Poetry
Հոգեր
Not translated into English
Vahan Tekeyan · 1901
Synopsis
The cares of the title are those of a twenty-three-year-old poet writing between Liverpool, Marseille and Hamburg, far from his native city. Short, finely chiselled pieces return again and again to waiting, regret, melancholy and love, and to the city left behind, whose absence gives the book its colour.
Context
The book appeared in Paris in 1901, the first volume of an author who had until then given only scattered pieces to the Armenian newspapers of Constantinople and Egypt. Nothing in it announces the poet of national mourning whom one will read later: this material enters his work only with the collections of 1914 and 1919, the one turned towards the heroic past of the people, the other towards what had just taken place. The pieces here are short, of a very polished form, and keep to waiting, regret and love.
Who it is for
Short, and made to be taken piece by piece. The language is Western Armenian; no French edition of the whole exists.
Prizes and reception
The first of its author's six books of verse, and the starting point of a body of work that the Armenian diaspora regards as its own.