The Candidate Read online

  SELECT TITLES FROM MIDDLE EAST LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

  All Faces but Mine: The Poetry of Samih Al-Qasim

  Abdulwahid Lu’lu’a, trans.

  Arabs and the Art of Storytelling: A Strange Familiarity

  Abdelfattah Kilito; Mbarek Sryfi and Eric Sellin, trans.

  The Desert: Or, The Life and Adventures of Jubair Wali al-Mammi

  Albert Memmi; Judith Roumani, trans.

  Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi: An Ottoman Novel

  Ahmet Midhat Efendi; Melih Levi and Monica M. Ringer, trans.

  Gilgamesh’s Snake and Other Poems

  Ghareeb Iskander; John Glenday and Ghareeb Iskander, trans.

  My Torturess

  Bensalem Himmich; Roger Allen, trans.

  The Perception of Meaning

  Hisham Bustani; Thoraya El-Rayyes, trans.

  32

  Sahar Mandour; Nicole Fares, trans.

  The publication of this book was made possible in part by a grant from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) and the Fesjian Fund at Columbia University.

  Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Manoukian and Ishkhan Jinbashian

  Syracuse University Press

  Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

  All Rights Reserved

  First Edition 2016

  161718192021654321

  Originally published in Western Armenian as Թեկնածուն (Beirut: Sevan, 1967).

  ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.

  ISBN: 978-0-8156-3468-3 (paperback)978-0-8156-5379-0 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vorpouni, Zareh, author. | Manoukian, Jennifer, translator. | Chinpashean, Ishkhan, translator.

  Title: The candidate : a novel / Zareh Vorpouni ; translated from the Western Armenian by Jennifer Manoukian and Ishkhan Jinbashian.

  Other titles: Tegnatzun. English

  Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2016. | Series: Middle East literature in translation | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016028141 (print) | LCCN 2016028163 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815634683 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815653790 (e-book)

  Classification: LCC PK8549.V67 T4413 2016 (print) | LCC PK8549.V67 (ebook) | DDC 891/.99235—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028141

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Translator’s Introduction

  JENNIFER MANOUKIAN

  The Candidate

  ZAREH VORPOUNI

  Afterword

  Zareh Vorpouni’s The Candidate: Testimony, Sacrifice, and Forgiveness

  MARC NICHANIAN

  Major Works by Zareh Vorpouni

  Notes

  Biographical Notes

  Acknowledgments

  THIS TRANSLATION is the epitome of diasporic mobilization, drawing on the knowledge and know-how of experts and friends—some even of Vorpouni himself—throughout the Armenian diaspora. Many thanks to Carole Allamand, Lusiné Kerobyan, Christina Lalama, Kristyn Manoukian, Vartan Matiossian, Linda Ravul, and Asbed Vassilian on the East Coast; Talar Chahinian on the West Coast; Razmik Panossian of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Marc Nichanian in Portugal; Boris Adjemian of the AGBU Bibliothèque Nubar, Krikor Beledian, G. M. Goshgarian, Louise Lacroix, Andrew Stearns, and Houry Varjabédian in France; Haroutiun Kurkjian in Greece; Lilit Avagyan in Armenia; and Daniel Ohanian in Turkey.

  A special thank you to Suzanne Guiod and Michael Beard at Syracuse University Press for welcoming a novel in Western Armenian into their Middle East Literature in Translation series for the very first time.

  Translator’s Introduction

  To my Armenian professor, Asbed Vassilian

  I FIRST CAME ACROSS Zareh Vorpouni’s name in a footnote, where some of the most promising literary tidbits seem to languish. His name did not start flashing on the page, nor was I visited by the inexplicable sense of familiarity I often feel when I first read about a writer with whom I will come to spend more of my nights and weekends than any living, breathing human being. In fact, his name meant nothing to me—or to most anyone else, as I would soon learn—but the description of his defiant generation of French Armenian writers seemed as if it might end my search for the irreverent, experimental, and countercultural in Western Armenian literature, while at the same time satisfy the Francophilia that afflicts me.

  In the 1930s, Zareh Vorpouni belonged to a group of writers that congregated in Paris, the center of Western Armenian intellectual life between the wars, around a literary journal called Մենք (Menk).1 The group comprised young men who had fled Constantinople for Paris in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide and in advance of the founding of the Turkish Republic, and it led to a cultural revival that focused on the development of the novel, the examination of diasporic identities in literature, and the cultivation of Western Armenian as a literary language.

  In the Ottoman Empire, Western Armenian was the standardized language used by the intellectual elite, many of whom were killed during the first phase of the genocide in 1915. The language, along with its speakers, fled into the diaspora, where it often came into fierce competition with the language of the host country.2 Even in Constantinople, the cultural capital of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Western Armenian literature was teetering on the brink of death after the war. In an attempt at revitalization during the Allied occupation of the city, a surviving cadre of Ottoman-era writers worked to create a group of young men who had the linguistic dexterity and cultural consciousness needed to continue the Western Armenian literary tradition. Among these young men were Zareh Vorpouni, Nigoghos Sarafian, and Shahan Shahnour.3

  Despite the expectation that they would bear the legacy of the old guard, Vorpouni and his contemporaries deliberately broke with their predecessors in theme and form, staging an outright rebellion against them. “We wanted to flatten them. That was our way of revolting. I think this sense of revolt was in the hearts of all of us and it was this revolt that created our literature against these honchos [bonzes],” said Vorpouni during an interview in 1978.4 Their invention of new literary standards and their impulse to represent the new realities of the diaspora challenged the conservatism of the Armenian community, creating a fleeting period in which brazen interrogations of nationalism, clericalism, and sexuality became the norm in literature.

  Whereas most of his peers lost their momentum after World War II, Vorpouni spent the second half of the twentieth century at the height of his creativity. His writing spurt in the 1960s and 1970s, however, coincided with the decline of Western Armenian. The diaspora was losing its ability, and its inclination, to read fiction in Western Armenian, especially experimental fiction that called into question accepted elements of diasporic Armenian culture. Consequently, Vorpouni’s novels were read only by a dwindling number of literary-minded readers who were concentrated in the intellectual centers of Beirut, Istanbul, and Paris.

  In the whole of the Armenian diaspora, Vorpouni’s influence was marginal, but within his coterie of followers he was praised for his attempt to modernize the Western Armenian novel. Vorpouni integrated elements of French literary and theoretical currents, most notably the nouveau roman and theories of textuality, to produce a cultural melding unique in the history of Western Armenian literature. This is not to say that Vorpouni’s work
was a calque or derivative of his French contemporaries, but that he saw no use in aspiring to the cultural ideal within the Armenian diaspora that understood the acceptance of the “foreign” as culturally corrosive. Rather than pretend to work in a cultural vacuum in which only the “authentic” Armenian existed, thereby indulging the tendency to exalt the past, Vorpouni resisted tired tropes and nostalgia to affirm the constructiveness of the natural interplay of cultures in the diaspora. In other words, he wrote about the realities of diasporic life, rather than about a delusive ideal.

  In The Candidate, published in 1967 in Beirut, Vorpouni’s indirect apprenticeship with an eclectic collection of French avant-gardists (e.g., Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, and Paul Verlaine) manifests itself structurally and thematically. The renegades of Western Armenian literature (e.g., Vahan Tekeyan and Taniel Varoujan) also make cameos in the novel, along with allusions to European intellectual giants, signaling not an aspirational yearning to be perceived as European, as it may come across in translation, but an assertion that the “foreign” can complement, rather than threaten, the Armenian.

  Despite the rare depictions of diasporic Armenians in literature, readers should resist the urge to see The Candidate as “ethnic literature,” designed to introduce them to a people and a culture. Vorpouni wrote the novel in a kind of secret language, an ethno-national language that few beyond those born into Armenian families take the pains to learn. The privacy of an ethno-national language like Western Armenian assumes a certain shared understanding of history and culture that sidesteps the need for explanation or didacticism in literature. Now, in translation, it is tempting to put Vorpouni’s novel at the service of understanding the “Armenian psyche,” but the original was not meant to teach its readers anything about the Armenian people. Above all, The Candidate should be seen as a work of fiction, a work of art that, like any other, seeks to muse on the anguishes, joys, and invisibilia of human existence. The novel is not a solutions manual for its intricacies, but an invitation to introspection and contemplation.

  After the novel, readers will find Marc Nichanian’s afterword, “Zareh Vorpouni’s The Candidate: Testimony, Sacrifice, and Forgiveness,” which reflects on three themes the work can offer to introspective and contemplative readers. Nichanian examines the singularity of the novel within the Western Armenian literary tradition and, through his analysis, exposes the range of academic disciplines to which it can add its insights, namely trauma studies, reconciliation studies, and narratology. He situates the book within its sociopolitical context and spurs readers to consider the contemporary lessons that can be gleaned from The Candidate.

  This translation is the result of a transcontinental collaboration between me in New Jersey and Ishkhan Jinbashian in California. In 2000, Ishkhan translated The Candidate for Marc Nichanian’s Armenian literature seminar at Columbia University. In an unexpected twist, I learned of Ishkhan’s unpublished translation as I was working on my own draft in 2014. In the end, we decided to combine our versions and work together to overcome the complexities of translating Vorpouni.

  Together, we fought to scale the novel’s sharp changes in register. Because of the narrative’s absence of linearity, in the span of one paragraph, Vorpouni can leap from metaphysical meanderings in a refined, almost lyrical, language to crass dialogue, complete with colloquial interjections, slurs, and idiomatic expressions.

  Together, we strove to convey the levels of intimacy and formality between which the letters in the novel vacillate. We faced a particular challenge in the limited number of ways to open a formal letter in English compared to the variety in Western Armenian. This limitation was made all the more difficult by Vorpouni’s explicit examination of these levels of formality in the text itself.

  Together, we sought to be hypermeticulous about keeping our word choice consistent. In the novel, Vorpouni has a habit of doing away with narrative conventions to offer metacommentary on the process of writing. At times, he picks apart his own writing and returns to certain phrasing and ideas—sometimes even to mock their banality—at different points throughout the book, making consistency crucial.

  Strokes of serendipity have led to each of my translation projects—one from a book poking out of a perfectly aligned row, another from a casual comment about a writer during an hours-long conversation, and now this one from a digressive footnote. From this footnote has emerged a translation that resists, much like in the spirit of the original. It resists the isolation and insularity of literature written in a minority language; it resists the idea that culture in diaspora is fossilized, stagnant, or in decline; and it resists the notion that Armenians have only their century-old plight to offer the world outside their national cocoon.

  JENNIFER MANOUKIAN

  February 2016

  The Candidate

  Malheur à qui scandalise les enfants!

  —Matthew 18:6

  C’est pourquoi il n’y a pas de crime

  plus horrible que de souiller le cœur

  des enfants.

  —Paul Claudel,

  L’oiseau noir sous le soleil levant

  Dear Mademoiselle Arshalouys,

  Vahakn is dead.

  Yes, Vahakn is dead. Today, a police car took his body to the morgue. If no one comes to claim it after two days, the morgue will probably turn it over to a medical school. The Church didn’t want anything to do with a suicide. I forgot to mention that Vahakn killed himself. Yesterday, when I came back to my room after work, I found Vahakn lying on the floor. At first, I thought he was just reading, since newspaper was laid out all around him. But then I noticed the pool of cold blood. He had slit the veins in his left wrist with a razor blade and rested his hand on a bed of newspaper. Then, if the peaceful expression frozen on his face is any indication, he waited calmly for death to come.

  Here we are then, dear mademoiselle. I’ve done my duty. At least I think I have. These past few days Vahakn wouldn’t stop talking about you. Now I know that he was subtly asking me to contact you.

  Please accept my heartfelt condolences, dear mademoiselle.

  Minas Yerazian

  Paris

  April 24, 1927

  PS: My address is on the envelope.

  He let out a sigh of relief as he dropped the letter into the mailbox and found that he felt lighter after ridding himself of that heavy burden. All night long he had tortured himself trying to find the right tone for the letter and now he was satisfied with the telegraphic form it had taken. The letter seemed more official that way, as if it were a war dispatch: Private so-and-so has died for his country or private so-and-so is missing in action. Yet he felt that he had ceded a bit too much to his emotions. Despite his hope that the letter would seem detached, he had only managed to stifle their intensity, not erase them entirely. Yes, compared to his earlier drafts, the letter was neater and quite a bit shorter. But it seemed to him that it was left in a way that required a response, despite the great effort he had taken to avoid just that. He had worked that whole night in a room where the memory of the dead was still fresh, still warm even. It was as though he were still there, alive, lying on the wood floor and giving orders from the dead, as though he were guiding the tip of the pen across the paper, composing the words just the way he wanted with an insistence unique only to the dead. Minas started the letter over and over again and the pile of crumpled paper he tossed onto the floor grew bigger and bigger. It was at that point that he decided to leave his room and come here to one of the cafés in Les Halles, where he felt that the commotion protected him from the meddling of the dead. The workday had already begun. The comings and goings of sellers and shoppers thundered through the streets, and in the flood of light, the antagonizing presence of the dead became impossible to sense, turning into a distant, and now somewhat enchanting, echo. Here he managed to finish the letter and immediately got up to drop it in the mailbox. It was only then that Minas could let out a sigh of relief, shed the burden
, and shake free from the memory that oppressed him. He had barely taken a few steps from the mailbox when he stopped short. He wanted to go back and get the letter, but it was too late. It was too late to get the letter, but still too early to go to work. The clock on the façade of Saint Eustache had just chimed five o’clock, the sounds undulating and conjuring up the distress signals of a ship lost in the fog on a cold autumn morning, far out on the open sea. He had until six o’clock. It didn’t take more than fifteen minutes to get to work near Grands Boulevards. He took a longer route than usual and passed through the heaps of produce that crowded the streets and square, breathing in the smell of fruits and vegetables that had mingled in the air. He changed his course once again near the Louvre and came to the wide, tree-lined path along the river, where carts as big as ships rumbled past, rushing to the capital the last fruits of the fall, dusty from their northern journey. From there, he walked to the Jardin des Tuileries, passed in front of the Comédie-Française, and took Avenue de l’Opéra until he reached the opera house itself. By then, the morning papers had already arrived. He picked up a copy and walked as he read under the streetlights, getting to work exactly at six. Walking distracted him from his thoughts, which filled the corridors of his mind like uninvited guests. Since finding Vahakn dead, it had been impossible to keep his thoughts at bay. His mind had not been able to function as it had before, but now that the letter was sent, he settled down and his brain allowed a tangle of thoughts to rush in. He stopped and leaned against the wall along the swollen waters of the Seine. A faint murmur passed through the air. The coolness rising off the water struck his face and he felt as though he had just been jolted awake. He hadn’t slept at all that night and fatigue had numbed his brain. The sound of a motor caught his attention as it traveled through the lead-colored water. A barge had already arrived at the bridge and, lowering its smoke stack, it passed underneath like a man bowing his head to avoid low branches. A boyish exhilaration seemed to sprout in his chest as he watched the ship head toward Île de la Cité, following the right bank to Notre Dame, then to Asnières or Melun, and maybe even farther, crossing rivers and seas to foreign lands. The noise dissipated, and the water, which for a moment was cleaved in the barge’s wake, healed to resume the secret whisperings that would soon blend into the uproar of the day. Minas continued on his way. If he wanted to keep surrendering to the early morning spell of the river, he would need to take a shortcut to make it to work on time.