Some Thoughts on Editing an Anthology of Armenian Writing in English by Naneh V Hovhannisyan

Contemporary Armenian literature hasn’t been the Anglosphere’s talk of the town. Among other national literatures in wider Europe, it is peripheral. Reasons for this range from the geographic and political to the relative scarcity of domestic and external funding for writers and translators of Armenian. This notwithstanding, despite small numbers and due to being diasporic, Armenians are known to readers, including for contributions to other national literatures. 

On the other hand, in Armenia in recent years, the majority of books in Armenian on the market have been translations, with English predictably having the lion’s share. In short, as any other minor literature, the Armenian one suffers from very limited access to the global marketplace dominated by a handful of major languages. 

All of this means that when we were generously invited to curate the winter 2024 special issue of Wasafiri Magazine on contemporary international writing, my co-editor Tatevik Ayvazyan and I felt duty-bound to cover both grounds – to re/present an under-represented literary community, as well as share engaging, exciting texts with English-speaking audiences. True, that task is inexhaustible – and readers will decide as to how close we came to fulfilling each of hose composites. But this process shed light on a number of things.

The beauty of Armenian history is its kaleidoscopic fragmentation: richly interplaying moments and experiences often only tangentially linked over time and space by language, institutions, or by someone simply saying ‘I am Armenian’. The tragedy of Armenian history is that these diverse experiences are all too often essentialised, dyeing this wildly polychromatic fabric the homogenising ‘colour of pomegranates’. This homogenisation is a result of genocide. The universal application of violence for simply being Armenian created the first truly universal Armenian experience. So writes – poignantly and pointedly – historian Nik Matheou in his review of Kirakos Gandzeketsi’s History of the Armenians for the issue, Armenia(n)s: Elevation. 

Today, over a hundred years after the Genocide, with a diaspora spread across myriad countries, with a Republic of Armenia, and a hundred and fifty thousand Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh Armenians forced to flee to Armenia in 2023, with their distinct perspective, it is hard to say to what extent our compilation reflects each of these segments. But as co-editors we settled on the languages accessible to us, deciding to include works in Eastern and Western Armenian, as well as works of Anglophone and Russophone Armenian writers. The idea was to reflect the main facets of Armenian identity, or rather, of the varied Armenian identities and experiences, and even of the different ideas of Armenia. Plurality was our guide, albeit within the constraints mentioned above.

Still, editing being about excluding as much as including, we did debate seemingly simple points, such as who is an Armenian writer? or what is Armenian literature? – firstly, as selection criteria, then, as a way to examine our biases. 

How does one define Armenian writing, Armenian literature: as a collection of texts by Armenians, in Armenian, from Armenia? Which? All together? As a result of the process, I moved away from a strict view that an author’s literary identity or a work’s literary belonging is determined exclusively by language (since language is literature’s tool), to a broader one, where there is room for writing outside the language, as well as outside the nation, to paraphrase the academic Azade Seyhan. Thus, the Pulitzer-prize winning Armenian-American playwright, novelist and short story writer William Saroyan’s works could be considered Armenian.

On top of it, I was aware of the precarious tension that comes with positioning oneself between the Republic’s and Diaspora’s contexts. So, born and raised in Armenia and now living in England, apart from certain pieces that I felt strongly about featuring, I asked myself at times when choosing: who is being represented and who is doing the representing? 

So, within the covers of the magazine, we have literary grandee Krikor Beledian’s poetry, novelist Chris Bohjalian’s life writing piece, and prose writer Narine Abgaryan’s short story, sharing space with Christian Batikian’s fiction, Marine Petrossian’s poetry and Siranush Dvoyan’s literary criticism, among others. Geographically, they hail from places as wide apart as Lebanon, USA, Russia, and Armenia. Thematically, they cover issues such as genocide, decimation of language, and diaspora, as well as Nagorno-Karabakh wars and Stalin’s gulag. In short, we kept the selection wide to highlight the diversity of concerns in new Armenian writing. 

Briefly about translation. A significant percentage of the commissioned content was translated, and working with translations was its own joy and challenge. As a trained linguist, I found it a thrill to see written material light up – doubly – and given sharpness and new definitions through the toing and froing between the source and the target languages. After all, what is translation if not a stripping naked of the original in order to re-construct and give it a separate existence? Yet it is also true that sometimes it is tempting to want to explain, or provide context or make it palatable for western readers, or to nativise, make things seemless. But in the main I for one resisted: readers are intelligent and open-minded enough, I figure.    

In 2021, Aram Pachyan’s P/F was awarded, and in 2023 Lusine Kharatyan’s Սիրիավեպ [‘Syrian Affair’] was shortlisted for the annual European Prize for Literature, an EU-supported initiative. Increasingly, translated prose and poetry by writers of Armenian have been appearing in non-dominant languages alongside translations into main European ones. As are English-language writers of Armenian descent becoming more visible. Between the diaspora and the republic, the International Armenian Literary Alliance is building bridges. And as well as the rising profile of Armenian literary agents in translation deals, authors themselves proactively seek opportunities to build connections and keep learning. Stay tuned and curious.

By Naneh V Hovhannisyan

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Naneh V Hovhannisyan is an Armenian-born writer of book reviews, essays, and memoir pieces from the margins. Her work has been published by EVN Report, WritersMosaic, Wasafiri, The Armenian Weekly, and the Armenian Institute, London, among others. She co-edited Armenia(n)s: Elevation, the special issue of Wasafiri (Winter 2024).