When I was asked to compile a volume of Armenian literature in English translation, I was reminded of Antoine Berman and what he describes in his seminal work, The Experience of the Foreign, as the aim of translation: “Fertilizing what is one’s own through the mediation of what is foreign.” We can then consider translation as an aperture that allows us passage to the intricacies of a literary culture, to which the original language cannot grant us access. As Schlegel puts it, an aim that makes the “mother tongue” play.
One of the critical goals of this issue is to explore how translating allows for lacunas in texts to surface and function as possible palimpsests, opaquely inscribed over original works. And how these palimpsests survive as witnesses to a double cultural memory: a written testimony through which translating can make the same language and literature survive itself anew. This becomes an especially significant imperative for Western Armenian—a language of the diaspora, some even argue beyond a dialect (its own individual language) with no official nation, a tongue still spoken by those who survived one of the greatest genocides in human history.
How do we then translate literature built upon its own ruins? This volume is an inception into this question in its efforts to make Armenian translations (from its two main dialects: Western and Eastern Armenian) informants to the growing field of translation studies. This collection includes contemporary Armenian texts from living authors, chosen as significant works that challenge, shape, and complicate conversations on transcultural analysis, and theories and practices related to translating. For this reason, you will find at the end of each translation an afterthought by the translator on the process of translating that particular work within the context of larger questions surrounding translation and translatability. The lack of compelling translations from the Armenian language into English has oftentimes deterred scholars working across multiple fields from considering Armenian literature alongside the literatures of other cultures.
This issue invites translators to move beyond purely prescriptive applications of translation, interpretation, and the localization of national literatures—and the mere translation of a “minor” literature into a major language—to consider their translations of contemporary Armenian literature as part of larger, non-compartmentalized cultural and theoretical frameworks and disciplines such as comparative literature, Mediterranean studies, Postcolonial studies, Diaspora studies, Trauma studies, and others. Translators have also reflected upon questions pertaining to the ethics of semiotic and cultural translation, and what ways (if possible) cultural nuances transform and translate across linguistic, political, and literary mediums. Several authors in the volume have also engaged in self-translation, exploring how an author’s own engagement with their text in a different language exposes an intimacy veiled in the characters of the original.
While they by no means comprise an exhaustive list, the following pages provide a survey of contemporary and active writers from around the world in Armenian at present day. Here, we have a corpus of writers mostly from the Armenian Diaspora–Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the United States, France, Sierra Leone—and some from the Republic of Armenia. Their translations grant access to an Armenian literary present and past, while at the same time allowing others to enter this same world. This volume imagines texts and translations as being weighed against one another as balancing acts of statements and silences. Whereas translations have traditionally been viewed as granting access to others, here we also see the alluring possibility of unmasking the unspoken in Armenian literature, to reveal mutual secrets unraveled in the movements between one language and another. Unscripted: An Armenian Palimpsest is an attempt to break the secrecy of our own language by translating the unspoken, to pulsate the silence beyond letters and words to a readership that is yet to receive it—the world of the original and its recreation; a world where our (same) language lives as a surviving one.
I thank the Absinthe team as well as the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan for helping this incredibly significant volume come to fruition. And a special thanks to all the contributing authors and translators without whom this volume would not be possible.
Dr. Tamar M. Boyadjian
Michigan State University