GEOFFREY MICHAEL GOSHGARIAN WINS PEN CLUB AWARD FOR AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF HAGOP OSHAGAN’S "REMNANTS"

AZG DAILY
03-09-2009

Culture

Geoffrey Michael 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 on May 19,
reporter.am reported.

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.

The translation was "consigned to limbo," Mr. Goshgarian told the
Reporter, "when, after publishing the first volume^A in the series in
English with Gomidas Press, Professor Nichanian unexpectedly decided to
produce the rest of his study in his native French." [An excerpt from
Mr. Goshgarian’s work in that first volume appeared in the Reporter’s
editorial for April 18, "Remembering the Cilician massacres of 1909."]

"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," he added, "my translation [of Oshagan] 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."

Ms. Kebranian, a native of the Armenian village of Anjar, Lebanon,
who was educated in the United States and Britain, is currently writing
her doctoral dissertation at Oxford University on Oshagan and Armenian
pe al literature, while teaching Armenian literature – including
a course on Oshagan – at Columbia. Ms. Voskeritchian, a native of
Jerusalem and Oshagan’s granddaughter, is a literary translator in
her own right who also teaches writing at Boston University.

"On Nanor and Taline’s urging and with their very considerable help,"
Mr. Goshgarian said, "I submitted an extract from The Remnants to the
PEN Club, which, in coordination with Columbia’s Literary Translation
Center, has since 2003 been promoting what it considers to be competent
English translations of first-rate works of literature by awarding
grants to their translators. 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, including his parents’ native Sölöz, one of the
many Armenian-speaking villages in the Bursa region founded in the
late sixteenth century by settlers from the Armenian provinces.

In the same period, in 1902, he had a run-in with the Ottoman
authorities that led to a short stint in the Bursa prison. He made
h y debut shortly before the war, joining four of his peers – Daniel
Varoujan, Gosdan Zaryan, Aharon and Kegham Parseghian – in founding the
short-lived literary journal Mehyan [Pagan Temple] in Constantinople.

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.

While the experiences of these years go altogether unmentioned in
his work, including his autobiographical writing, it is not hard to
measure their impact on him from his wife’s accounts of his nightmares
and panic-stricken cries and friends’ remarks about the tears and
even paralysis that mere mention of that period brought on in him.

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 left Turkey for good in that year to spend the
last 25 years of his life teaching Armenian literature in diaspora
communities in Cyprus and Palestine. He died suddenly during a visit
to Aleppo in 1948, on the eve of a planned pilgrimage to the killing
fields near Der Zor.