Poetry
Դյուցազնորեն
Not translated into English
Siamanto · 1902
Synopsis
Long poems, in ample periods, which take as their matter the massacres of the 1890s and Armenian resistance. The poet holds to his vocation of singing the pain of his people and, if he must die, of dying singing, heroically: the earth, the light, the sun, arms and struggle recur like so many rallying words, in a violence of imagery that Armenian poetry had not known.
Context
The first poems of the collection appeared in Geneva in the Drochak, the organ of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, under the very title of the book, while the author was living between Paris, Zurich and Geneva and the newspaper was denouncing the Ottoman government. The volume appeared in 1902, when its author was twenty-four, and opened a body of work of a few collections written over a dozen years, including the cycle on the Adana massacres of 1909.
Who it is for
Long, declamatory poems, to be read aloud, in Western Armenian. It is better to know what the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896 were.
Prizes and reception
The book that established one of the principal poets of the Western Armenian renaissance, killed in 1915; a large selection of his work appeared in French in 2023.