enter military service and go to be torn apart. A Turkish expression speaks of that age with bitter admiration: “What an age to die…”
The stones and clay of New Arabkir were watered from the Hrazdan; water was brought up from the gorge in barrels. Later, when I saw New Arabkir, it was a sun-hot garden.
In the green meadow of youth
Wild steeds were galloping,
Their manes a surge of fire,
They galloped, they flew:
As though they were birds of flame,
They flew…
In the autumn of 1941 the unit was hurled from the deserts of Mongolia, in freight wagons of course, into the marshes of Belarus. That is what it means to bear the first blow. Only a handful of that generation of boys survived; one could say just a few. During the retreat, drowning in a river, he clung to a crate… of butter. Butter, yes. He ate some and took a helmetful with him. In 1960, twenty years later, when we met, butter still disgusted him. But that is not the terrible part. Nor is the soldier torn apart, mixed with earth and mud, up in the air; nor the sight of a soldier fleeing in panic, bellowing like an animal. The train was given a five-minute halt on the empty steppe: the unit, everyone together, was to relieve itself. I have seen such a sight; it was revolting. But he is the son of an Armenian Christian; he moves away, then farther away. And now the train has started, and he, this skinny boy who has written poems about school and girlfriends, runs after it, runs without knowing whether he will catch it.
Like a puppy trying to escape cold water, a person wants to swim out, leap out of that ice hole of memories. All the more so because splendid fellows have gathered on the rescuing shore: Hakob, Suren, Paruyr, Hrant… Those who would soon become Hakob Salakhyan, Suren Aghababyan, Paruyr Sevak and Hrant Tamrazyan. The colourful Mahari would come from Siberia, Hamo Sahyan from Baku.
We tasted hardship and death early,
Life was not given to us free, as a gift,
And that is why, in all the world, there is
Nothing dearer than our happiness.
Even before the war, his first poem, sent to a newspaper, was published without a single alteration: the poem had, so to speak, requested no corrections. He says: “They corrected only my name and surname. I had signed, in Arabkir pronunciation, Vahak Davityan; they changed it to Vahagn Davtyan.” That may be the only intervention by another hand in his work. And here a great trial lies in wait for every true poet. Everything seems to go well: you write, they publish; you write, they publish again. Then you become editor-in-chief yourself, and you write and publish your own not particularly good, not particularly bad poems. Before them, the reader can neither account for his dissatisfaction nor take them to heart with an inexplicable love. At that decisive moment, an inner itch is needed: an inner itch, creative jealousy, an awareness of how little you have done beside what you must do; of how insignificant what has been realised is beside poetry’s possible manifestations, its cosmic magnitude; a profound understanding that cultures today are weapons in the hands of homelands, that cultures today are fighting. Davtyan had that creative jealousy. The collection The Song of Wine marked a turning point in the even, healthy, regular cardiogram of his poetry, which had given literary critics no cause for discontent. He thoroughly revised the epic The Tondrakians, well received by literary society. Then came the books Smoke from the Hearth and The Burning Bush, then the Songbook cycle, the Requiem, then…
That sacred restlessness, that exacting pride in literary work, did not leave Davtyan and does not leave him in these bewildered times of ours, when the very substance of literary work seems a needless luxury that can be excluded from national life.
1977