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).
