third master
The president leans over, and the four buttons on his sleeve inscribe their stamp while he draws traces in some history. Four wheels—longwise, faceless like the nature— tree, tree, tree, tree, witness like the nature on a dark sidewalk. Four buttons of a small country, of a big country, of a country of small towns bending—over inks and paper, over crowds, and disasters, under the sun, over the bogs like storks. Eight eyes upon four roots— sewn with a thread. A thread of doubts.
second master
Fly fast, run rapid, swim swift, escape easy, prey-beast! The tribe chief sings to the prey— My hunter will catch you with bare hands, choose your goddess, prey-beast! The naked hunter plays the water, the earth, the leaves, the moon, in the sun, the small straw bunch is his clothing with bone buttons— the sign of his vigor, sewn with beast tissues, Run fast, prey-beast! He’s already finished his playing sewn to the forests—with steady threads.
first master
She circles around, and her circles include what concerns the man and herself. Having the peel of obedience, weakness and beauty she circles pots of the sound mind, taking from one side of the earth and giving to the other. She rearranges the hunting site with a thousand hands— originally knows the order of things correctly, possesses power over all concerns, over the man, that ceaselessly provides weapons to be cleaned, and over the buttons that are firmness and beauty. She is on the earth by the knee, and the earth of all times is all in her hands. She–Ursula.
I have translated the following poem word for word—a process that does not deal in equivalencies in English that would translate the same in Armenian. Rather, going beyond transference to grasping the internal meaning, interpreting a word already deconstructed in order to understand, not after understanding. What has the word for word translation to offer? It helps to bring into the target language the foreign glow of a text, and beyond that, what the source language already has to offer—what Walter Benjamin calls “pure language.” Languages operate as spies in the depository of pure language, complementing each other's knowledge through texts. If I were a language my dream would not be clinging to what is already known, but in guessing more. This text with its Armenian glow is there for that.
Anna Davtyan