I leave next week for Armenia. I hope, for the next weeks, to blog from there, internet access permitting. I’ve blogged before about director Sergei Paradjanov, and his museum in Armenia’s capital city. Today I’d like to introduce Armenian poet Paruir Sevak.
According to the biography of his Selected Poems (Jerusalem: Saint James Press, 1973), Sevak was the “most important Armenian poet of the sixties” and, as of publication, “50,000 subscribers [were] eagerly awaiting the last three volumes of his six volume collected works.” From Garig Basmadjian’s translations in Selected Poems, which collects Sevak’s work from the sixties, I believe it.
From Let There Be Light (1969):
CLOSE YOUR EYES
It so often happens,
man shoots himself
in lucid water, a mirror,
or in someone’s eyes,
and is killed instantly.
But his double remains:
he remains = we remain.And we bury ourselves without mourning,
then we live once again
first like fauna and flora,
thousands of years later,
with the hard life of man.
And all this takes
perhaps an endless moment,
a week or a short year.My god, you know well
how many times I’ve repeated
this rocky and thorny road.
And I’m overtired
of killing myself
and (above all) of reliving.And it is worthwhile
for me to attempt it again,
this time shooting at myself
in the eyes of this girl?Close your eyes darling,
I have a fearful foreboding
that I shall not get killed this time,
that I shall destroy your eyes“
Lines in the above, and elsewhere, appear prophetic of the end of Sevak’s life. The Selected’s biography says Sevak’s last book, Let There Be Light, was “printed in 1969, but because of censorship appeared only in an abridged form after his untimely death in a car accident in June 1971.” The censorship and accidental death are made ominous in my Bradt Armenia travel guide by Nicholas Holding. Sevak was a critic of the Soviet government then in charge, Holding notes, and “most Armenians believed that his death was murder at the hands of the KGB rather than the result of a road accident–and certainly the spot where the alleged accident took place is a straight unobstructed section of road with little traffic.”
It seems from the Selected Poems that Sevak knew death impended. Indeed, the official report, a car accident where a car accident would be impossible, would not be an image out of place in his poetry.
Also from Let There Be Light (1969):
from UNCERTAINTY
We are sick with the malady of uncertainty.
Sick with this vindictive malady
which desires our death.
We won’t have that either:
to die normally one must have some luck.And don’t ask me in vain what to do.
I won’t tell you.
Our likes have come and shall still come to this world
to tell you with their lives what not to do.
Only this,
for the rest
address the uncertain part of uncertainty.
TRANSIENCY
When twilight rakes the clouds like a comb
and the thin, sniffing wind stops like a puppy
before every shrub, tree, clod and man,
when the young cold shows its strength
making us button our shirts and grumble,
when the day’s bark is deadened on the deep velvet
and the strewn lights seem ancient adornments–
once again I become na??ve,
once more I believe in justice,
and it seems to me
I shall die a natural death.
Unfortunately, an Advanced Book Exchange search yields little of Sevak, and the six volume collected works didn’t make their way into English. Five libraries in the U.S. carry his Selected Poems, though, for those who’d like more.
One last poem–this one from Man Inside a Palm (1963):
GOOD EVENING
The sun’s declining,
the day’s getting short,
the mountains are begetting children
in the form of shadows,
which gradually grow
and bury their mother.Pivoted on its hind leg
the whirlwind
soars to the sky
affirming
the denied myth of ascension.A piece of hot body,
bird for short,
throbs slowly in the cold air.A woman stands in a concave field:
the visible adjunct
of the world’s invisible axis.Guilty without sinning,
without witnesses,
stigmatized
I murmur from far off
already not to this one
but to my own:
good evening to you my lonely one.