Mariné Petrossian: ??????? ??? ????? ?/YEREVAN IS A BIG CITY

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DATE : Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:23:19 -0500
Entered in Database : 2007-03-17 02:23:19
length : 6069698
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Click to hear YEREVAN IS A BIG CITY read by the author,Mariné Petrossian.

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YEREVAN IS A BIG CITY

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This piece has previously appeared in the volume ????????? ?????????????? (Canonical Stories), published in Yerevan in 1998.

____________________________
YEREVAN IS A BIG CITY
Translated by the author in collaboration with Margarit Tadevosyan.

Baghramyan Avenue is frozen over.
It is hard to smile in the dark when nobody can see you.
This is the longest night, the 21st of December.
And I don’t want to go home.

Now I understand the tension in your eyes;
yesterday I did not see it.
Yesterday all the goblets were filled with joy,
I turned them upside-down, still they were filled with joy;
then suddenly all the gates began to close;
they were closing forever, but I did not now that,
and I didn't feel pain.

The past is unreal, as if in a dream.
Summer, peace, scientific communism
are all unreal, as if in a dream.
The real Yerevan is a dark city frozen over.

It is late, too late, all the candles are blown out,
yet I know there are people behind these walls.
They can’t sleep. In their hearts
hope is turning black like a sunflower.

This is the longest night. They call it winter solstice.
The past is unreal, as if in a dream.
Summer, peace, scientific communism
are all unreal, all in the past.
Just like the feeling that the river of time
flows somewhere in the distance.

The river of time is no longer far away,
it flows right beneath my windows now;
all the glass in my windows is shattered.

I will not forgive you your being afraid of pain,
I will not forgive you your preferring retreat to failure,
I feel no pain,
I simply can’t sleep. In my heart
hope is turning black like a sunflower.

The moon is full like the goblets that were full of joy.
You could throw them to the ground and they wouldn’t break.
We were all born to live in the country of joy,
why are we banished from it?

Soon it is New Year.
The old year left me banging shut the door.
Maybe we'll never meet again,
Yerevan is a big city, big enough for us to part forever.

The old year is over, yet the winter is not.
I want to live to see the spring coming,
the river overflowing its banks, shattering the glass of my windows.
I want to live to be happy.

Yerevan is a big city,
big enough to shelter you
when you are frozen and there is no place you want to go.

This is no longer the city where I was born,
this is a new city frozen over.

In the metro station a child-beggar stares at me stubbornly,
but I will give him nothing.
Is the sun rising or setting?
You can’t tell in this metro station’s everlasting twilight.

All the passengers you see are gloomy.
Don’t ask them why.
Yerevan is a city of everlasting winter,
the anxiety is dissolved in its air like salt.

Who will give me back the city where I was born?
Shall I see again the blue of its summer sky?
Maybe the beggar could answer my question,
but I do not ask him.

I was born in the summer, the 16th of August.
It was long ago. There are no more summers.
Yerevan is a city of everlasting winter,
and people look like fish.

If you look at me, I am like a fish.
If you cut my heart open with a knife,
I am a field of ripe black sunflowers under gloomy sky.

Copyright 2005 Mariné Petrossian

You can find this poem in Emily Artinian's limited edition artist's book, “From Ararat to Angeltown," London, 2005.

Some notes for the reader of the English version, to explain why it is shorter than the Armenian one/ You see, I don't feel myself obliged to translate every word, every line, not even every metaphor or simile. A poem is never a mere total of its parts, and I'm sure I will never get the same poem if I simply translate all of its parts into another language. Actually you can never translate a poem, you have to write it anew. And this is exactly what I always do - I write my poems anew, using the means of another language - often excluding some lines or including new lines, when necessary. - M.P.

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