I would be the last fool to say that a great calamity has occurred in the life of the Armenian people, or even of Armenian poetry. Yes, we are committing a great and beautiful man to the earth, but this is one of the uniquely fortunate losses in all our Armenian ages—if a loss can, of course, be called fortunate. He lived long, was fruitful, was writing even in these days, uttered no misguided word, was not disfigured by the fear of old age that exposes our failings. No hostile, alien hands touched the body his soul had left. On the shoulders of his sons, of his people, he came down to earth to join the flock of his own.
This is the sunset of an accomplished patriarch, a sunset many of our ill-fated people deserved but few were granted.
My lament is for my life and ours tomorrow. In a moment of forgetfulness we will lift the receiver, and his voice will not be in the telephone. We will lay out bread and cheese under an apricot tree, and his place at the head of the cloth will be empty. On some unexpected occasion we will all need one another badly, yet never find one another, because we will see his doors closed. By instinct, at sunset, we will turn our eyes to his window and realise, wings fallen, that the building is no longer ours; behind those windows his bright brow no longer thinks, meditates, suffers, doubts, affirms.
This is how your own country withdraws from you, how you become a stranger in your own homeland. That is why the words of the elders counsel us: cherish and preserve those who gave you birth, so that the land that created you may long remain yours, and you its own.
If only we had faith and believed in the miracle of resurrection, when the Lord rises in the twilight above the bewildered heads of his followers: “Lads… what has happened to you? Why are you bewildered?”
And that is just how it will be. Our grateful reverence for the native land, our consciousness of national dignity in the marrow of our bones, our devotion to the difficult writer’s craft, our undying love for the Armenian peasant, who embodied both prince and labourer, and for the human being in general; our constant interest in those capricious paths that measure and remeasure every rise and fall of the native land, gather all its scents and whispers, all its anxieties and birth pangs existing beneath God’s life-giving breath—this love of ours will resurrect him, and our great one will appear on the road of our march.
If it does not happen, if he does not appear above the bewildered heads of our community of writers, at least of writers, it will mean that either our path is wrong or he was not great.
But he has left too much for what he left on this earth not to gather itself together, materialise and repeat his living image. He will appear and ask his forebear’s question: “Lads… why are you bewildered and lost?”
We are bewildered and lost because his presence of bread is no longer here, his presence of fire that gathered people around it is gone; his life-giving word is gone, and his silence, which we filled with our finest abilities, restraining, suppressing and refusing to let the little monster within us raise its head, is gone.
Yet his hour was no kinder than our cruel, wretched hour. “You lived in a brutal age, / When the chance came to weep your fill, / You closed your mouth with your own hand / And swallowed your sobbing.” With every moment and every word he warmed his time and made his surroundings more human. He gave more than he could, endured more than he could, forgave, loved and bore more than his bowed body could bear; he tormented, exhausted, wrung out his poor body and left more in this Armenian home of ours than he had the strength to give, because he was born a master and a father. He was no slave and no rebel, no thief and no plunderer, because he was born a creator and forged himself into a creator; because a father cannot give his home over to plunder and cannot rise in rebellion—against whom, against the walls of his own house?
We are Khorenatsi’s nation, yes. We are Jesus’s people, yes. We are children of the golden Armenian tongue, yes. But there are no eternal glories: glory demands to be shaken free of dust every day. The gods want renewal every day. There are no nations finished once and for all: a nation wants to be renewed and strengthened every day. Even language is not eternal: it demands toil, suffering, ringing and pealing every day, with every newcomer.
Before Sahyan, Armenian did not fall silent—it spoke, and with the language our whole present and history spoke. God took the form of the patriarch of our fields and settled quietly in the main room of our home, a constant spirit of care and labour, honesty and nobility. His Armenian arched like a rainbow and, wherever we may be, invited every one of us to pass into the world of Armenian life.
He became the renewer of his time, and that will be his crowned image at the head of our march.