GEOFFREY GOSHGARIAN HONORED WITH A PEN CLUB AWARD

/PanARMENIAN.Net/
28.05.2009 16:00 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Geoffrey Goshgarian’s English version of an extract
from Hagop Oshagan’s The Remnants was one of eight translations honored
with a PEN Club translation fund award at a ceremony in New York.

Mr. Goshgarian, a freelance translator, was educated at Yale and
UCLA. He has to his credit sixteen book-length translations from French
and German, including Louis Althusser’s writings. He is the author of
To Kiss the Chastening Rod. Mr. Goshgarian began englishing Oshagan’s
1,500-page novel cycle in the 1990s. His translation of part of the
first novel in the cycle was originally intended for inclusion in
a projected multivolume work on modern Armenian literature by Marc
Nichanian, then professor of Armenian studies at New York’s Columbia
University. "Except for a short passage published in Ararat in 1998
and another released by the online journal Words without Borders in
December of last year," Mr. Goshgarian said, "my translation would
probably still be moldering in the same closet in which reams of
Armenian prose and poetry that I’ve translated have been languishing
for more than a decade if Nanor Kebranian and Taline Voskeritchian
hadn’t taken an interest in it last year. The fact that Oshagan’s
text has been singled out for an award means that I can now translate
enough of it to bring an English translation of at least one novel in
the cycle into the realm of possibility." While the $3,000 PEN award
cannot cover the costs of translating a full-length work of fiction,
it often attracts publishers or sponsors who can. It remains to be
seen whether a major Anglo-American trade publisher or university press
will now take the risk of putting out an English version of a work by a
novelist who is virtually unknown to Anglophone readers and wrote in an
"exotic" language such as Armenian. Considered the foremost Armenian
novelist by many Armenian literary critics in the Diaspora, Oshagan
(1883-1948) is also a chronicler of Ottoman Armenia’s modern political,
social, and literary history. His life’s story reflects the tragedy of
his people. Born and raised in Bursa, a predominantly Turkish city with
a big Armenian population located not far from Istanbul, he worked,
before the first World War, as a teacher in various Armenian schools
in nearby villages. He managed to elude the April 1915 roundup of
prominent Armenians in the Ottoman capital that marked the beginning
of the Genocide, and lived underground there through the war; arrested
by the Ottoman authorities on at least seven different occasions,
he managed to escape each time.

In the last year of the war, Oshagan escaped to Bulgaria, returning to
Allied-controlled Istanbul at war’s end to teach in various Armenian
schools until 1924. He died suddenly during a visit to Aleppo in 1948,
on the eve of a planned pilgrimage to the killing fields near Der Zor.