“Still Born: Repetition, Translation, And Translatability”
(Lecture)

I.

What I will try to present in this lecture belongs to the oldest layer of my long inquiry into Zareh Vorpouni's work. First, a few words on the general context and then on Vorpouni and his production as a novelist, which will certainly not be superfluous. We need to recall that, before 1915, the novel was a genre largely neglected in the Western Armenian literary tradition; only the so-called Realist school had begun to cultivate it. The novel is the genre of duration. Before 1915, in the nightmare of death, the organ of duration had atrophied, as Hagop Oshagan says.[1]In the Diaspora, in contrast, the novel experienced an extraordinary flowering. We also need to recall that 1930 was a pivotal year for the Armenian novel in the Diaspora, for, from 1926 to 1934, Oshagan composed all his novels, in particular his groundbreaking Mnatsortats [The Remnants]; Costant Zarian published his Pancoop yev mamout'i voskornerë [The Pancoop and the Bones of the Mammouth] (1932); Shahan Shahnour released the famous Diasporan novel Nahanj arrants' yergi [Retreat Without Song] (1929).[2] That same year, Vorpouni published P'ordzë [The Attempt], the first novel in the cycle The Persecuted. In this same period, even Nigoghos Sarafian was writing novels, Khakhiskhen herru [Far from Base], T'omas Aypanelin [Thomas the Blameworthy], and in book form, Ishkhanuhin [The Princess]. In 1934, Hratch Zartarian published Mer Keank'ë [Our Life].

These three titles—The Retreat, The Attempt, Our Life—belonging to three different authors, form a compact ensemble: they are indiscernible, as if they were three different articulations of the same set of problems. There are, to begin with, the external similarities in the basic situation depicted with their narratives: a young generation arrives in France where it has to face the reality of permanent exile and learn the ways of its foreign environment. These novels were, indeed, read for more than one generation as realist works. One can, taking them the other way around, trace the way the Foreign is inscribed in them, both as a category and as an experience. Vorpouni, before all, would carry the experiment as far as possible in his later work. This aspect of the novels of 1930 failed to emerge in the early, realist readings. In subsequent years, Beirut’s cultural influence reinforced the initial misperception. Only with the appearance in 1964 of Zareh Vorpouni's Yev yeghev mard [And There Was Man] was that influence in some way neutralized. This novel worked something of a revolution in Armenian letters. If it had been widely read, it could have enabled the youngest generation of the Diaspora to attain its proper identity, to find its own way. I say this in the conditional. The reality is that it was too late for such discoveries and revolutions. And, nevertheless, this novel of Vorpouni's counts, at least for my generation, as the most important event in the history of the Diaspora. It was hailed by H. Kurkjian as inaugurating a psychological turn in novelistic writing. But even more, what was at stake was an interrogation about how inaugural events were still possible in a domain in which duration had ceased to function. But who in the Diaspora was interested in this type of questions? Vorpouni's name remained widely ignored and his works are barely accessible today.[3]

Of the writers of the Paris school, Shahnour was the one who succeeded in capturing the attention of the age. There was a certain brio to his writing; he had, moreover, a knack for provoking his readers. He made a name for himself early on with his Retreat. The whole of his uprooted generation believed it had found its image in this novel, whose fame was cemented by a few controversial passages. Strangely enough, the success of the novel continues unabated to the present day. It has gone through at least three different editions in the Diaspora and two in (Soviet) Armenia. No other book has had comparable success among Armenians. Though the novel was widely read in France in the thirties, it quickly passed into the hands of the Eastern Diaspora—I mean, the Armenian speaking communities in the Middle East after 1950—where it won over new readers. This indicates one very precise thing: the novel was prized not because it depicted reality, but because it corresponded to the Armenian representation of that reality. Its readers were reading their own obsessive ideological representation in the novel, their own fear of and fascination for the Foreign. Shahnour's novel was as good at pandering to the fascination as it was at cultivating the obsession. In his "Second Equation,” first published in the journal Ahegan (Beirut) in 1968, Harutiun Kurkjian engages with this point very well.[4] Of course there is more to say about Shahnour's treatment of the encounter with the Foreign. Yet, as long as the ideological overlay of fascination and obsession has not been stripped off, the rest will remain invisible.

The writer who made good on all of the promises of the generation of 1930 was Zareh Vorpouni. He was born in 1903. After a ruined adolescence and then three years at the Berberian School in Constantinople, he spent the rest of his life in France; his biography is intertwined with his ripening fiction. He conceived of the idea of writing a novelistic cycle with his first novel in 1929. The second work in the cycle, T'egnatsun [The Candidate], was not published until 1967, nearly forty years later. It was, at the time, necessitated by mourning; but it speaks volumes about the internal obstacles that were necessary to overcome in order to produce the novel of the Diaspora. One must also not forget the total isolation experienced by Vorpouni and his generation after WWII, the eclipse of Paris as a cultural rallying point for the Armenians, and the ascendency of Beirut. In any case, two other volumes were published in 1972 and 1974: Asphaltë [Asphalt] and Sovorakan or më [A Day Like All the Others].[5] The fifth volume remains unpublished. In 1982, the Paris journal GAM published what there was of the sixth volume. Between 1929 and 1964, Vorpouni also published several collections of short stories, which should be considered preparatory exercises for his major work. Vorpouni's novels have never seen the light of day in a way that would make them entirely accessible to readers. In my estimation, Vorpouni remains the most representative writer of the Diaspora.

In his 1967 novel, The Candidate, he offers a testimony—obviously an imagined one— in the middle of the novel. I cannot explain now the profundity and the subtlety of this gesture, which supposes or entails an interrogation about the secret limit between literature and testimony. This is for another time and a different lecture. Suffice to say that the novel revolves around the figure of a survivor, Vahakn, who, in a burst of madness, kills a Turkish friend, a student in Paris, who was apologizing, or God knows what—maybe he was asking for forgiveness. The main events of the novel are supposed to take place in 1927. Vahakn kills his Turkish friend, and, as a consequence, kills himself. In the time that elapses between the murder and the suicide, he writes a letter in which he explains his double gesture, a letter, more than fifty pages long, in the novel. He explains that he was already dead before the corpse of his friend; he then writes as a dead man, as the dead witness that he is, the absolute survivor. The letter is at the same time a testimony—the testimony of a survivor, an account of his particular experience of the Deportation. The letter shows that even if the main feature of the Paris writers was the encounter with the Other, the necessity of writing the Catastrophe and of re-experiencing or re-playing the limit of literature in the form of testimony was not absent from their preoccupations. Other survivors' accounts, the "real" ones, recount the sufferings, the death of the next of kin, the atrocities. They recount the Deportation. But they have nothing to say about the Catastrophe, if the Catastrophe is the death of the witness. How would they be able to bear witness for the death of the witness? One needs to be dead in order to bear witness. With this testimony of a survivor placed in the middle of a novel, and written by someone who is already dead, Vorpouni was, for the very first time, interrogating the intimate and conflicting relationship between literature and the testimonial account in general. With the enigmatic equivalence that Vorpouni established between murder and suicide, with his insistence on the necessity of cleaning ourselves from the poison that inhabits us—long before Hrant Dink—he invited his readers to reform themselves in order to open a way toward reconciliation, and to initiate the time of forgiveness. He was not understood. He was barely read. I will attend another time to the extraordinary subtlety of this treatment of testimony, which makes The Candidate one of the most powerful novels written in the Diaspora. It deserves a lecture entirely devoted to it. Today my topic is the third volume of the cycle, Asphalt.

At the center of this third volume there is what they call in Armenian vizhum, which can be “abortion“ or “miscarriage.“ The oldest layer of my inquiry in Vorpouni's work is thus related to the event (the thoroughly novelistic event) of an aborted birth and consequently to the result of this aborted birth, a stillborn child as a figure. The aborted birth and the stillborn child appear in Vorpouni's novels relationally through a structure of repetition—I need to pause here first and, if possible, interpret or at the least comment. The structure of repetition is constantly present in Vorpouni's novels, with different modalities. One of these modalities is from novel to novel, the modified repetition of novelistic events that had already taken place, or had already been recounted, but now need to be recounted differently, the way a photographic image can be edited several times. The French word for “editing” in this case would be “retoucher.” The second modality is stranger and much more disquieting. It's a question of repeating an event recounted in a different novel by a different author. In Asphalt, Nicole's death during childbirth can be read as a secret repetition of an event that itself was entirely inconspicuous at the end of Shahan Shahnour's Retreat Without Song. It could be, of course, a coincidence, or the result of an unconscious or very conscious rivalry between the two, as a result of which Vorpouni needed decades in order to rewrite Shahnour's successful novel, and to rewrite it in his own way, with his own categories.

In a very different context, it was no less strange when Blanchot was writing, in his own name and in the first person, an episode of Georges Bataille's “autobiography,” as though it was his own. It is true that, in the case of the generation of Armenian writers gathered in Paris in 1930, there was a common experience, which can be subsumed under the title that I already referenced “The encounter with the Other,” the Other being sometimes viewed as an alienating Other. And we will have to ask, then, in which form does this encounter take place, how are we to understand it, how is it recorded in literature? The third modality of repetition is the one that interests us here more closely and more immediately than the others. This time, it is indubitably a repetition, it is a repetition in the same novel, Asphalt. Something strange happens in that novel, not in the story that is recounted, or the scenes which are described. From pages 130 to 161 (in the only edition that we have at our disposal), the author has copied out what he had already written in the previous pages, sometimes word for word, sometimes taking liberties with the initial wording, and slightly modifying expressions or idiomatic phrases. I will give a few examples to illustrate my point, since I can't do more in the context of a lecture. But before doing so, I imagine that again it will not be superfluous to say a word about what happens in this third volume.

The novel recounts the relations between its main protagonist, Minas, and two French women, two sisters—Nicole and Monique. Minas has married Nicole and has eventually walked away from her. The story begins with a long scene of childbirth, which actually occupies the entire first half of the novel. The unborn child is understood to be Minas’s child, although Minas never ceased to ask himself why Nicole fled his approaches. The riddle remains unresolved “even after the scene of the couch,” which revealed to Minas the sexual closeness between the two sisters. The first half of the novel then places the reader in the room where, for a whole night, Nicole will fight death and Minas (who came back and took upon himself the responsibility of watching over her) will not move an inch to call the doctor. A large part of the novel is devoted to the analyses that Minas proposes to himself in order to explain and understand his failure, analyses that obviously are motivated by his sense of guilt. Intertwined with this long night-time scene we read day-time ones that describe the first meeting between Minas and Nicole, until the moment when in the early morning Monique arrives, Nicole is immediately sent to the hospital, and later the telephone rings, announcing Nicole's death. “The child had already died in the womb of its mother, doubtless well before Nicole was taken away . . .” And, again, mixed with these scenes are others that show from within the life of a leftist Armenian journal in Paris and the infighting between political parties that hate each other. The second part of the novel is devoted to Monique, with beautiful graphic descriptions of Minas engaging in sexual intercourse with her, intertwined with other scenes which in some way correspond to the general title of the novelistic series, where we see Minas running away through the streets of Paris.

Let us return to the question of repetition within the novel. As I noted earlier, beginning on page 130, and within the space of thirty pages, Vorpouni repeats through the same sentences, sometimes with a slightly different wording, what he had already written, modifying an idea here, a word there, with an imperceptible shift from the present to the past. Vorpouni simply returns to copying out sentences that he had already written in his manuscript and, in copying them or writing them a second time, changing their nature and status. It is possible to imagine that the duality of the sisters participates in the structure of repetition, and as a consequence that the same sentences have been written the first time in the sphere of Nicole, the second time in the sphere of Monique. The novel then separates sister from sister, since one of the novel’s presuppositions (or of Minas’s psychology) is the similitude of the sisters, their oneness, their proximity, their indestructible link, visible through their supposedly homosexual connection. The separation is then carried out in and through the novel. Minas was excluded from the Foreign. He had to recapture a lost territory. This was Vorpouni's way to regain control of the whole problematic concerning the encounter with the Foreign, which was the focus of the Paris group of novelists.

But this is only one way—a satisfying but not sufficient way—of interpreting the structure of repetition within the novel. Within the next novel in the series, the one published in 1974, A Day Like All the Others, Minas narrates a dream—it is a literary dream, to the extent that Nicole's death is repeated here (one more repetition) in the form of a dream, and this time it is clearly repeated as a murder. The literary dream doesn't need to be analyzed. It is itself the analysis of what happens in the fiction and as fiction. It repeats and it lays bare the novelistic project. In the dream the still born child enters the room, he's got a knife in the hand, he is heading toward Nicole who is lying on the couch, and he pushes the knife in her vagina. Here, for the first time, our murderer is revealed. It's the stillborn child. He had never shown up in the daylight before. If we recall the end of Shahnour's Retreat, Nénette was also transported to the hospital, covered in blood, but there was no explicit mention of a stillborn child. Here we are, at the end of Shahnour's novel: “And before all, before all, blood, blood everywhere. Blood on the bed and the floor, blood in several buckets filled with water, blood on rags, on shirts, on towels, blood even on the threshold of the house.”[6] Was it a suicide, in accordance with the logic of the fiction? It's not clear. Or rather was it a miscarriage, an abortion? Here are Nénette's last words: “Pierrot, save me... This time, I swear... the doctor just confirmed, I swear... I am... I am really pregnant... Really pregnant…”[7] Yes, but again there is no mention of a stillborn child. And here, suddenly, in Vorpouni's novels, with Minas’s dream, we know who committed this literary murder, provided that we read the novels through the grid of the structure of repetition. It is the stillborn child. He is on the stage, he comes into play, a knife in his hand. He proceeds toward the woman's naked body. He rips her belly open. The blood flows from the belly and the vagina, it spatters on the walls, it paints everything red: the rags, the shirts, the towels. Literary murders are cruel.

But who is this still born child? It is possible to read and to present him as a psychoanalytic figure? He lives in the innermost depths of the unconscious. But, in that case, whose unconscious? Can it be the same unconscious, from one author to the other? It is true that Freud himself hit hard with his Oedipus—again a figure, more than common—since Freud considered it as a common good or a common curse for the whole of humanity, as a constitutive element of our humanity after all? But, again, how are we to explain the fact that the Still Born Child manifests itself with the structure of repetition, with the implementation of that structure? And before all how are we to explain that its manifestation seems to be the central moment in the experience of the Foreign, the one that was the most profoundly hidden? The Still Born is here ; it lives, if I may say so -it is before our eyes, in the novelistic dream. It was born as dead. In French they say, un mort-né. Born dead. Or prevented from being born. And the fact that he could not be born is equivalent in the novel with the reality of its being being deprived of a name. There is no name for it, for him or her, in language, and consequently in the dream. “I try to shout, to call, but I find no name to shout, while knowing very well that it is our child. It is a terrible thing not to know the name. Not to have a name. I want to shout its name. A borborygmus forms in my mouth, it grows to the point of explosion, to become a name, but it does not manage to make a name.”[8]

Language here arrives at its limit. It experiments within itself, its own end, its own loss. Outside of literature, such an experience would be unconceivable, because it would need a language in order to be recorded and registered. I said earlier that the dream repeats and lays bare the novelistic project. Here is the project: to bring language to its limit, on the verge of its capacities, on the brink of its loss. It is at this point, on this borderline, there where a given language meets the Foreign, meets it own Other, it is here that the Still Born Child shows up, manifests itself, as a figure.

And upon this difficult understanding, we are confronted with a series of questions, which invite a new set of examinations. First, what does it mean for a language to meet the Foreign, to meet its own Other? Is it not true that every language, at some point, can meet with its own Other, and lose itself in the Foreign? Why then does not every language in the same way arrive to its own limit -in other words, to a point where it disappears, in itself and for itself? “We have almost lost our language in the foreign,” wrote Hölderlin two centuries ago. Wir haben fast die Sprache in der Fremde verloren. Was it the same experience as the one lived through by Vorpouni and transposed into words by him, not poetically but “novelistically”? Is it the case that German also, as a language, in and through Hölderlin's experience, had arrived to its end, to its limit, had met the Foreign, and had been lost, almost lost in the Foreign?

Second, we said earlier that here a language was experiencing its own limit and its own loss, its own disappearance, its own end. How can a language experience and record within itself its own loss, the loss of itself? This assertion reminds us of Georges Bataille's formulations about the inner experience, which is the experience of the loss of the subject, but which presupposes a subject that is able to experience its own loss, or at least is able to bear witness about that loss—a project which is apparently highly contradictory, and demands for a reflection on the nature of the survivor, the one who survives her own death, who survives the death of the witness within herself. Hence Maurice Blanchot's suggestion addressed to Bataille, which has remained unnoticed for a very long time—to carry out the inner experience as though he were the “last man,” which clearly means the one who cannot be his own witness, a survivor.[9] The only question and difficulty then becomes knowing how we are able to think of our language—and to practice it—as the language of the survivor, or better as a surviving language: a language that is already situated beyond its own loss and nevertheless is able to experience and to inscribe that loss within itself. Or in other words again: we should be able to make our language speak from beyond its own death and at the same time, by the same token, to understand it as a space where the still born child shows up, manifests itself.

But there is a third series of questions, which, in turn, is related to literature and the structure of repetition that functions within literature, from novel to novel, from one author to another, or in the same novel, literally. What is ultimately the privilege of the novel, of what we call the novel? What we have said up to now does not give us the indispensable tools that would allow us to answer that question. With the figure of the still born child, we have stayed too close to the psychoanalytic vocabulary, at the risk of confusing everything. It is well known that the psychoanalytic approach has never been able to create a satisfying conceptuality for literature, and it would have a hard job creating it today for the structure of repetition in literature, for the experience of the Foreign, and for the inscription of a language's own death within itself. We therefore have to make a final leap, in order to dissipate the confusion, with the vague hope that the first two series of questions will also receive something close to an answer. This leap will bring us outside of the Armenian-speaking world, in search of a different horizon.

Before performing this exercise, one more word on the structure of repetition in Asphalt will be appropriate. We have already said that one way of reading this repetition was to suppose that the repeated sentences belonged to different contexts, one being the sphere of Nicole, the other one the sphere of Monique. The sentences, through this change of context, would also have incurred a change of signification. They would in both cases tell of the birth of the still born child, or its death. For a still born child, birth and death coincide. They would consequently foretell this coincidence between birth and death. But they would not tell it in the same context. The coincidence would not necessarily have the same meaning here and there. Now this change of meaning—assuming that there is such a change—is not in itself of a novelistic nature. It is not part of what the novel tells through its narrative, the protagonist is not concerned by this change. If we were in the framework of a classical novel, the protagonist would himself be transformed by this change, he would understand, at least implicitly, what has happened. Here, on the contrary, repetition works in and for itself, so to speak, independently of the protagonist.

II.

In order to better understand the nature of that repetition and transformation, we must now take into consideration what happens in one of Borges's stories, the one titled "Pierre Ménard, Author of the Quixote," which was first published in a literary journal in 1939, then in a collection of stories in 1941, and finally in the volume called Ficciones in 1944.[10] We know that Borges imagines a contemporary French writer, Pierre Ménard, who decided to re-experience the writing of Cervantes's Quixote word for word and in this way produces two chapters (the chapters nine and thirty-eight of the first part) and some other passages of Cervantes's work. Borges says that he was inspired by Novalis, and, more precisely, by one of Novalis's aphorisms, about the necessity of identifying oneself, of becoming one, with the author. In Borges's words,

Before turning to this fragment by Novalis, we need to first understand that Pierre Ménard's idea is not to copy out the Don Quixote. Not to copy it out, but to repeat it word for word, which means: to re-experience and to reinvent from the inside the necessity of every word used and written down by Cervantes. In order to reach this point, he needs to push the identification to its most extreme possibility, to consider all the variants that could have occurred in Cervantes's mind and to follow the path that brought the author to his final choice of words in the Don Quixote. Borges is very clear. It's not a question of becoming Cervantes, of transforming oneself into someone else. Pierre Ménard has to remain who he is, a contemporary author, and he must arrive to the Quixote "through his own experiences." When he writes the Quixote in the 20th century, and not at the beginning of the 17 century, he transforms it into something absolute; he reinvents it not contingently as Cervantes had done, but necessarily. He reinvents the contingent text, plus its internal necessity. Cervantes's writing was simply anecdotal, haphazardly written down, or so it seems as long as that internal necessity had not been rediscovered. Moreover in the 17th century, the Quixote was written in a language that was entirely accessible to its readers. In the 20th century, the same Quixote, re-written in Spanish, (in Cervantes's Spanish), by a French author, becomes an improbable object. It recreates the genre of the historical novel, without any local color and any exoticism. It's the same work, physically, the same words, the same letters, and nevertheless it's a different work, given that the context of its production is not the same. Even the style is different. Cervantes's style was natural. Pierre Ménard's style, when he rewrites the Quixote in Spanish, is antiquated.

Thus, here is a magnificent musing on behalf of Borges, under the pretext of a critical article concerning Pierre Ménard's work; a musing of which the inspiration of course comes to him directly from the reflections of the first generation of German Romantics, the one regrouped in Iena around Friedrich Schlegel, with Novalis, Schelling, their wives and mistresses. The repetition that we have read in Vorpouni's novel does not spring from the same source of inspiration and does not obey the same principles; this is obvious. In both cases, it is true, the same text is transferred from one context to the other. In both cases, the language remains the same. But in Vorpouni's novel, the transfer is carried out in the same work and, it seems, by the same author. The central operation in the novel is precisely this strange transfer, through which the Still Born child appears and disappears. But conversely in both cases, an author translates that which another author (or the same) had written, in the same language. Consequently what commands this parallel, this juxtaposition, between Pierre Ménard and Vorpouni, is the need to understand this act— translating while remaining in the same language.

Should this transfer be read as a translation? At first glance, the connection between Borges's musing and the questions raised by translation—the very act of translating— is not obvious. But now here is Novalis's fragment, the one to which Borges makes an explicit reference, titled "Doctrine about the duties of a reader":

Novalis's preoccupation here is with the reader, the duties incumbent upon a reader, who should be able to entirely re-create a text for himself, to multiply it, to raise it to the second or the third power. Every reading in this sense is already philology, according to Novalis. And because the author is his/her first reader, every text contains in itself its own secret philology. In this short reflection under Novalis's pen, we already have one of the tenets of the Iena school, a tenet that is sometimes expressed in the form of an imperative or an injunction by Friedrich Schlegel or Novalis himself: the literary text must contain within itself its own explicitation, its own philological interpretation. Novalis's ideal was the text raised to an infinite power, in which what is literary and what is philological should mix and merge, to the point of being indistinguishable. This is how we, as writers, readers, or interpreters, belong more than ever to the horizon opened up by the Romantics. In that sense, Borges was their first and greatest heir. But in the fragment that we just read Novalis also speaks of the philological act of reading as though it were a translation. "I show that I have correctly understood an author if and only if… I can translate him.”

At first glance, it seems Novalis uses the word "translate" here metaphorically, since he is preoccupied with the comprehension of a given text. Reading as a philological act contains within itself or presupposes an act of translation, which remains within the same language. The metaphor seems to generalize the usual sense of the word "translation." And we know that this is what Novalis had in mind, in his encyclopedic writings, a sort of general and reciprocal transfer between meanings, forms, and discourses. In that perspective, translation was the philological activity par excellence, because it was one of the privileged ways of infiniticizing the work of art.[13] But what the fragment says can also be understood without any mention of the ways of making the work of art infinite. Novalis demands from the reader (as translator) that he reproduce the work itself, not only the words and the sentences that comprise it, but also, and before all, the intention that gave birth to them, and consequently their internal necessity, the way it has been experienced and implemented by the author. It is precisely this demand for recreating the intention and the literal necessity that is recorded by Borges, when the latter makes Pierre Ménard write the following as an explanation for his crazy enterprise: "This game of solitaire I play is governed by two polar rules: the first allows me to try out formal or psychological variants; the second forces me to sacrifice them to the 'original' text and to come, by irrefutable arguments, to those eradications… " (93).

We can also consider what Maurice Blanchot, the greatest of all readers, wrote on Pierre Ménard's enterprise in the essay that he devoted to Borges and his "literary infinite" in his book of essays published in 1959, Le Livre à venir:

To be sure, Blanchot's intention here was not exactly the same as ours in the present context. What interested him was the disparition of the original and the redoubling of the world "in a book." And, indeed, immediately after the lines that we just quoted, he says the following: "Thus, the world, if it could be exactly translated and copied in a book, would lose all beginning and all end and would become that spherical, finite, and limitless volume that all men write and in which they are written: it would no longer be the world; it would be the perverted world in the infinite sum of its possibles." What Blanchot describes or imagines here is the world of the eternal return, with just a slight correction. He describes the eternal return in which repetition occurs through translation. The same comes back, again and again, infinitely, but translated, into another language or in the same language. But what we call “translation,” the demand for translation, is a demand that comes from the literary work as such. It is an imperative, which is hidden in the deepest folds of literature, and of which the echo has passed from the Romantics to Nietzsche, from Nietzsche to Borges, from Borges to Blanchot, and from Blanchot to us. A literary work is literary just as far as it has performed within itself the experience of translation, before every intervention of a real translator, in other words: as far as it has already met the Foreign within itself, from the start.

In his book The Experience of the Foreign, Antoine Berman had a formulation very close to this one, in his description and analysis of the theory of translation among the German Romantics. For them, the translating operation frees the work of art from the naturality of its language, it produces it a second time, it brings it to a second power, and by so doing it makes it more artificial, it raises it to the absolute of art. Berman—while criticizing the will of absolute, which according to him ignores the concreteness of languages—writes the following about this conception and this practice of translation: "Doesn't such a potentiating translation presuppose a relation of the work to its language and to itself that is itself of the order of translation, thus calling for, making possible, and justifying the movement of its translation?" And further on, "The work is that linguistic production which calls for translation as a destiny of its own. Let us provisionally name this call translatability."[15]The idea of this particular repetition inspired by the Romantics, of this call, which constitutes the core of a literary work, came to Antoine Berman straight from Walter Benjamin, and more precisely from his famous essay on the task of the translator. If a text is literary, it is due to the fact that it is überstzbar, let us say “translatable.” This is what we read already under Benjamin's pen. But "translatable" does not have exactly the meaning that we usually give. It does not mean that it can be translated. It means that it contains within itself the demand of being translated. It's an injunction, a call. It screams: Translate me!

In Benjamin's essay, this is posed in the form of a question, which is tantamount to a statement: "Is it not the case that the work bears its own translation, and if this is so... does it not demand of being translated?"[16] And here is Derrida's commentary on this statement: "The original requires translation even if no translator is there, fit to respond to this injunction, which is at the same time demand and desire in the very structure of the original."[17] Accordingly, Benjamin is speaking of a radical translatability, a contract between languages at the origin of languages, when he says that it is the "translatability" of the original that decides the coincidence of a translation with the "essence of its form." And at the end he claims, "When the text immediately belongs to the pure language, without intermediary signification... it is then that it is absolutely translatable." This absolute translatability is the one of the Scripture. But the literary text also participates in this phenomenon and has in itself a degree of translatability. "In a variable measure, all great texts—but in the greatest measure the Scripture—contain between the lines their possible translation."[18]

It is this radical translatability that Derrida precisely translates with the French word traductibilité, which we then need to distinguish from traduisibilité, which the translator of Derrida's text into English renders with transferability. The to-be-translated of the sacred text, its pure transferability, that is what would give at the limit the ideal measure for all translation. The sacred text assigns the task to the translator, and it is sacred inasmuch as it announces itself as transferable, simply transferable, to be translated, which does not always mean immediately translatable, in the common sense that was dismissed from the start. Perhaps it is necessary here to distinguish between the transferable and the translatable. “ . . . Never are the call for translation, the debt, the task, the assignation, more imperious. Never is there anything more transferable, yet by reason of this indistinction of meaning and literality (Wörtlichkeit), the pure transferable can announce itself, give itself, present itself, let itself be translated as untranslatable."[19] Derrida merely paraphrases Benjamin, on the strong accent on the “sacred” of the sacred text. It is true that through its pure translatability, it is the sacred that gives its measure to the literary. But again conversely, and when we observe the phenomenon from the side of what we now call transferability, the sacred is nothing else but the extreme measure of the literary.

To-be-translated, this is the requirement of the literary work, as literary. The to-be-translated is waiting in it, from the beginning. Consequently it is there that the encounter with the Foreign is located. The Armenian writers in Paris have written down the modalities of this encounter through their personal experience, no doubt. But, when we look at it from the horizon of the to-be-translated, this encounter obviously is located far beyond the personal experience. It is an encounter and an experience without a subject. It is there that a language reaches its limit, inscribes within itself its limit with all other languages, and consequently with itself as well— in other words, experiences and experiments its singularity and its difference.

What is then the encounter with the Foreign? Where does the privilege of the literary come from, when it is a question of defining this encounter? These were the questions that we asked ourselves previously. Here, with the experience of its singularity and its difference, a given language also experiences its other, its possible loss. This is why there is a potential loss in all languages, secretly waiting in them. Which certainly does not mean that all languages are lost in the Foreign. The loss of a language can be the object of an examination with the methods of sociology and sociolinguistics. A given language can be placed on the list of endangered languages, these languages that supposedly are under the threat of extinction. It is even possible to worry about its possible disappearance and take measures in order to prevent such a deadly outcome. These are justified and respectable approaches. But they say nothing, absolutely nothing about the negative potentiality, the potential loss, and they say nothing either about the experience of such a loss. Only the literary and sacred translatability, in the sense defined by Benjamin and Derrida, can provide the possibility and the reality of that experience. Only through the translatibility of the text—literary and sacred—does a given language experience itself as surviving. And this experience is located in the work and the text, before any intervention of a subject, and of course before any intervention of a real translator or translation. This is the way a given language experiments within itself its own loss, possible or effective.

It would be beneficial to pause here and provide a summary of what he have explored up until now. At the beginning we described a structure of repetition in the works of Vorpouni and Borges, and we asked some questions about the encounter with the foreign and the hypothetical privilege of literature. We then developed the problematic of translatability and transferability, on the footsteps of Benjamin and those who were directly inspired by him. There is something strange in this state of affairs. I will try to explain this as clearly as I can. The strangeness of the situation is the following: what we call translatability is a desire, a requirement, a call, an injunction, which originates in the work itself, but which remains in the dimension of pure potentiality—the passage from potentiality to actuality. The fact that a literary text is translated or not is entirely dependent on external conditions, and consequently has nothing to do either with the experience of the foreign, or with the self-experience of a given language as surviving. I am not claiming that the effectivity of translation is entirely left to chance, to fortuitous circumstances. What I am saying is that the decision to translate a work written in a given language can only come from someone who lives in a different language, who is the inhabitant of a language that is foreign to the language of the original, and this is true even if this translator-to-be is perfectly bilingual and even if he is motivated by the very subjective desire to make a work better known to a large public. Translatability is inherent in the language of the original. Should we therefore consider it as a paradox if I say that the translations of a work into foreign languages have nothing to do with the translatability hidden and awaiting in the work itself, the to-be-translated that constitutes the core of a literary work as literary?

If I decided to translate into French one of Vorpouni's novels, I would have to take into consideration the conditions of its reception in the French language. I wouldn't make any demands on the secret translatability within the literary work. And if we want to push this paradox to its farthest limit, we would even say that every translation, in that sense, betrays the translatability of the work. This very simple but admittedly highly paradoxical state of affairs begs a number of questions: How is the encounter with the foreign brought about by the act of translation itself (and not simply by the secret translatability of the work)? How does one make a language experience its singularity and its difference with all other languages and with itself; how to make it repeat the experience of the work—an experience without a subject—through its translation? How to make translation and translatability coincide? What to do in order for translatability not to stay a pure potentiality? It is clear that the foreign translator must through her own work participate in the deepest layer of the work's experience in the translated language. Again how is this possible? How can a foreign translator inhabit both her own (foreign) language and the language of the original, provided that the language of the original for her is a foreign language, even if this translator is perfectly bilingual? It seems that we are faced with a requirement that is impossible to satisfy. Borges wanted precisely to meet this impossibility head on, he wanted to make this impossibility possible, or to inscribe this open abyss, this unbridgeable chasm between translation and translatability, in the archives of humanity.

I said earlier, at least twice now, "Even if the translator is perfectly bilingual." With the figure of Pierre Ménard, Borges presupposes the existence of a translator who is absolutely bilingual. He imagines the existence of a French translator who masters the Castilian language better that any Spanish contemporary, given that he is able to write that language just the way they spoke and wrote it at the beginning of the 17th century. Castilian is not his mother tongue; he learned it. He didn't learn it in the womb of his mother. It is even possible to say that his mastery of Castilian is better than Cervantes's mastery of his own mother tongue, which, after all, was only a natural language. He thus lays bare the non-naturality of the literary. Let me add, such a mastery is not entirely impossible. After all, the Mekhitarist Fathers of the 19th century, settled in their monasteries in Venice and Vienna, claimed that they wrote grabar, or classical Armenian, better than the authors of the 5th century. Their intention was to re-create the natural language, both written and spoken, of fifteen centuries ago, just the way it was written and spoken at that time, in its supposed purity, as though so many centuries had not passed since. And when Arsen Pakradouni was writing Hayg the Hero exactly the way it would have been written in the 5th century (but actually was not written), we are not that far from the delirious enterprise imagined by Borges. And why did Borges feel the need to imagine a French writer and place him at the center of his narrative, and not say a Spanish writer? The answer is easy now. The foreign translator had to participate with his work in the most intimate experience of the original language, in the encounter with the foreign as it could have been experienced and was never experienced as such in the original language, in the possibilities and the accidents provided by the translatability of the original. A foreign author, as foreign, had to make actual that which otherwise would have remained pure potentiality. Translation, in the form of a pure repetition, this way became the actual experience of translatability.

We must confess that Borges's dream is impressive. But then what happens in Vorpouni's novel is still more impressive, even if less visible to the naked eye. And, as a consequence, we need to meditate one more moment on what happens in Borges's narrative. Cervantes writes in the Spanish language of his epoch. He writes a natural and living language. As to Pierre Ménard, he writes in a language that is purely artificial. He writes the same work, the same chapters, the same words, but he doesn't write them in a living language. What he writes is the Castilian of three hundred years ago. It's not even a foreign language. It is explicitly a surviving language. Pierre Ménard writes that language as though it were still a living language. Or, on the contrary, he writes a living language as though it were dead. What matters then is not the fact that we have two different authors. What matters is that the language in which Don Quixote is written, here and there, does not have the same status. The language is the same, it is the same Castilian, and nevertheless its nature has changed radically when it passed from Cervantes to Pierre Ménard. It's not Cervantes national and natural language any more.

Now if we want to understand the structure of repetition in Vorpouni's work with the same categories, do we need to imagine that the one who writes and the one who repeats are two different authors, two different Vorpounis? The first one would be the Armenian one, the second one would be, let us say French. The French one would have usurped Vorpouni's name. He would have learned Armenian as a foreign language and would have made it his own language to such an extent that now the Armenian Vorpouni and the French Vorpouni would be indistinguishable, just like Cervantes and Pierre Ménard, not as subjects, but as authors. This other Vorpouni could have even written books in French. Why not? Others have done so instead of him. Shahnour has published poetry in French under the name of Armen Lubin, and no one at Gallimard knew at that time that he was a famous Armenian novelist. The second Vorpouni would have wanted to push the identification even farther, since he was now signing his books with the same name as the first Vorpouni. He copied the works of the first one, he wrote the same novel in a different context. Like Pierre Ménard, it was from his own experiences that he deduced the necessity of the text that had been written a first time by the first Vorpouni. And we could say about him what Borges says about Ménard, with just a small substitution, "Vorpouni's Asphalt" instead of "Cervantes's Don Quixote": "I shall turn now to the other, the subterranean, the interminably heroic production—the oeuvre non pareil, the oeuvre that remains—for such are our human limitations! —unfinished. This work, perhaps the most significant writing of our time, consists of the first and second chapter of Vorpouni's Asphalt and a fragment of chapter 3. I know that such a claim is on the face of it absurd..."[20]

Did I say "in a different context" a moment ago? Yes, it is clear that a work written in Armenian cannot be the same if the author is named Vorpouni and if he is named, let us say, Pierre Ménard alias Vorpouni. And just as Ménard did not want to be Cervantes and preferred to come to the Quixote "through the experiences of Pierre Ménard," we must imagine that the other Vorpouni, the usurper, preferred to remain who he was and come to Asphalt through his experiences of a French writer of the 20th century. If my auditors see a slight contradiction here, let me say that the same contradiction is to be found in Borges, where Ménard strives to a total identification as the writer of the Don Quixote, but not as a person. The same strange situation could be reproduced with the two Vorpounis. The first one would write his natural and national language. The second one would write in the same language, but as a surviving language. And immediately we see that what matters, once again, is the change of status of the language used. In the case imagined by Borges, a distance of three centuries was necessary between Cervantes and Ménard, in order for the latter's language to appear as a surviving language; whereas in Vorpouni's work the change is brought about on the spot and is recorded in the narrative. This change of status imposes itself as the real subject and the real object of the story.

Was this hypothesis of two Vorpounis intervening in the structure of repetition absurd? Maybe. But it is not more absurd than the one imagined by Borges. I can even say that it is a pretty faithful description of what happens, and, by the same token, a means of understanding retrospectively what was happening in Borges's narrative. Through the structure of repetition, what we have called absolute translatability (which was otherwise condemned to remain pure potentiality) becomes actual and represents the encounter with the foreign, now recorded in black and white. What else could we await from a novel whose aim was to be written in the surviving language, in the language of the survivor, I mean: to be written in such a way that the language in which it is written becomes a surviving language through the very fact that it is written and resonates from beyond its death. When Borges invents his Ménard, he invents a figure through which the impossible coincidence between translation and translatability would become reality, the potentiality would become actual, the secret encounter with the foreign would be brought about in and through the act of translating, by way of repetition pure and simple. This was Borges. With Vorpouni, it is not an invention any more. It is not imagined. The change of status of the language really happens. We have almost lost our tongue in the foreign. From now on we will write in the same language, but as a surviving language, the language of the absolute survivor.

When Hölderlin inscribed his famous sentence, the "almost" precisely signified the potentiality of the encounter with the foreign. His tongue had within itself the power of being lost. This is what I called a negative potentiality. Today, for us, for the absolute survivor, there is no "almost" any more. The loss has become quite real. The written language of the novel has become, through the very writing of the novel, a surviving tongue. It came to survive by way of its repetition in the novel. The loss in question is not a sociological fact any more. It manifests itself in a literary work and through the structure of repetition that is active within that work. In that sense, Asphalt is eminently the novel of the survivor, maybe more than The Candidate for example. From now on, we live in that country called loss. We live in it through our tongue, the language that we are writing and in which we are writing.

Where and when can a language be considered "lost"? The answer is: when it does not translate any more. Western Armenian has ceased to translate for eight or nine decades. Its last great translator was Arsen Ghazikian. After him, I know only one author who practiced translation on an ongoing basis, Yervant Gobelian, who is not well known outside of the community where he was active as an intellectual, the Armenian community of Istanbul. In any case, Western Armenian does not translate any more, so it is. The experience of loss consequently could be registered or recorded only in a literary production committed to a creative confrontation with translation, with the contextual and transcendental impossibility of translating into Western Armenian. This is how the encounter with the foreign leads to the paradoxical birth of the Still Born child, through the structure of repetition that lays bare the translating movement and its final failure. What happens here is also of course a lesson for all other languages, which have not yet reached that outcome, that failure, that measure in their experience of the foreign. For instance Pierre Ménard's French, Cervantes's Spanish, or Hölderlin's German, and why not also Armenian, when considered a national language, a language that has not yet gone through the experience of the still born, of a birth aborted for ever. Because the abortion of the translating movement secretly waits at the horizon of all languages. These languages should learn that if it is always possible to translate between national languages, even if that translating passage from the one to the other is always respectable, even if it is a historical necessity (which began to be felt on a large scale only with the advent of national languages, precisely in the time of Goethe's Weltliteratur), it is nevertheless true that the respectable act of translating between national languages does not have much to do with the act of translating into a surviving language—the one which translates into a living language as though it were dead, or into a dead language as though it were alive. Only that act of translation can lay bare the essence and the substance of a surviving language, as surviving.

We arrived at the limit. The end has begun. We must translate. It is an imperative. We must translate because the end has begun. But we now know that translation aborts if it does not take into consideration the change in status of our language. From now on, the imperative has also changed in nature. Henceforth it has become the imperative to translate into the language, our language, the same language, but as a surviving one. Who would have ever heard that imperative if we had not been confronted by the loss of our language in foreign countries?

1. On Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948), see my book, Le Roman de la Catastrophe, Geneva: MétisPresse, 2008. The most explicit passage where Oshagan mentions the "violence" to which the Western-Armenian writers were subjected because the "organ of duration" had atrophied in them is found in his Hamapatker [Panorama of Western-Armenian literature], vol. V (Jerusalem, 1952), p. 153. For a French translation of that passage, see Le Roman de la Catastrophe, p. 136.

2. An (incorrect) English translation of Nahanjë is available, Shahan Shahnur, Retreat without song, trans. Mischa Kudian, London: Mashtots Press, 1972. A French translation has recently been released, Armen Lubin (Chahan Chahnour), La Retraite sans fanfare, wrongly subtitled Histoire illustrée des Arméniens à leur arrivée à Paris suite au génocide de 1915-1916, translated under the direction of Krikor Beledian (Paris: L’ACTEMEM, 2009).

3. On this generation of writers in exile, I refer the reader to Krikor Beledian's study, Cinquante ans de littérature arménienne en France. Du même à l'autre, Paris: CNRS, 2001.

4. Harutiun Kurkjian, Yerkrord havasarum pazmat'iv anhaytnerov [Second Equation with multiple unknowns] has later been included in the book P'ordz tara-grut'ean masin [Essay on Writing Exile] (Paris: Collection "Diaspora arménienne", 1978), with a French translation.

5. Asphaltë was released from the printhouse of the journal Marmara in Istanbul, in 1972, and subsequent references are cited from this edition. Sovorakan or më was released in Beirut by Sevan Publishing.

6. Nahanjë arrants' yergi, p. 257 of the first edition.

7. Ibid. p. 258.

8. Sovorakan or më, p. 84.

9. See Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. with an introduction by Leslie Anne Boldt, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988, p. 61: "Blanchot asked me: why not pursue my inner experience as If were the last man? [...] The subject in experience loses its way, it loses itself in the object, which itself is dissolved. It could not, however, become dissolved to this point, if it’s nature didn't allow it this change; the subject in experience in spite of everything remains [...] As the ancient chorus, the witness, the popularizer of the drama, it loses itself ...; as subject, it is thrown outside of itself, beyond itself [...] For it is possible that the last one without chorus, as I want to imagine him, would die, dead to himself, at the infinite twilight he would be...." I have commented on these lines in the essay (in Armenian), Anmardkayini P'ordzenkalumë [The Experience of Inhumanity], published in my most recent book Patker, Patum, Patmut'iun (Yerevan: ActualArt, 2015). This essay was itself the expanded version of a lecture pronounced in English at UCLA in 2013, in the framework of a colloquium on "Inhumanities.”

10. "Pierre Ménard" in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, London: Penguin, 1998, p. 88-95. An Armenian translation has been prepared for me by Vartan Matiossian, and published on the website of the journal Ink'nagir in 2015.

11. Collected Fictions, p. 90. Subsequent references will be given in the body of the essay.

12. Novalis, Fragmente, Dresden: Wolfgang Jess, 1929, p. 644.

13. On this idea of a general transferability and translatability “of everything into everything,” which characterizes Novalis’s “encyclopedic” writings and Friedrich Schlegel’s project of a “progressive universal poetry,” see Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign, Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. Stefan Heyvaert, Albany: SUNY Press, 1992 (L’Epreuve de l’étranger, Gallimard, Tel, 1984) esp. Chapter 5, “Romantic Revolution and Infinite Versability.”

14. Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir, Gallimard, 1959, pp. 118-119. The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford University Press, p. 95.

15. These excerpts are on pages 177-178 and 201 in French, 111 and 135 of the English translation.

16. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Band IV-1, Francfot: Suhrkamp Verlag, IV-1, p. 10.

17. See Jacques Derrida, Psyché, Galilée, 1987, p. 216, and in English: Acts of religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 116.

18. Gesammelte Schriften, Band IV-1, p. 20-21.

19. Psyché, p. 234, Acts of Religion, p. 132.

20. Collected Fictions, p. 90.