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Krikor Beledian is widely regarded as the most important poet writing in Western Armenian. A prolific novelist, essayist, and literary critic, he is the author of more than 30 volumes that have been published in the Middle East, Europe, Armenia, and the United States. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, and a long-time resident of Paris, for the last half-century Beledian has chosen to write almost exclusively in Western Armenian, a UN-designated endangered language.
In its 13 parts, “Unpeopled Language” makes up the final section of Beledian’s magnum opus, Mantras (Yerevan, 2010). Throughout the volume, Beledian recasts the mantra as a disruptive tool against what he calls in the preface “the game of expression,” in order to create a “work without contours, held in a ghostly state.” Dire in its subject matter, skeletal in its austerity, and tormented by participating in the very game it decries, “Unpeopled Language” is a groundbreaking work — a ceremony of mourning, suspicious of resurrection, which transforms and expands not only Western Armenian but also English, its language of passage.
¤
1.
we ate salt
sand
then nettles of black snow
on the mountains
now
piercing cold, the ache of extinction
with shriveled
hands
stuttering
the same relentless
denied
witness
to nothing
2.
water
grew to a throat of fire
the April scent of a scorched corpse
and here light tatters
a face freed of skin
dispersion of tin
my breath I gave to the scrapped poem
3.
deep in your eyes
keep
the invisible
it comes
with the same light every year
every day
fire ignited by darkness
a beam
facing you into your retina
no ear no fist
no mourning
no rage and lament
nor the whisper of a prophet’s breath
nothing
the one
who comes with such ceremony
you wrap yourself around every moment
you are warmed by the dead’s breath
which tells you a story and leaves you bereft
soars
to a stutter
there
neither forward nor back
a blank, caustic sky
which redeems gods only
leans over you, bows down
with a dagger’s whoosh
its shine blinding ash
the one who comes
at each throb
with the same denied utterance
the discord from rafters of bodies
holds unresolved
at the apex
of your muted voice
the sun rounds back toward roads of carnage
what remained unnamed revolves around you
what was lost
heaves here now
the final emptiness
your parched tongue catches fire in your mouth
o you asleep everywhere, prisoner to extinction
¤
Translated by Taline Voskeritchian, Christopher Millis
LARB Contributor
Krikor Beledian is widely regarded as the most important poet writing in Western Armenian. A prolific novelist, essayist, and literary critic, he is the author of more than 30 volumes that have been published in the Middle East, Europe, Armenia, and the United States. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, and a long-time resident of Paris, for the last half-century Beledian has chosen to write almost exclusively in Western Armenian, a UN-designated endangered language. (Photograph © Nazik Armenakyan)