Grigor Naregatsi - Nareg

[15levels]

I am looking for the english translation of Narek online, could it be someone has a link? I really appreciate any help.

[spectra]

I don't think it is possible to translate Griqor Narekatsi in english, but here is a link that you may find it useful http://www.digilib.am/texts/grigor_narekat...tian/index.html

 

P.S. I am not looking forward in replying further more to this topic. Don't ask me why it's not possible to translate grapar to english, you know it very well.

Edited March 13, 2004 by spectra

[15levels]

Thank you for the link. However I disagree with u regarding the translation, if its possible to translate grabar to russian (and there is a wonderful translation of Nareg to Russian), then why wouldnt it be possible with english (or in fact with any other language). And besides, its DONE already, the book is published and its sold in Yerevan.

[Yeznig]

There is in fact a very good translation from Grabar into English by T Samuelian. It runs both the Grabar text and the English. It is in my view a fine if imperfect translation.

 

BTW Mr Arnavoudian whose column on Groong I read did a review of a book on Narek that is worth reading. I attach it below. Clearly he is not up to date as he doesn't know about the Samuelian book.

 

Why we should read...

 

'Krikor of Narek'

by Vatche Nalpantian

Khorhrtayin Grogh, 304pp, Yerevan, Armenia, 1990

 

Armenian News Network / Groong

July 5, 2001

 

By Eddie Arnavoudian

 

 

The 10th century poet and thinker Krikor of Narek (Narekatzi) once

enjoyed a pre-eminent position in Armenian cultural and intellectual

life. His work influenced the language, substance and contours of the

nation's literature for at least some 8 centuries. Before he became

the unread icon of modern days, Narekatzi and his monumental 'Book of

Lamentations' (Narek) were regarded with enormous reverence by the

common people too. Invested with miraculous powers the poet and his

book were held in awe, considered as balm for human woes and

tribulations, as guardians of the poor, the homeless, the sick and the

suffering. Today, in a tragic waste of cultural inheritance, Narekatzi

is referred to hardly at all and read even less.

 

Vatche Nalpantian's excellent introduction to Narekatzi contributes

to recovering his work for the modern man and woman. Despite some

stretches of weak, unsubstantiated and questionable argument,

Nalpantian successfully draws Narekatzi's dream of human grandeur out

of its religious shell. Full of well chosen quotation, it opens up a

world rich in reflection on the drama of human existence. This small

volume fulsomely substantiates Nalpantian's claim that in Narekatzi we

have no less than a giant of international literature who speaks

directly to the troubled soul of the individual in the modern age.

This book is additionally a superb example of how to read that

superior portion of religious/theological literature which, despite

its religious forms and conceptions, touches on essential human

concerns.

 

 

Preludes to the 'Book of Lamentations'

 

Time has left us only 20 odd samples of Narekatzi's shorter poems. Yet

these already contain some of the features of his vision as they

appear later, in perfected form, in the 'Book of Lamentations'. In

them, suggests Nalpantian, religious form becomes a vessel for a

secular appreciation of the natural world and human life. Against the

grain of Christian thought and tradition, nature and the human body

are not regarded simply or exclusively as sources of sin, corruption

and evil. They are also treated as objects having their own unique,

inherent beauty, worthy of their own praise and glory. Cited as

evidence is a poem in which the Virgin Mary appears as a woman of

flesh and blood, possessing a human beauty far removed from prevalent

lifeless Christian images.

 

Nalpantian endorses Levon Shant's view that Narekatzi's vivid, lush

and sensual descriptions of nature, of human beings and of human

labour that appear in the shorter poems often serve no religious

purpose at all. In many of the poems there is only the most formal

obeisance to religious concerns, sometimes expressed only in a title

or tucked away in end lines. In effect human beings and nature are

presented as ends in themselves.

 

The shorter poems also hint at the function of the natural world in

Narekatzi's later poetry. Nature makes superfluous any resort to

metaphysical mysticism. Nature can supply the images and the metaphors

with which Narekatzi renders comprehensible the deepest and most

passionate of human experiences and emotions. With Narekatzi the

elements of the natural world prove adequate to the task of portraying

the finest, profoundest and most spiritual of human experiences. In

this connection Nalpantian, along with others, argues that Narekatzi

draws on those traditions of pagan Armenian culture that in folklore

survived the Christian destruction.

 

 

The Book of Lamentations

 

The scope of the 'Book of Lamentations' is vast, stretching over a

thousand lines and consisting of 95 elegies or prayers, headed 'Words

Unto God From the Depths of My Heart'. Some claim it lacks genuine

inner unity. False, retorts Nalpantian. Narekatzi conceived of his

epic as a unity and it should be our business to grasp this unity.

Indeed only in doing so will we appreciate its true grandeur, its

humanistic logic and its modernity.

 

The virtue of Nalpantian's commentary is that he unveils the human

core of Narekatzi's vision, without any distortion or evasion of the

powerful Christian, mystical, ascetic features of the book. But he

does show how sometimes through them, sometimes beyond and sometimes

in opposition to them Narekatzi grapples with the spiritual and

material troubles and turmoil of human life here on earth.

 

Often referred to as a prayer book, Narek is, notwithstanding its

religious form, a stunning poetic encyclopaedia of the symptoms that

together constitute humanity's existential condition. The book's

central object is the rational, thinking, feeling and suffering human

being. 'I am everyone' says Narekatzi, and 'what is in everyone, is in

me also.' So each elegy portrays aspects of human experience -

emotional, physical, spiritual - which are dissected, reconstructed

and laid bare in their essential, universal and enduring manifestations.

 

In Narek we see men and women alienated from their own potential,

suffering insecurity, gripped by fear, hesitation, trepidation and

loss of confidence in life, enduring bitter spiritual and bodily

pain. 'If a hand is raised I bend;/ If I see a small scarecrow I

shake;/ If I hear a light noise, I start;/If I be summoned for

questioning I grow silent;/If I justly be examined, I become numb..'

Worse still, 'foreshadowing the destructive peril of my death' many of

the 'most miserable and pitiful doubts/ have accumulated above one

another/in the deep, sensitive substance of my heart' which is

'pierced with incurable pain'.

 

In each elegy Narekatzi, as spokesman for all human beings, strives

for release from the pain of life. Not however in the afterlife, but

in the here and now. Unlike the traditional Christian worshiper he is

not frozen in passive, powerless, beseeching genuflection before an

Omnipotent God. The human being in Narek has independent consciousness

and ambition and does not plead, but seeks to recruit the Almighty as

an ally to render life endurable and fulfilled.

 

Narekatzi is no beggar or supplicant but one who protests, argues and

negotiates. At different points he even takes it upon himself to

'explain' and to 'teach' God that the best way to express His

greatness is through 'audacious philantrophy'. Indeed God is 'worthy

of the greatest praise' when He 'privileges the love of humanity'.

Narekatzi simultaneously humanizes god, making him more accessible and

familiar, less remote. In many a passage god is 'invited' to 'enter

the worshipers home' there to 'discuss' and 'honour' human concerns

and needs.

 

The Book of Lamentations can be read as a record of humanity's

negotiations and debates with the deity aimed at cancelling out the

traumas of human life and raising the human being to God's grand

level. This debate and negotiation eventually appears essentially as

man/woman struggling with him/herself to overcome his/her own limits

and weaknesses and realise the potential that rests concealed or

suppressed within the human being.

 

 

The perfectability of the human

 

Feuerbach, a 19th century philosopher, claimed that through religion

an alienated and powerless humanity projects its own potential

perfection on to an ideal, omnipotent deity of its own invention.

Amazingly, eight centuries earlier Narekatzi appears to be a step

ahead in suggesting that humanity has the ability to reappropriate and

realise this potential. According to Nalpantian, this - the human

capacity for transformation, to make a transition from an imperfect to

a perfect state, - is one of the dominant themes of Narek.

 

For Narektazi, a Christian person is inevitably tainted by a thousand

and one sins, is flawed and prone to evil. This is the very nature of

being human. Yet just as saints have the capacity to overcome, so does

a man or a woman generally. Narekatzi is relentless in cataloguing

every human weakness and failure. Yet he simultaneously reveals human

consciousness of their opposites. In counterposing human misery,

weakness, failure and sin to the glory, power, virtue and justice that

God retains for himself, Narekatzi defines a terrain for a contest with

God in which the human being presses all the time to acquire those

perfect qualities of a God.

 

In Narek, the common Christian assertion that man has been created in

the image of god acquires an entirely radical dimension. Man/woman

becomes more than mere image or form, becomes also content and essence

where God's omnipotence, wisdom, justice and perfection cease to be

beyond human reach. The human being is marked by unique qualities. God

has 'adorned me with reason;/ Made me radiant with breathing;/

Enriched my mind;/ Increased my wisdom;/Fortified mine intellect;/

..selected me out of animate beings; /mingled into me an intelligible

soul;' and 'Bedecked me with a princely existence'

 

The immense scope and capability of human reason, intellect and wisdom

unfolds through floods of remarkable metaphor, adjective and synonym

sometimes culminating in suggestions of the possible deification of

the human. So Narekatzi writes, 'even though to say so strikes me with

terror' that 'We also are able to become god;/ With virtues and

abilities fine' Thus does he dissolve the traditional Christian breach

between God and man into a single, whole, human experience.

 

 

The aim is man - body and soul

 

Completing the picture of the human being's emotional and psychological

experience, Narek contains startling images of social reality and the

ills of the time. This, Nalpantian argues, is indication, if any is

needed, of the poet's concern for the well being of the living, earthly

human being, in his or her bodily and spiritual unity. Knitting together

diverse passages from the 'Book of Lamentations' Nalpantian shows

Narekatzi denouncing the terrible conditions people had to endure -

the usury, plunder, war, plague, devastation and banditry among them.

 

It is as if the entire social and political structure has become a

corruption, inflicting itself on the population: 'If I see a soldier,

I await death;/If it be a messenger, severity;/If it be a clerk, a

bond of ruination;/If it be a legal man, malediction:/ If it be a

religious man, reprimand'. So the poet, becoming a spokesman for

humanity, urges God 'to bless those suffering more than I;/ To release

the incarcerated;/ To emancipate the condemned;/ To do goodness to the

cursed;/To bring joy to the humiliated;/ To be balm to the

heartbroken.'

 

Narekatzi's temporal concerns are evident not just in the social

content of the poetry but in its philosophic and artistic technique as

well. It would be inconceivable, Nalpantian asserts, for a thinker

preoccupied by mystical concerns to exhaustively, passionately and so

vividly describe the human body. Yet this is exactly what Narekatzi

does often in some inspiring poetry. And he does not do so in the

traditional Christian manner, to underline God's genius. In affirming

the marvel of the human body he lays the ground for appeals to God to

cure people of bodily ills, to restore them to their own inherent

splendour.

 

Underlining this concern for life on earth is a rejection of

traditional Christian notions of death as relief and redemption from

an unworthy bodily existence. With awesome poetic force Narekatzi

shows that death is no blissful transition to a better, everlasting

world. It is 'annihilation', it is 'the transition to nothingness', it

is 'loss' and 'emptiness'. Death is like 'a lantern extinguished', a

'dried up stream', 'an uprooted tree', 'a burnt bit of dead wood', a

'pitiful sight', a 'miserable form', a 'tragic thing'. It is no

accident therefore that pleas to stay the hand of death, to cure the

body, to give it strength to resist and live appear throughout the

poem.

 

Pressing home his point Nalpantian argues that when Narekatzi does pay

homage to the Christian concept of death the passages lack poetic fire

and passion. Equally significant is the fact that in the 'Book of

Lamentations' one only rarely comes across significant references or

expressions of desire for the afterlife. Those passages that do

express such a desire also lack poetic power. Many scholars,

Christians among them, even claim these passages may be additions by

other pens.

 

Krikor of Narek wrote the 'Book of Lamentations' as a 'monument of

hope'. In a series of wonderfully uplifting passages we see at the

core of a truly monumental work a profound love of humanity and a

passionate desire to see all obstacles to human happiness -

psychological, emotional and material - removed. Reading these

passages we can see why the book had such an amazing hold over the

population. With a mesmerising poetry unrivalled in Armenian

literature, it inspired in men and women the hope of a fulfilled life,

and it sustained this hope during long centuries of darkness and

oppression.

 

Vatche Nalpantian's 'Krikor of Narek' is a marvellous introduction to

a body of work that belongs not to Christians, but to humanity as a

whole. Despite the aspersions cast upon it, Narek is not a sermon in

humility and resignation in the face of oppression and misery, even

though it does not, and could not, preach revolt as some have idly

desired. Despite its complexity and age the 'Book of Lamentations' can

still speak vibrantly to an era where hope has diminished and where

gloom and darkness need vanquishing.

 

Note: There is no adequate English language translation of Narek.

Extracts are rough and ready, remote approximations, with the help of

Misha Kudian and Gevork Emin

 

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Eddie Arnavoudian holds degrees in history and politics from

Manchester, England, and is Groong's commentator-in-residence on

Armenian literature. His works on literary and political issues

have also appeared in Harach in Paris, Nairi in Beirut and Open

Letter in Los Angeles.

[nairi]

There is in fact a very good translation from Grabar into English by T Samuelian. It runs both the Grabar text and the English. It is in my view a fine if imperfect translation.

I agree, although I wish his introduction was more extensive, but maybe I'm asking for too much He also translated Toumanian's David of Sassoun, again with Armenian and English opposite each other. I wonder what else he has translated...

[15levels]

Here is the book in english in its entirety

 

http://www.stgregoryofnarek.am/

 

Many thanks to Sara from Armenianhouse.org for posting this link.

 

Enjoy it and pass it on.

 

Officially, the book is online.