More than my house I need the truth.
But I need my house too.
BERTOLT BRECHT
My grandfather died more than a decade before I was born. But when conversation turned to him, there was sometimes mention of a book of poems with which he had something to do. It was in Armenian literature an important—what one might call a flammable—book, written by his friend Adom Yarjanian, whose pen name was Siamanto. Siamanto and my grandfather, Diran Balakian, were born in 1878 in Akn and Tokat, respectively, provincial cities of Turkey. As progressive, outward-looking Armenians, they went to Europe to complete their educations, my grandfather to medical school in Leipzig, Siamanto to Paris to study literature and philosophy.
After graduating from medical school in 1905, my grandfather returned to Constantinople and, shortly thereafter in the spring of 1909, went with a group of Armenian physicians and relief workers to Adana in southern Turkey—a part of historic Armenia in the medieval period known as Cilicia—to do relief work for the Armenian survivors of the massacres of that region. Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 Armenians were killed, mostly in the month of April, as a result of ethnic backlash in a time of political turmoil in Turkey. A new government had emerged from the Young Turk revolution of 1908 that had toppled the Sultan Abdulhammit II, permanently terminating the political authority of the sultanate. By 1909, the new regime was waged in civil conflict with the Sultan’s counterrevolutionary army, and the Armenians, in the Adana region in particular, were being mass-killed and their businesses looted and burned by the local population and counterrevolutionaries who were reacting with more than hostility to reforms for Christians that had accompanied the Young Turk revolution. Before it was over, the new Young Turk army that came to the region to quell the violence also engaged in the mass killing of the Armenian population. In short, Armenians were being scapegoated by both the new, secular, and purportedly liberal Young Turk government and the embittered forces of the recently dethroned Sultan, whom the Young Turks had driven from power.
In various ways, it was a sign that the new Young Turk era reforms for minorities were not going to work, and it was also a harbinger of the full-scale genocide of 1915 that would result in the death of more than a million Armenians and the erasure of almost all of Armenian life and culture in Turkey, where Armenians were among the indigenous peoples of Anatolia for more than 2,000 years. In one sense, the Adana massacres of 1909 were part of a “continuum of destruction” to use Irvin Staub’s phrase, which had begun with Sultan Abdulhammit’s Armenian massacres in the 1890s, when more than 100,000 Armenians were killed and thousands of others ruined and displaced.
In Adana in 1909, my grandfather worked as a physician aiding the survivors. He became a witness to atrocities and destruction the way a physician might be. He was single during these years (not marrying my grandmother until 1913), and he wrote letters home regularly to his family in Constantinople. The letters, which have not survived, were filled with details and narratives about the atrocities. Siamanto was a close friend of the Balakian family and lived near my great-grandparents in the Scutari section of Constantinople (today Istanbul). Not only did he read the letters my grandfather sent from Adana, but he used them as his source for a book of poems.
When my father wrote his father Diran Balakian’s obituary for the National Cyclopaeida of American Biography, he noted this: “During 1909–11 he served with a group of Armenian doctors in Adana, Turkey, aiding stricken refugees of the Turkish massacres of those years. During that time he wrote a series of letters to his friend, the poet Siamanto, describing the conditions in Adana and the plight of the refugees, and these were published by the poet in 1911 [sic] under the name Sanguineous [sic]News from My Friend.” My father’s statement about his father’s letters home from Adana has one inaccuracy: Siamanto didn’t publish my grandfather’s letters verbatim. But I suppose in some way my father was acknowledging how deeply a joint venture this book of poems was—a physician and a poet collaborating to articulate some harsh realities. As for my father’s translation of the title, I remember, after this history had ceased to be taboo in my family, my father and his sisters Anna and Nona, who were literary critics and scholars, discussing it. Should it be Red News from My Friend, Sanguinous News from My Friend, or perhaps Bloody News from My Friend? My father’s translation—“Sanguinous”—seems to me too diffuse and even euphemistic. Garmeer in Armenian is “red,” and in the context of these poems clearly means “bloody.”
Siamanto was arrested on April 24, 1915, in Constantinople/Istanbul along with the famous group of about 250 Armenian cultural leaders; he, along with one segment of that group, was sent to Ayash near Ankara, where he and most of the others were killed by the Turkish gendarmes in the summer of 1915, somewhere outside of Ankara. He was a poet whose identity and writing were an important part of an Armenian cultural renaissance in the first decade of the twentieth century and part of what was the beginning of Armenian literary modernism. He was a central voice in articulating poetry’s role in reclaiming history and myth in order to make a new language and a richer culture. In this sense, he is a poet whose cultural situation bears some resemblance to that of Yeats in Ireland, Neruda in Chile, or Whitman in the United States, especially during the Civil War. Although he wasn’t a polemical writer, he believed that poetry could not be entirely separated from the social sphere and, in this case, that meant the pressing conditions of the Armenian people under Ottoman rule. He would have agreed with Whitman’s insistence that “a bard is to be commensurate with a people.” And Siamanto was a poet of bardic affinities. He was a public poet who declaimed his poems before audiences and crowds and was popular in the café culture of Constantinople in those years before 1915.
For the reader unfamiliar with Armenian literary history, it is worth noting the context from which Siamanto emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. In the second half of the nineteenth century, both Eastern Armenia (in the Russian Empire) and Western Armenia (in the Ottoman Empire) were in the midst of a cultural revival. From the second half of the eighteenth century on, both Eastern and Western Armenia had absorbed different dimensions of intellectual tradition from Europe and Russia. The European Enlightenment and Romantic movements had impacts on Armenian writers and thinkers. Voltaire, Racine, Rousseau, and Hugo, for example, embodied ideas about civil liberties and human egalitarianism, and Armenian writers appropriated these ideas to help them address Armenia’s deplorable social and political conditions under Ottoman rule.
Although the impact of French culture on Armenian writers and thinkers seems to have been primary, Byron and Shelley, Swift, Milton, and Shakespeare also contributed their share to the Armenian cultural revival, as did the Italian Risorgimento by way of the Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro in Venice. There, Mekhitarist monks—who had taken in Byron in 1816 for his year of studying classical Armenian—had been a bridge between Armenia and Italy since 1717. Dante, Manzoni, and Leopardi were translated into Armenian from the middle of the nineteenth century. To Armenians, the democratic revolutions in France, Germany, and Italy in the middle and later parts of the nineteenth century were also signposts of progress and the ideals for liberty.
While nineteenth-century European influences helped shape Siamanto, so did a revival of interest among Armenians in their art and culture. Like various European cultures, Armenia in the late nineteenth century was involved in its own Romantic movement, and Armenian writers and artists were rediscovering their pre- and early-Christian poetry, such as the epic of David of Sassoun and the inventive mystical poems of Gregory of Nareg, as well as the ballad tradition of Sayat Nova and village folk music, which the priest and composer Gomidas Vartabed was collecting, arranging, and composing. There was also new excitement about the extraordinary medieval manuscript painters such as Toros Roslin and Sarkis Pidzak and the pioneering architectural achievements of early Christian and medieval Armenian churches, exemplified most dramatically by the uncovering of the lost medieval Armenian city of Ani by the Russian archeologist Nikolas Marr in the 1890s.
In this milieu, Siamanto came of age with a kind of cosmopolitanism that was new for Armenian intellectuals. Like other modern Western Armenian writers of his generation—Daniel Varoujan, Vahan Tekeyan, Zabel Yessayan, and Krikor Zohrab, to name a few—Siamanto absorbed European traditions into Armenian traditions. Looking back from the twenty-first century, the loss is hard to comprehend: an entire generation of Western Armenian writers were extinguished by the Ottoman government just at a moment when they were emerging into a generation that was bringing Armenian literature into modernism and into an international light. Fortunately, a solid body of their works survive, among them numerous fine translations of poetry into English, many of them done by the poet Diana Der Hovanessian, which has given them another audience.
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There is nothing like Bloody News from My Friend that I know of in twentieth-century poetry. It is a book that was forged from certain salient late-nineteenth century literary modes, but somehow along the way turned into something startling and new. The Bloody News poems undermine traditional norms of genre and poetics that defined late-nineteenth-century poetry in Armenian literature as well as those in the Anglo-American tradition. Although Siamanto assumes certain late-nineteenth-century Armenian conventions in creating dramatic monologues and narrative mimetic lines, the harsh violence that he sought to represent drew him into a language of such a raw, blunt, and stark nature that it subverted anything that might evoke, hint of, or imply a genteel aesthetic, or a pursuit of inspirational nature, or the sublime that much of fin-de-siècle poetry was defined by in American and British poetry.
In making a rougher language and a vernacular voice, Siamanto often dispensed with traditional notions of metaphor. His blunt realism strikes me as owing more to Whitman’s Civil War poems than to l’art pour l’art poetics of Malarmé or the pre-Raphaelites that defined much of the of the fin-de-siècle. As the British World War I poets would, Siamanto found that the impact of mass violence veered him away from the more romantic aesthetic that had driven his earlier poems, in which he sought to reclaim a sublime Armenian past, to reinvent Armenian myth, and to capture transcendent forces.
Because the Bloody News poems wrestle with “raw evil,” to use his phrase, Siamanto is obsessed with Turkish Islamic culture and its modes and capacities to demonize the other. What happened to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1909, and then in 1915, also happened in different forms to the Greeks of western Turkey and the Pontus and the Assyrians of southeast Anatolia during this period of genocide and ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Christians from 1915 through the burning of Smyrna in 1922. Thus, the texture of these poems has broad implications about the dynamics of power and the demonizing of the other. In this sense, the Bloody News poems have an increasingly visible place in the ongoing interest in the dynamics of poetry in relation to situations of mass violence. The popularity of poems like “The Dance,” “The Cross,” and “Grief,” since their first appearance in Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, and then in the English translation of Bloody News from My Friend in 1996, strikes me as a barometer of a certain broadening of poetics in our current literary culture.
Although poems like “The Bath,” “The Dagger,” “The Atonement,” and “The Cross” may be shocking in their graphic depictions, they avoid the sentimental. Siamanto is interested in depicting the ways the perpetrators conceived of “the Armenian” as other—that stereotyped personage who had been denigrated by the hegemonic culture as gavur (infidel). Bloodthirsty is a word that Siamanto uses again and again, and I suspect it was a word my grandfather used in his letters. What Armenians experienced during the massacre and genocide period was inseparable from what psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton has called “death saturation,” 1 in which the bloody mess of killing and the phenomenon of mass corpses comes to define the survivor’s traumatic aftermath or, in the case of my grandfather, medical witnessing in those weeks and months after the massacre. Perhaps the intensity of gore and bodily pain of the mass killing is hinted at in U.S. Ambassador to Turkey (1913–1916) Henry Morgenthau’s defining memoir about the Armenian genocide, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, published in 1918:
I have by no means told the most terrible details, for a complete narration of the sadistic orgies of which these Armenian men and women were the victims can never be printed in an American publication. Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.2
It is that kind of “sadistic orgy” that Siamanto tries to depict in Bloody New from My Friend. “The Bath” “The Dance,” and “The Cross,” for example, raise ethical and philosophical questions about the relationship between religious ideologies and political power. Whether we are encountering Turkish Muslims torturing, killing, or raping Armenians, or the Nazis’ mass incineration of European Jews in concentration camps in the 1940s, or Serbian Christians massacring Muslim Bosnians at Srebrenica in 1994, we are always forced to ask questions about ethnic and religious ideologies in relation to extreme nationalism.
In assessing aspects of literary representation, one finds these poems remarkably modern in their imagistic concreteness, their unromantic depictions of human suffering, their daring use of vernacular, and their ways of moving discursively with epistolary episode and eyewitness-like reportage. Ezra Pound and the modernist movement would extol some of these qualities in the ensuing decades in his new credos. In certain peculiar ways, Siamanto found some prevailing elements of modernism by virtue of his sensibility and his historical and cultural predicament. It seems to me that we are much better prepared to read these poems today than we might have been when they were written. Not only in the wake of modernism, but in light of a new historicism, which, in part, shaped the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century.
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The Bloody News poems might be noted as poems of witness, a term that’s been given visibility by Carolyn Forché’s anthology of 1992 and by an evolving genocide studies discourse. But I’m more inclined to reflect on Siamanto’s ability to ingest violence and setting the lyric poem the task of transforming and manipulating the event. By engaging conditions of extremity, torture, killing, and rape, Siamanto attempts to find a language capable of linguistic compression and lyric precision to allow the poems to create scenes, images, and dialogical voices. In most of the poems, Siamanto withholds a personal voice in order to create distance and detachment by setting up characters through the dramatic monologue and at times even a dialogue of voices. The poems have something of a playwright’s sensibility in this sense. The point of view and framing techniques in most of these poems are the poet’s way of conveying violence with some detachment that creates its own kind of irony.
As the title Bloody News from My Friend suggests, the poet has received from his friend the physician eyewitness accounts of what has happened to his Armenian countrymen and -women in, to use that phrase of the big city, “the interior.” Because Diran Balakian, the physician, had sent letters from the killing fields that reached his friend, the poet, Siamanto, back home in Constantinople, the poet is able to establish some distance, and this distance is essential to the perspective of the full thirteen-poem cycle. Many of the poems begin in medias res, as if a conversation between the physician and the poet is an ongoing thing. In poems such as “The Dagger” and “The Cross,” the voice of epistolary witness speaks clearly: “I don’t want this letter to scare you,” or “forgive me today my good friend of old dreams.” The poems convey the authority of one who is seeing firsthand the dead, the wandering, and the displaced or gathering narratives from others who have.
“The Dance” is told by a German woman, an eyewitness who is aiding Armenian victims. As she nurses a dying woman, she watches from her window the torture of a dozen women as the gendarmes douse them with kerosene and burn them to death while they are forced to dance. In “The Mulberry Tree,” an Armenian woman, a deportee, tells the story of an old woman who has gone mad after seeing her grandson killed. In “Strangled,” “A Victory,” and “The Son,” an omniscient voice tells tales of heroism and horror. “Strangled,” for example, deals with a mother who is forced to suffocate her infant so that she and a group of Armenians hiding in a dug-out cellar won’t be found by Turkish soldiers.
Siamanto’s depiction of sexual violence is embedded in many of the poems in the cycle. And while sexual violence in the Adana massacres was prevalent, Siamanto’s focus on violence toward women is an emanation of the precarious conditions of Christian women in the Ottoman Empire. Armenian women, like all minority women, were vulnerable in Ottoman society; the abduction, rape, and selling of women into harems was the result of the asymmetrical legal system under which minorities lived as dhimmi (non-Muslim citizens living in a Muslim state) in the millet system. During the genocide period, the Armenian men of a household were killed first, leaving the women vulnerable to rape and abduction, and forcible conversion to Islam. It’s estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 Armenians were disappeared in these ways.3
Other poems dramatize how religious ideology fueled the killing. “The Cross,”4 for example, deals with a mother pleading for her son’s life outside a church where she is met by a Turkish mob and some gendarmes. “Don’t worry,” they tell her, “he’s in the vestibule praying for you . . . he’ll be free today.” They strip her, soak her dress in his blood, and push it in her face. “Doesn’t it smell familiar?” they taunt her. Then they paint a cross in blood on the wall, and the poem closes:
In the church that Turk pointed to the cross.
“Kneel down and pray.
We’ll do it to you like you did it to Christ.
Pray, mother, to your son.
Have you no faith in the resurrection?”
In “The Dagger,” sexual violence and sadism are inseparable from Turkish envy of Armenian wealth, which often fueled resentment against Armenians, especially during this period. In this epistolary poem, the witness refers to Armenia’s hope of “Ideal Brotherhood” going up in flames. Here, the Armenian family’s wealth becomes the focus of denigration. The Turk dresses the Armenian woman in her own jewels before killing her: “Let me sprinkle your hair with these brooches and gem-studded hair pins . . . pick your own slippers—gold thread or pearl.” With a dagger he tries to force the woman to kill her son: “Feast your eyes one last time on your wealth, infidel, / because I’m passing out to all my guests your jewels.” The poem has a strange twist, but in the end the culture of death subsumes everything.
In “The Dance,” the killers taunt a group of Armenian women, forcing them to circle dance:
dance till you die, infidel beauties.
With your flapping tits, dance!
Smile for us. You’re abandoned now,
you’re naked slaves,
so dance like a bunch of fuckin’ sluts.
We’re hot for your dead bodies.
The gendarmes then douse the women in kerosene and light a match as they watch the women collapse to their deaths. The ghoulish ritual here is neither exaggeration nor melodrama; this method of torture and killing was witnessed by survivors throughout the mass killing sprees. The burning to death of naked women is in complex ways inseparable from the patriarchal denigration and humiliation of Christian women that was embedded in Ottoman culture.
Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, notes that “what is remembered in the body is well remembered,” 5 and this pathological sense is something that defines a psychological layer of meaning in these poems. Scarry’s notion that torture approximates what she calls “the undoing of civilization,”6 also suggests something about Siamanto’s perspective on traumatic breakdown and the shutdown of self and human voice. Perhaps the title of Scarry’s book is an apt trope for the Bloody News poems. Scarry goes on to note that torture is a totalizing infliction of bodily pain, such that the victim is rendered speechless, stripped of voice, and subjugated in the most complete sense to the power of the regime. Torture, she asserts, is not only the “unmaking of civilization” but the “mutilation of the domestic, the ground of all making.”7 The grandmother in “The Mulberry Tree” testifies to something like this when she grieves over the loss of her domestic life:
You should’ve seen my home, what a hearth of good things—lambs, hens, a white cock.
Everything in my sheepfold burnt down.
In my granary I had a handful of wheat for autumn,
under my garret two bee-hives.
In one day the whole village was burned.
Every morning smoke puffed out my chimney.
What did they want from me? Tell me . . .
If torture unmakes human consciousness, breaks down the connection between self and other, self and world, and severs the voice, then the poem, Siamanto suggests, can offer some ethical counterforce in the aftermath. The poem’s ability to create a voice for the voiceless pushes lyric language to a graphic intensity as well as to an acquiescence to absence, to voicelessness, to gestures of silence, which also push back in these poems in dialectical ways. The wretched in the Bloody News poems are often speechless. At the end of the “Mulberry Tree,” the companion of the narrator, having seen the grandmother go crazy, begins to “cry like a child,” and at the end of “The Dance,” the German narrator renders a speechless gesture, “How can I dig out these eyes of mine?” The poem “Strangled” concludes with the woman who suffocated her infant, begging for her death, “Take my throat, my hands are too weak.” The victims of torture are rendered in some kind of agony in which they make what Scarry calls “sounds anterior to learned language.”8 If the violence is silencing as it is in fact in the acts of killing and torture, the poem emerges as some kind of answer to total silence: a refusal to let the victims go voiceless into the dust.
Although many of the Bloody News poems rely on narrative lines, a poem like “Grief” reminds one of Siamanto’s lyric inventiveness. The poem’s opening, civic voice veers into some wilder leaps and surreal associations: “You stranger, soulmate, / who leaves behind the road of joy, / listen to me.” The sense of shock and betrayal at the eruption of the massacres in Adana give way to a strange sense of the absurd and to some questioning of larger meaning. Siamanto’s gift for wry bitterness and surreal humor in the face of atrocity are nowhere better heard than in the middle of the third stanza:
walk down the roads without rage or hate
and exclaim: what a bright day,
what a sarcastic grave-digger . . .
what a mob, what dances, what joy
and what feasts everywhere. . . .
Our red shrouds are victory flags.
The bones of our pure brothers are flutes . . .
with them others are making strange music.
In the closing, Siamanto isn’t afraid of a big rhetorical gesture with a touch of something philosophical: “if you are chased down by raw Evil, / don’t forget that you are born / to bring forth the fruitful Good,” or “The law of life stays the same . . . human beings can’t understand each other.”
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Working with my collaborator and friend, Nevart Yaghlian, who provided me with literal translations and her literary and linguistic intelligence, I did my best to render these poems into an idiom that best corresponded with late-twentieth-century poetry in English. I think a translator of poetry in particular is obligated to bring the language of one poet of one historical time into the other language of the historical time in which he or she is working. Because I felt that some of Siamanto’s oratorical flourishes did not have an effective equivalent in English, I did not try to reproduce all of the sound play of his Armenian, and so at times I needed to trim phrases or lines. I also felt it was necessary to make contemporary some of the dialogue, which was also contemporary in its early-twentieth-century Armenian, so that the language reads as idiomatically vernacular as possible in our own American English. Most importantly, I have remained faithful to the meaning, the spirit, the ideas, the images, and the voice of the poems, and I have done my best to create the same sense of response in our audience that Siamanto hoped to elicit in his.
Bloody News from My Friend was first published in Constantinople in 1909, and a year later it came out in Armenian with the Hairenik Press of Boston, where Siamanto was living at the time. In 1985, the Donikian Press in Beirut reissued Bloody News from My Friend. This is the first edition of Bloody News from My Friend to appear in English, although poems from the volume have appeared in various anthologies, including Anthology of Armenian Poetry, translated by the poet Diana Der Hovanessian (with M. Margossian), and “The Dance” and “Grief” appeared in Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness in my and Nevart Yaghlian’s translations.
Looking back at Bloody News from My Friend from the end of the twentieth century, one can sense something postmodern about the disruptive strategies in these poems. In refusing to be ornamental, generic, metaphysical, Siamanto insisted on seeing in a clear way something about the impact of mass violence on the self, the fabric of social organization, and, of course, the imagination in aftermath. To read a simple line from a poem in the collection called “The Son” is to encounter a prophetic emblem written at the beginning of the twentieth century: “for miles, the cinders of farms, strewn corpses, and in his living room his wife, naked and stabbed.” Even before the British poets of World War I found themselves stuck in the trenches, Siamanto’s poems had ingested a kind of experience that would alter our idea of poetry’s reach and range.