7 replies to this topic

[Eddie]

Having previewed the post I feel I must ask for forgiveness where the length is concerned!

Here initial notes for an introduction to Toumanian's poetry that I am preparing. All comments of all sorts will be much appreciated before I complete a draft for eventual submission to Groong.


Hovannes Toumanian - poet of the people with a dream of freedom

No other writer is as quintessentially Armenian as is Hovannes Toumanian. His work, in Souren Aghababian’s apt description is an ‘encyclopaedia’ of 19th century rural Armenia that, being then homeland to the vast majority of the Armenian people, defined an authentic national reality. To appreciate something of the essence of Armenia, to feel something of its defining features, its history and society, something of the inner lives of 19th century Armenian man and woman one must read, enjoy and study Hovannes Toumanian. Seeking to repeating for Toumanian what Engels had said of Balzac’s focus of French society Barouyr Sevak argued that:
‘Taken together the whole and very substantial body of scientific literature on the history of the Armenian people cannot give even the vaguest idea of that which is offered so vividly in Toumanian’s work.’

But Toumanian’s Armenian encyclopaedia is also an international one illuminating as it does some of the most diverse dramas of humankind that unfolded in the Armenian highlands. Protest against the suffocation of the human spirit, the cry of devastated love, the rage against national and social oppression and injustice and the confrontation with the existential awe of life’s finite reality fires almost every one of Toumanian’s poems. This it does with a force that focuses sharply the trouble and strife of our 21st century, in Armenia and beyond. Significantly for the Armenian people, in epics such as ‘To the Land’, ‘The Old Fight’ and ‘Mehri’ Toumanian’s authentic representation of aspects of Armenian national oppression can be read as ripostes against the Turkish falsification of the history of the history of the Armenian liberation movement claiming it had no grounds in the social condition of the people and possessed no indigenous roots.

‘Maro’, ‘Anush’, ‘The Old Fight’, ‘Towards the Infinite’, ‘Akhtamar’, ‘Mehri’, ‘The Rejected Law’, ‘Sako from Lori’ and other epics, ballads and poems are all inspired by or rooted in the concrete everyday experience of the Armenian village particularly from the author’s native province of Lori in the north Armenian highlands. They draw deeply too from the common people’s collective memory that in tales and legends, songs and poetry embodied and reflected the custom, the tradition and mores of bygone ages and so preserve something of the true history of the mass of Armenian men and women that had been disdainfully omitted from the pages of Armenian chronologies written by ascetic men of the Church.

All of Toumanian’s protagonists are common folk presented with lucid simplicity but never in a manner that reduce their human complexity to one-sided plainness. Often in a single line or two, Toumanian captures and richly so, an essential aspect of the inner world of his characters or of the complex relations of the world that they inhabit. No passion or emotion, no ambition or desire, no tragedy or comedy that together socially or individually shape a human life is absent from Toumanian’s work. All flourish within brilliantly concrete reconstructions of Armenian rural life that feature almost every aspect of popular existence.

It is all there – labour and love, sport, dance and song, marriage, death, blood feuds, honour killings, revenge and treachery, dreams of immortality and infinity, peasant superstition and mob drunkenness, Church backwardness, religious asceticism, banditry, madness, the plight of emigration, greedy grasping priest and landlord, rural banditry, foreign oppressor, ideals of emancipation, armed national resistance and more. As with all great writers Toumanian’s writing pays specific attention to the condition of women. The Armenian woman, as was the case with women from neighbouring Turkish, Kurdish or Georgian villages, was required to be a passive and obedient servant to the will of her husband, her father and her brother. She was not entirely denied initiative and independence but these had to be pressed into patterns of her servitude normalised by a web of customs, traditions, moral strictures and rules that were in turn defended by the strictest of punishments meted out against the inevitable refraction or rebellion, rebellion that Toumanian so brilliantly reveals as an essential quality of the human spirit.

Hovanness Toumanian could not avoid engagement with the Armenian national and social question. After all his beloved creations - Anoush, Maro, Saro, Mossi and the scores more - did not live lives bound only by the relations and traditions of local family and community. They carried, in addition, ugly scars and daily-inflicted wounds of Ottoman conquest, Tsarist oppression as well the blight of Armenian feudal and Church exploitation. No statement about 19th century Armenian life could approach truth without consideration of these issues and to them Toumanian turns in ‘David of Sassoon’ and in some undeservedly neglected epics such as ‘The Old Fight’, ‘Mehri’, ‘The Sigh’ and other poems such as ‘The Song of the Plough’.

Though often flawed and incomplete these epics retain both artistic and historical value each being marked by Toumanian’s exceptional ability to touch on fundamental human and social truths through dynamic narrative and dramatic plot that is always ceaseless movement and action. Whatever faults distort character or plot, these epics reproduce, and with striking coherence, some of the most significant social and political contours of Armenian life during the second half of the 19th century. Particularly fluent is Toumanian’s articulation of the successive stages of the people’s 19th century passage from resignation to resistance, first as individual and local defiance and then as organised action


Toumanian’s body of work offers us an artistic totality that is at once ruthless social and moral criticism executed with clarity and straightforwardness that leaves no room for misunderstanding. Vibrant and dynamic in the depiction of the flow human passions that course through the Armenian highland his poetry also has a cutting objectivity that dissects social and individual ills, individual pride and mob prejudice as well as delusion and superstition and much else. The moral judgement of social relations that emerge at the core of this work is never however dry and dull philosophical or sociological assertion. All becomes apparent and explicit through the actions of full-blooded protagonists who, never mechanistic functions of the social relations, develop in plots remarkable for their pace and dramatic tension.

In the Armenian literary constellation Toumanian occupies a central position. He raised to the level of art the lives, the cultural traditions, the history and the hopes of the Armenian peasant that for the previous millennia had been excluded from official literature controlled by the Church and its intelligentsia. Emerging within a popular democratic artistic tradition established and developed among others by Khatchaour Abovian, Berj Broshian and Ghazaros Aghayan, Toumanian himself also turned literature in the direction of the common people, recreating their lives in a language that was comprehensible to them and with their own concerns and hopes at its core. His work became the finest collective mirror indicating that which needed to be discarded and that which should be preserved in the process of modern Armenian democratic nation formation. Here Toumanian’s 19th century legacy recalls the endeavour of 20th century African nation formation reflected in the work of Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiongo or that of Nigerian Chinua Achebe.

Outstanding in his art Toumanian was also extraordinary as a public figure, imbued with an unwavering democratic, national and internationalist vision. The qualities of honour, loyalty, friendship, valour, gallantry, individual and collective solidarity and social and national freedom that define his art is manifest in his own public life. In the often fraught and troubled inter-national conflicts in the Caucuses Toumanian was in Yeghishe Charent’s view ‘a tower’ facilitating ‘interethnic unity’. His life and work epitomized an Armenian cultural and political tradition that was defined by a sturdy patriotism, an uncompromising opposition to national and social oppression but also by a deep consciousness of the common, shared, spheres of life that united Armenians with the common folk of their neighbouring Turkish, Georgian, Kurdish and Azeri villages.

Considering Toumanian’s poetry in English presents more than the normal difficulties of quote and extract that are inevitably altered by translation. Even in their original quotes and extracts never substitute satisfactorily for an appreciation of the whole. This is particularly so for Toumanian’s epics the truth of which emerges always in the telling of the entire story. Yet even though translated and isolated quotation may miss the deeper human truth available they do enable us to touch on those essentials in Toumanian’s work that speak with force to 21st century lives.

Eddie Arnavoudian

[Arpa]

Dear Eddie, once again thank you for an excellent critique.

Considering Toumanian’s poetry in English presents more than the normal difficulties of quote and extract that are inevitably altered by translation. Even in their original quotes and extracts never substitute satisfactorily for an appreciation of the whole. This is particularly so for Toumanian’s epics the truth of which emerges always in the telling of the entire story. Yet even though translated and isolated quotation may miss the deeper human truth available they do enable us to touch on those essentials in Toumanian’s work that speak with force to 21st century lives.
Eddie Arnavoudian

Please stay and wake us up. Thank you for waking me/us up. Just as I and many others dismiss Toumanian as a “ court jester”, what with his fables and parables, his nursery ditties (to entertain and educate the children. He had a dozen children of his own, whom he loved and adored). His such sugar coated epics like Anush,** with song and dance of “Hambardsum Yayla”, we fail to sweep aside all that “sugar and spice and everything nice”, the artificial sweetener to see the bitter truth under. The bitter truth of the ethno-socio-political rot under.
Toumanian has never been taken seriously. He has and is viewed an entertainer, a story teller. He has never been placed on the podium of such social commentators, the likes of Bakunts, Charents, P. Sevak (not to forget Ruben Sevak).
** One of his best remembered is “AKH TAMAR” (remember that he had a daughter named Tamar***) which is an ingenious if shameless play on words-PUN. There are so many “puns” in our literature, if only we knew the Armenian language enough to recognize them. Like Otian’s “punch(j)-uni” and Charents’ “arevaham ‘բար/bar/fruit/harvest, and barr/ բառ/word’”.
***Please search and find what the Arabic word “tamr/tamar/date/armav/ghurma/sweet” means. It is the latest fad, every other Armenian girl is named Tamar, aside from the biblical reference and Queen Tamar of Georgia, does anyone know its etymology?

Edited by Arpa, 25 May 2010 - 01:25 PM.

[Zartonk]

Very well-written Eddie. Thank you for sharing.

[Zartonk]

Toumanian has never been taken seriously. He has and is viewed an entertainer.

That, I fail to grasp.

[Arpa]

That, I fail to grasp.

Thank you for reminding me. I had been intending to amend that phrase and add "story teller". Even if many of his stories may have tacit or overt ethno-social messages very few of us know them or look at them analytically. We all know his best remembered poems and novellas only, most of all the lighter ones. Not to forget his value in educating the children, many of who learned the Armenian language reading his works.

Edited by Arpa, 25 May 2010 - 01:32 PM.

[Zartonk]

I mean aside from obvious poetic genius, I can't think of an ethnographic task more significant than preserving our National Epic in writing. Mind you, not only is Sasna Tzrer severely underrated by our own, it is erroneously misread and reduced to a folk account of Late Medieval history.

[nairi]

Toumanian has never been taken seriously.

I wasn't aware of this, to be honest. I know he's very much revered in Armenia, though mostly because of his linguistic prowess, because in the Soviet era, one could not praise content--especially critique, social and political--so instead critics tended to emphasize linguistic skills. The legacy today is people in Armenia saying things like: "He writes so well! The story is so well-written! The language he uses is so breathtaking!" (even when it's not that impressive). The few times I asked: "Do you know what he's writing about?" or "Do you realize that this story is about oppression, abortion, and rape?" I did not get an answer.

Two of my childhood favorites by Toumanian are "Gikor" and "Pisiki Gangate" (which is more than just about a little kitten sitting in a corner and crying, if you read between the lines).

[Zartonk]

Aside from his masterful use of regional dialects, his language was brilliant