Poetry
Անջրպետի մը գրավումը
Not translated into English
Nigoghos Sarafian · 1928
Synopsis
Poems in which a young exile, who arrived in Paris a few years earlier, seeks new paths for an Armenian poetry without a country. Wandering, journeys to the sea and the question of an identity confronted with the foreign recur throughout, in a clear language attentive to sensation, haunted by contradictions that the poet does not resolve but makes the very matter of his future work.
Context
The collection appeared in 1928, three years before the Menk group was founded, of which the author was to be one of the leading figures. It marks the moment when the poet accepts uprooting and exile and devotes himself to building his work in his own language, Western Armenian, following a modernist approach. A perfectionist, he afterwards never stopped revising his manuscripts, and one formula sums up his project: a homeland of the mind must be created.
Who it is for
Poems in Western Armenian, in a dense language. It is better to know that their authors, survivors who arrived in France around 1922, were writing for a scattered readership.
Prizes and reception
The first book of a poet whom critics place among the great voices of Armenian literature in exile, translated late into English and French.