I wanted a translation journal to be established, so that every month the Armenian reader would hear from world literature and discover something new. It would also influence our literary craftsmanship, raising writers and stretching them. This reader would no longer remain our “monopoly”; readers’ demands would grow. I am speaking of prose, but this could extend to poetry as well, though it is a more capricious field. The need for a journal of literary criticism is also keenly felt: the ranks of critics must expand and grow stronger. Not a single line by a writer should go without a response, yet a substantial part of literary production remains outside criticism. These factors would help strengthen our literature.
Dashtents’s novel “The Call of the Ploughmen” has been written, though unfortunately its author did not have time to recopy, edit, prepare a clean manuscript or revise it. Nevertheless, together with its patriotic force, it also carries a promising aesthetic force. It is a work that helps revive myth, history and legends, grasp the people’s spirit, and correctly understand the relations between the land and the writer, the people and the writer.
I read “The Clouds of Mount Maruta” and felt the pain of losing Mushegh more deeply. He was an incomparable author, a wonderful man. But our literature will have new “recruits” from many generations. We also have names to fill tomorrow. In prose, let us name Meruzhan Ter-Gulanyan and Vano Siradeghyan.
There are certainly achievements, names and works, but it seems we have not fully justified the hopes our elders placed in my generation years ago.
Perhaps my dissatisfaction comes from the great demands of our reality and our time. We are obliged to write better, to write more deeply, because our reader is well acquainted with the world’s classical and contemporary literature. We must take account of the worldwide literary standard, or we will lose the reader. We must be able to make readers in the four corners of the world share our joy and pain, as their writers so often make us share theirs. Under the gaze of world literature, we must raise our problems, which we know best, our delight, anxieties and prospects to a level that moves everyone.
We often bring reality into literature without poetic wings, effectively removing the artist’s calling from between reality and literature.
Literature is reality given the wings of poetry, raised to the level of poetry.
All too often, sadly, we also try to re-edit the winged, spirited treasures our great forebears created. In short, we raise a hand against consecrated literary figures. We must not. For my part, sinner that I am, I believe a true literary treasure is something before which all doors open. Even art’s sworn enemy cannot fail to yield before a genuine literary treasure.
Although “Our Run” and “The Trees” have only recently been published, they came into being before the previous congress. During this time I have struggled with my unfinished works, almost none of which is yet finally complete: they must be reconsidered and edited.
I would like to read my friends’ works with confidence, believing that the first successful page will be followed by other good pages. I would like my friends to think the same of my works. Their failures are mine, since we are labourers of the same language, the same culture, doing the same work.
I watch every new Armenfilm production with fear and anxiety: the national image our cinema is striving to create is missing from the screen. What I say also applies to music, architecture, painting and the other spiritual fields.
Saroyan says: no one must think (know) that I am not with them. More simply, the writer must be in everyone. More simply still, literature is what each person reads and feels addressed by, thinking, “This is about me.”
We must strive for this.
Armenia exports industrial, economic and scientific assets. It must export cultural treasures too. Figuratively speaking, people are very happy to take our tuff stone. We should like to create an equivalent demand for literary works.
It is sad to be a consumer of world culture: we must also export.
Our age is an age of translations. There is something merciless in this. The competition of translations is a fierce struggle. Cultural defeat is tantamount to spiritual defeat.
The congress can create an atmosphere of high, rigorous demands upon national treasures and of goodwill, so that we can repay the gifts the people have given with spiritual treasures of equal worth.