A door always open to every Armenian has closed; a trembling existence has gone out; a creature of God with a fragile heart has fallen. Ludmila Motalová has died in Prague — our sister, our friend, the one who encouraged us. She whispered “Prague”, she said “Prague” in a whisper; she whispered in general. It seemed she did not dare enter Armenian aloud, but whispered beside it with reverent respect. Yet she had long been in the deepest depths of Armenian, Armenian literature and Armenian history. Her conscientiousness had brought her to the depths of her subject, and that subject had made her its advocate. She began as an Armenologist working for the Czech language; she ended as a Czech patriot and an Armenian patriot. She did not know she was ending. They say an unfinished page of an article about us remained in her typewriter. At her hearth one could warm the heart; from her one could learn Armenian and learn love of one’s country. Across states and seas, she made her people extend a heart and a hand to us in pure brotherhood. Our losses were hers: she grew pale at our losses and flushed at our successes. People like her, in the years of the Armenian massacres, appealed to the conscience of thrones and laid balm on wounds and hearts in Deir ez-Zor. Perhaps we are those they saved, and she was their rare successor, simply one of them in new circumstances. She knew what had remained of what, and that was why our living republic was a sacred relic to her. A relic with which she wanted to endow her people, to enrich the culture of her Czech language. And because she, perhaps she alone, had communed with everything Armenian that can in a word be called the Armenian spirit, and because carrying that capricious, elusive, uncatchable spirit into another language’s cultural treasury was not one person’s task, nor just anyone’s task, while she was only one, one Motalová, she worked with fanatical devotion. She strove to take the place of the many who, by her deep conviction, a conviction truly in the marrow of her bones, should have been there, were obliged to be there, yet were absent. They had left everything to one Motalová, to a fragile young woman. And she tormented that fragile young woman beneath the burden she had assumed as a Czech citizen and a guardian of literature’s honour. She believed in literature as in those blessed times, if such times ever existed, when what was written was what was done, when people wrote directly upon open human hearts.
Whatever their age when they die, the death of such people is always premature. Life needs them greatly; life hungers for such people. She is needed even now, so that we may feel the loss of Ludmila Motalová — our sister, our translator, our ambassador in a warm little country for which her own short, full life warmed our love — as deeply as she felt our loss of Sevak and Minas, as she trembled for the life of each of us and all of us.