Karen Jallatyan
Two translations in two years. Two translations of Krikor Beledian’s monumental Fifty Years of Armenian Literature in France, 1922-1972, From the Same to the Other (Cinquante ans de littérature arménienne en France, 1922-1972, Du Même à L’Autre,
2001, CNRS) were published in the past two years: the English version
translated by Christopher Atamian in 2016; the Armenian version a year
later, translated by Arpi Totoyan. Growing out of Beledian’s second
dissertation, defended in 1995, this meticulously researched volume
analyzes the Armenian Catastrophe and diasporic exile by presenting the
literary milieu and the literature of the “Menk” (We) generation whose
authors – among them Shahnour, Sarafian, and Vorpouni – started
publishing in the 1920s and were active well into the 1970s. Here, I
will focus on the essay “The Bilingual Net” («Երկլեզու ցանցը», 5-39)
with which Beledian introduces his work’s Armenian translation. True to
its title, this text attempts to think diasporic multilingualism from
the prism of reading (hence writing) literature. Before delving into the
essay, I invite you to take a brief excursion through Beledian’s
literary criticism to see what this author might mean by “thinking”
(theorizing) and “reading” (writing).
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| The two translations of Krikor Beledian’s monumental “Fifty Years of Armenian Literature in France, 1922-1972, From the Same to the Other “ |
Beledian the Literary Critic: An Incomplete Outline
Krikor Beledian has theorized about the nature of diaspora for decades,
mainly occasioned by analyzing diasporan Armenian literature. . His
first series of essays appeared in the journal Ahegan (Beirut, 1966-1970). These and others were later published in the collected volume Discourse (Dram, Beirut,
1980). The brief preface “Leap” («Ոստում») and the introductory essay
“Discourse and Reading” («Տրամ եւ ընթերցում») to this volume mark the
beginning of a series of publications on what it means to read (hence
write “about”) literature. These two texts conceive of reading as a
decisive event (the “leap”) that puts to test the literary work,
actively shaping its past and future, in contrast to conventional
understanding of literary criticism as expressing and/or communicating
pre-made and stable truths “about” literature. Framed in this way, the
rest of the book analyzes the works of Misak Metsarents, Indra/Diran
Chraqian, Daniel Varoujan, Nigoghos Sarafian and ends with a letter to
Zareh Vorpouni. With the publication of the volume Battle (Mard,
Antelias, 1997), which analyzes the literature of Yeghia
Demirjibashian, H. Oshagan, Zabel Yessayan, and Levon Shant, Beledian as
it were settles his accounts with the main pre-diasporic Western
Armenian authors. The opening brief essay, “Two Centers,” sets out to
wage battle against sterile academic literary criticism which mutes the
“living bodies” of literary creations. (10)
With Flock (Darm, Yerevan, 2015) the
anagrammatically linked trilogy comes to a close. This volume collects
readings of Terian, Charents, H. Oshagan, Garbis Janjigyan, V. Oshagan –
all on poetry – and diverse essays, including one with the title
“Identity-Diaspora” (431-464). (How many of thousands of Armenians who
love to talk about diaspora know about or have actually read this
piece?) Before turning to it, a note on the introductory essay “The
Literary Concept” (2009). It opens with the image of a flock of birds to
help the author and the reader comprehend the formation and deformation
of literary thinking across languages, intellectual developments, and
catastrophes. What about the essay “Identity-Diaspora”? There, Beledian
theorizes diasporic life as undergoing three phases, illustrating each
through examples from Armenian literature written in France. Phase one,
rejection of the other (see, for instance, Retreat Without Song (1929)
by Shahan Shahnour); phase two, a contradictory state of
in-between-ness, pregnant with the opportunity to embrace the profound
crisis of identity as a creative state of being (e.g. the poetry of
Nigoghos Sarafian); phase three, the unexpected independence of Armenia
which leads to further attempts to undermine the legitimacy and dignity
of the diasporic experience. Make no mistake, Beledian is not against
independent Armenia; what he is, perhaps, against is the indifference
towards diasporic reality as such and the refusal, if not the inability,
to live authentically and creatively this exile. Engaging in dialogue
with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Paul Ricoeur – major European thinkers of
the past century – Beledian in this essay thinks of exile as essential
to identity since the latter is not a positively given, self-standing
thing but always forms through an essential encounter with its other.
“The Bilingual Net”
Now that you and I have made it through the above excursus only
partially intact, let’s turn to the essay “The Bilingual Net.” The
occasion is Beledian’s reworking of Totoyan’s translation, which makes
him meditate on partial auto-translation. The work itself – Fifty Years of Armenian Literature in France
– as Beledian notes, is the result of an encounter between Armenian and
French cultures, since it is written in French in Paris and studies
Armenian literature written in Armenian in France. Beledian opens this
essay by first taking issue with literary criticism that erases the
active agency of the literary critic. By contrast, he emphasizes his
role as first of all experiencing and putting to trial the works
analyzed through a transformative act of thinking. This consists not so
much in interpreting but arranging and shaping the material. (See pp.
5-13 as well as p. 30.) This echoes, doesn’t it, the reading approaches
that, as I suggest above, Beledian develops earlier? Having restored his
active role, Beledian turns towards the problematic that is the central
concern of the essay. What is it like to live and write literature in a
bilingual environment? Usually, bilingualism is analyzed in translation
studies, linguistics, and anthropology, and rarely occasions
speculations forming out of literary criticism. But is not language
writers and literary critics’ primary “material,” too? This is where the
significance of Beledian’s essay most strikingly lies and is the reason
why I focus more on this section of his essay.
Now, how does Beledian link and think the bilingual with the
literary? Meditating about auto-translation, he begins by recalling that
identity is not a given; instead, it is essentially conditioned by
difference. (17) The reader here, too, should recognize an echo with his
earlier essays. Beledian writes: “The foreigner (the others), that is,
my one difference, one of my others; the alterity forming its essence
obviously and in an undeniable manner had a formative role from the
beginning, I would say.” (17) Having reminded of the essential lack in
identity, Beledian sets out to think what this might be in a bilingual
setting. He claims that the “man of in-between” (18), living in and
between two languages, lives in a state of “lasting tension,” wherein
the languages are always seen from outside and found an exilic
consciousness. (18) The exilic writer by definition discovers that
“literature begins with the loss of innocence, immediacy, ties, and
perhaps ends with their later invention.” (18) The mind dwelling in and
between two languages experiences the irreducible and interrogative
strive between the different grammars of the two languages; this reality
at any given moment forces the mind to choose between one or the other,
and bars it from the possibility of arriving at a “single imaginary
focal point” beyond the two languages. Why? Because any call for such a
unified horizon beyond language, if it exists, has to come in a
particular language, which not only excludes the other language but with
it also any hope for such a horizon. Beledian then adds: “And perhaps
it is thanks to that state of in-between-ness that one-ness,
monolingualism becomes possible.” (19) In other words, exile is
profoundly multilingual, or, what is more accurate, hetero-lingual.
Under such circumstances, the existence of one language is more than
ever conditioned by its lasting encounter with another. This reveals the
“essence” of language which the monolingual prejudice and the
ideologies built on and feeding it had forgotten and tend to forget.
Beledian writes: “Languages tatter each other, of course, but also each
one of them recognizes its own lack thanks to the other’s interposition.
It looks at the other, gazes in it, as that which lacks the other.
Because languages come to be what they are by excluding the others which
form them. And so, they lack with each other.” (21) Beledian conceives
translation accordingly, not as a process of transposition of ready-made
expressions from one sphere of positively existing meaning to another
but as the doubly abysmal encounter between languages. (23) Doubly
because both (all) parties of the encounter are themselves essentially
groundless. Beledian wonders: “But how to guard the position of the
other, if not by calling for an other, which not being entirely
different would succeed saying the same with its different words and
different glossology, which would not be mine, while being it partially.
This is the role of the translator. A kind of intermediary between the
writer’s two I’s, to writerly consciousnesses, between two cultures or
worlds.” (17) In other words, Beledian conceives of the translator as a
“third” other which mediates between the two I’s of the bilingual
writer. This “third” other is only “partially” different from either of
them since were it “entirely” different, there would be no way of
relating to it.
Yet, the danger in theorizing the essential lack of language as
“interposed” by another language lies in the easiness with which we can
slide back into the gravitational field of monolingual plenitude,
obscuring and making us forget the essential lack in another language’s
other-ness, a lack that our usual models and practices of translation
can hardly represent or inscribe. To begin with, is not translation
ordinarily conceived as an act of explanation from “one” language to
“an”-other? What would translation look like, read like, if it were to
try to give the essential multiplicity of “each” language? To
avoid this danger, perhaps it will help to first emphasize that the
multiplicity of multilingualism is not a mathematical multiplicity of
identically different units; rather, such multiplicity is the living
porosity of heterogeneous and irreducible auto-differentiating
formations called languages.
The lack (exile) as multilingualism should also be combined with the
lack as mute visuality and as the untraceable boundary between voice and
sound. Beledian’s literature has consistently and masterfully explored
these aspects of lack by collaborating with the Paris-based visual
artist Assadour and by meditating on image and voice both through his
prose and poetry. To continue being creatively vigilant regarding these
issues, perhaps we should keep in mind the following questions: What
potential forms can multilingual culture take? How is diasporan Armenian
art intrinsically conditioned by multilingualism? In what ways does it
come to be in tension with pre-existing ideologies? How to reconfigure –
through experimentation, of course – diaspora Armenian socio-cultural
institutions that open up to this essential multilingualism and
facilitate cultural emergence that could be adequate to the complexities
and opportunities of diasporic life? We would have to proceed by
singular examples, perhaps first of all turning to a volume of bilingual
poetry by Beledian himself, Objets & Débris (1978, Paris), again, in collaboration with Assadour. Here,
I also have in mind Hrayr Anmahouni’s work. With this review, my hope
is that Armenian and non-Armenian artists – especially writers – would
be inspired by Beledian to not see multiple languages as a matter of
constraint but would strive to live in the in-between space opened by
their encounter, treating it as a space of creation. Only thus can we
hope for truly multilingual times to come.
"Asbarez," December 7, 2018
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