New Spanish Translation of Aurora Mardiganian's "Ravished Armenia": How the Fragments of the Film Were Discovered

Aurora Mardiganian's memoir "Ravished Armenia" and the eponymous film (1918), where the teenager survivor of the Armenian genocide played herself in the first attempt at representing the annihilation, became the stuff of legend. The memoir had many reprints and was translated into different languages, while the film was shown in many countries until its traces disappeared in the 1920s.

The memoir had been translated into Spanish in 1919 (reprinted in 1999). A second Spanish translation appeared in early 2021. The movie was commercially premiered in Buenos Aires in 1920, and  exhibited for the last time in a function for the local Armenian community in 1926.

Mardiganian passed away in total obscurity in 1994. In the same year, Armenian-Argentinean researcher Eduardo Kozanlian discovered in Armenian 15 minutes of film, which he identified as remnants of the lost movie, known both as "Ravished Armenia" and "Auction of Souls." This year, Ediciones Ediar, with the sponsorship of the Hamazkayin Armenian Cultural Association, published in Buenos Aires the Spanish volume Subasta de almas o Armenia arrasada: La historia de Aurora Mardiganian (Auction of Souls or Ravished Armenia: The Story of Aurora Mardiganian), edited by Kozanlian.

The 300-page volume presents a new Spanish translation of the memoir by Dr. Vartan Matiossian, who had previously published two studies in English and Armenian about Mardiganian, the book and the film. In his prologue, Matiossian depicts and assesses Aurora Mardiganian's odyssey throughout the book and the movie, and also highlights the relevance of the discovery.

Kozanlian has extensively annotated the translation and added an extensive study on the book and the film, where he describes his work as a film sleuth and gives a first-hand account of the circumstances leading to the discovery of the fragments. An appendix to the book includes the original 16 photographs of the film, as well as other interesting materials from the editor's personal archive.