“Buzz”
(poetry)
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To the Immortal Memory of Alfred[1]
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Violet Grigoryan’s brilliance lies in her masterful interlacing of the repertoire of various social and dialectal registers of Armenian along with a fluid multilingualism that is taken for granted by a group so accustomed to having multiple languages—and their accompanying sociolinguistic resources—readily available in any setting. The torturous yet gratifying process of attempting to translate these intra- and interlingual leaps has challenged and stretched the boundaries of my own linguistic reserves.
On a deeper level, however, the entire poem confronts the notion of translation, as, at its core, it is an attempt to decode the raw, fleeting, and chaotic thoughts of various characters battling their double consciousness, while Grigoryan simultaneously challenges her own awareness of the limitations of the poetic medium. Constantly testing the reader’s tolerance for ambiguity, she surreptitiously shifts narrator, linguistic media, and modes of speech. Grigoryan immerses us in and draws us out of her characters’ inner thoughts and external utterings, flavored by the commentary of various social types attending a high society event, who look on in amused contempt and pity. In capturing the transition between the uncontrollable firing of thoughts to their ensuing verbal expression, all kinds of identities are put to the test: linguistic, gender, social, national, and political. Grigoryan presents a woman wronged by an unrequited love as the central heroine, a character obsessed with revenge and plagued with an inability to decipher if her thoughts are indeed her own or those imposed on her by society. The lines that read, “You are hell, you for yourself, when there is someone else sitting / inside of you,” capture the angst of the woman’s double consciousness. But just as the woman is victim to social and gender norms set by man and society, so language is victim to the forces of the uncontrolled, frenzied, and tumultuous stream of consciousness of the main characters. Although Grigoryan challenges the conventions of the poetic medium in a multitude of ways in order to realize this transition from chaotic thought to physical utterance, she is still paralyzed by her consciousness of the tradition. Even in her deliberate deviance from linguistic conventions—ranging from lexical, semantic, phonological, to the usage of dialect and a variety of registers and languages—she is still left with an uneasy search for a parallel universe beyond words. As she articulates in the poem, the current world has words that confirm certain phenomena, “But now they are already bearing false witness, / but now they are already their graves.”
Shushan Karapetian
Translator’s Note: The reference to Alfred is to T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Author’s Footnote: Noise, gossip, quirks. Emotion, excitation, anything that stirs up passions, stimulation. Incomprehensible talk, curses flung through the cracks of teeth. The first single of the rock band Nirvana – Love Buzz. When Polonius comes to inform Hamlet that the actors have arrived, Hamlet responds, buzz, buzz, since this was no longer news. Today much news and high society gossip webpages present themselves with the word “buzz.”
TN: In the original Armenian, there is a play on the etymology of the word ənker (friend), which originated from əndker (eating companion).
TN: The reference to the “great one” here is Stanislavski and his famous verdict, "I don't believe" to his actors’/students’ performances, exhorting them to “be convincing.”
TN: In the original, there is a play on the Western Armenian kowgan ow ker/
t῾an (they come and they go), with the last component t῾an separated on a new line and with a question mark, standing for both the ending of the phrase “they go” and an offering of a traditional Armenian yogurt drink, t῾an. This is also a reference to the repeating lines “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” from Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
TN: Distance learning is a common option in the Armenian higher education system for students who live outside of the capital or the country to gain access to university education. The quality of the education however is often considered weaker than the full-time equivalent.
AF: depth, wave, internal side, womb, a mythical female evil spirit with a hideous appearance, that is an enemy of women in labor, newborns, and youth, glutton, man, and child-kidnapper.
TN: The character Jean-Sol Partre, a spoonerism of Jean-Paul Sartre, in Boris Vian’s novel Froth on the Daydream.
TN: Direct translation of line 73 from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Purfrock.
TN: The intentionally deviant syllabification of these words is supposed to represent the accented and non-standard pronunciation of Armenian by some state officials to indicate their parochial and sub-standard knowledge of the language.
TN: A reference to Hector, the Trojan prince in Greek mythology and his farewell to his wife Andromache. There is also a play on the rhyming words hražešt (farewell) and žešt (a Russian borrowing, meaning an old, discarded, piece of metal).
TN: Marina Tsvetaeva’s ironic reference to the Eternal Feminine, which is the archetypal or philosophical principle that idealizes a woman as immutable.
TN: A commonly used and recognized phrase from the first president of the independent Republic of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian.
TN: A play on the correspondence of the words avaz (sand) and avazak (thief), which also forms the first root of the noun avazakapetowt῾yown (kleptocracy).
TN: A play on Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous line “Hell is other people.”
TN: Reference to a popular joke about a spy named Onik, who is sent from Armenia to the US on a top-secret undercover mission. In order to establish contact with Onik they send another agent with precise instructions on how to find him. They explain that the only way to find Onik’s home is by locating the pharmacy next to it. This second agent goes to the US and starts looking for Onik. He asks a random person: “Excuse me, would you tell me where to find the pharmacy?” The person responds: “No problem, go straight, turn left, ask where spy Onik’s house is, everyone will show you, and right next to it is the pharmacy.”
TN: The entire line is in English written in Armenian transliteration.
TN: “this July? no, please” is in English written in Armenian transliteration.
TN: Reference to line 122, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Purfrock.
TN: The first line of a popular series of jokes in the Caucasus about extraordinary circumstances that Armenians, Turks, Azerbaijanis, Russians, and Georgians are put into and their respective solutions and reactions. Typically these involve an encounter with the devil, God, a dinosaur or some powerful force, which sets up certain conditions, often reflecting the geopolitical environment of the time. In the Armenian context, the Armenian typically comes up with the most witty, clever, and/or humorous solution.
TN: A play on the similar sounds in the words anjrew (rain) and janjrowyt῾(boredom) from poet Vahan Teryan.
TN: The preceding three lines contain references to some well-recognized lines and themes (whisper and rustle, shivering slowly, cold, monotonous, formless shadow, I am not you anymore) by Armenian poet Vahan Teryan.
TN: Reference to the popular children’s poem and cartoon, “Powy powy mknik” (Squeak, squeak, little mouse) by Derenik Demirchyan about a little mouse who lives under a coconut tree. One day a coconut falls down and the mouse struggles to get inside through a crack. After much difficulty, the mouse gets in and gluttonously drinks all of the coconut liquid, after which he struggles to come out.
TN: Reference to the following 1916 quatrain by Hovhannes Toumanyan: In my dream an ewe/Came up to me with a question,/“May God protect your son,/ How was the taste of my child?”
TN: Reference to a line from the movie Pepo by one of the main characters, the aging nouveau riche Zimzimov, who constantly buys new things to impress his new, young wife.
TN: Reference to The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
TN: Reference to the homonymous poem and opera Anush, in which the heroine commits suicide by throwing herself off a cliff.
TN: Reference to a tale by Armenian writer Hovhannes Toumanyan, entitled “The Death of Kikos,” about a young woman who envisions getting married, having a child, and that child climbing a tree and falling to his death. The entire family then mourns the death of the child.
TN: Reference to Violet Grigoryan’s last name being printed incorrectly as Dridoryan.
TN: Reference to Alice looking down at her feet in Alice in Wonderland.
TN: Play on the Armenian proverb/saying êši akanǰowm k῾nac (asleep in the donkey’s ear) indicating someone who remains unaware of something important.
TN: The grammatical flexibility of Armenian allows the reference here to be intentionally ambiguous. Since Armenian is a null-subject language, an explicit subject is not required in the original. Moreover, Armenian has one genderless third person singular personal pronoun, which can stand for he/she/it.