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[Eddie]

Though I have at odd times seen my name on this forum, I am new to it and not therefore sure how it works. But noting the importance attached to Armenian literature, below is a draft portion of a review I am doing of a fine translation of Aksel Bakunts by Nairi Hakhverdi. Any comments as I prepare this review for Groong will be appreciated.

Eddie

‘The Dark Valley: Short Stories by Aksel Bakunts
(Translated by Nairi Hakhverdi, 149pp, 2008, Taderon Press, London)

Part One: Peasant life in the era of war, genocide and revolution

I
Aksel Bakunts’s ‘Dark Valley’ is locked into the rugged heights of some of eastern Armenia’s most remote mountainous regions. ‘Almost untouched and wild’ it resembles ‘one of those forgotten places from an era when mankind did not exist and the fossilised dinosaur felt as free as the bear does in our days (p13, 140). It was from within the villages of this valley that Bakunts fashioned this, his first, volume of short stories unearthing dramas of maimed lives, deep sorrows, lost loves, wounded spirits and sad remembrances, the artistic excellence of which is conveyed amply in this new English translation by Nairi Hakhverdi.

The best of Bakunts’s stories have a quality of poetry - brief but powerful moments of experience grasped with revealing intensity. They are in addition profoundly revolutionary and this in a broader sense than is suggested by Bakunts’ support for Soviet power. Lives in the Dark Valley are distorted, bent, torn and snapped not by preordained individual destiny but by socially created and therefore potentially alterable collective and individual relations as well as by backwardness, prejudice and superstition that are here exposed on almost every page. Though scarred the lives of the inhabitants of the Dark Valley contain an additional but equally potent significance. Their story will inject into even the most hardened city dweller a vivid feeling for existence not marred by the unnatural dislocations of urban life. The fullness of peasant life lived at one with nature, despite its impoverishment invites attention to inherent possibilities of existence free of the ugly consumerism that is peddled as an escape from 21st century alienation.

Remote as the Dark Valley is, it is nevertheless bound by a dozen strings to the wider world of 19th and early 20th century Tsarist occupied eastern Armenia and so also battered by the tide of World War, the Armenian Genocide, the Russian Revolution and the coming of Soviet power. Reflecting their impact Bakunts’s work also offers perhaps one of the most authentic histories of the eastern Armenian peasantry, of its relations to Tsarist state and of the deadly effect of war and Genocide on their communities. In the wonderful book of the Armenian peasantry written by novelists and poets such as Khachadour Abovian, Berj Broshian, Ghazaros Aghayan, Muratzan, Tlgadintzi, Hamasdegh, Hovaness Toumanian and others, Bakunts added his own chapter covering the period from the turn of the 20th century to the upheavals of Soviet collectivisation. Written prior to the fatal triumph of Stalinism ‘The Dark Valley’ additionally, and with subtle accuracy, illuminates the reticent, even ambivalent albeit not hostile, attitude of a section of the Armenian peasantry to the 1917 Russian revolution.

Anahit Sahinyan an outstanding novelist demanded the highest standards of translated literature. She found even wanting Hovanness Toumanian’s Armenian renditions of Pushkin poetry that have been generally judged as near to perfection as possible. ‘Whatever Toumanian has translated’ she remarks ‘certainly offers the Armenian reader a taste of poetry, but it is not the taste Puskhin’s poetry, it is that of Toumanian’s.’ (p148) If this be the standard, and so it should be, Nairi Hakhverdi’s translation of Bakunts into English, albeit not flawless, is a significant accomplishment. Though not all, many of the lapses are technical in character, a product of the complexities of Armenian dialect or even editorial errors, rather than of questionable artistic appreciation.

Nairi Hakhverdi takes us almost seamlessly into Bakunts’s fictional world and gives us a sense of his creative energy, his craft and his technique. Her English rendition offers something of the precision of the prose, the astonishingly apt choice and use of words, the graphic images and metaphors, the defining detail and the poetic evocation of the original. Conveying something of Bakunts’s bold, almost scientific and steady fluency of expression this translation enables us to grasp lives and sensibilities not just of men and women, but of all living things, of animals, of horses, dogs, lizards, worms and of plant life too, of flowers and trees and shrubs.

Bakunts does sometimes falter with forced metaphors, invented as if to signal authorial skill, rather than communicate content. But beyond exceptions there dominates a particular quality of naturalism minus any trace of redundant reproduction assumed to be the flaw of this genre. If there is a photographic quality, it is as art, of substance recreated not appearance copied. Putting us, as it were into the skin and fold of soil, plant, animal and beast as well of course of man and women and that in the remotest of nature’s edge, Bakunts enables the modern reader to appreciate something also what we share with and of our own fundamental unity the natural world.

[Arpa]

Though I have at odd times seen my name on this forum, I am new to it and not therefore sure how it works. But noting the importance attached to Armenian literature, below is a draft portion of a review I am doing of a fine translation of Aksel Bakunts by Nairi Hakhverdi. Any comments as I prepare this review for Groong will be appreciated.

Eddie
‘The Dark Valley: Short Stories by Aksel Bakunts
(Translated by Nairi Hakhverdi, 149pp, 2008, Taderon Press, London)
Part One: Peasant life in the era of war, genocide and revolution ...

Welcome again dear Eddie. I say again, if my memory does not betray me, you have been here before ever so briefly. Please stay, we are so starved of intellect.And please don't be discouraged when some of our 12 year olds with the intellect of under 3 year olds may attack you and call you names. Yes, you have seen your name here as some of us have occasionally quoted you from the Critical Corner. Some of us are big fans of yours.
As to Bakunts by Nairi look here;
http://hyeforum.com/...=1
http://hyeforum.com/...topic=7080&st=0
See the Original, well, Soviet orthography, not how Bakunts, Charents, Tumanian, Varouzhan and Siamanto wrote. here;
http://www.eanc.net/...ace_language=en
I am pretty sure that she is who I think she is.
She is/was a prominent correspondent here even though perhaps understandably we have not seen her since Aug. 2009.
You guys should get together as there are so much gems that need to be translated into the modern “lingua franca”. The world must see our masterpieces in a masterful English. Sad to say that the Internet is extremely poor when it comes to Armenian Literature. Oddly enough, most are by Russophiles with bastardized orthography and an English that leaves much to be desired..Where ԷՇԷԿ is spelled as ԵՇԵԿ. And where Tauros/Տաւրոս is spelled as "DaVros/ՏաՎրոս". When we do that we totally lose our connection to the indo-European heritage, and instead fall into the furko-Perso=Armemian where there is no sound for the Latin U or the English W. Do we hsvr the sound of W? How do you pronounce "astuwats/Աստուած"?
Dear Eddie, you may remember the time when I pleaded with you to please use the Mesropian/Greco/Latin transliteration where A== Ա=Alpha, B=Բ=Beta, C=Գ=Gamma, D=Դ=Delta G=Կ=Kappa, T=Տ=Tau, Th=Թ=Theta, P=Պ=Pi and so on.
I was pleasantly satisfied when you spelled the name of the author “ԲակունցBakunts” not Փաքունց/Paqounts as some of us do.

Edited by Arpa, 09 March 2010 - 12:25 PM.