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  • I Love the Sun-Baked Taste of Armenian Words
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I Love the Sun-Baked Taste of Armenian Words

Eghishé Charents

I love the sun-baked taste of Armenian words,
their lament like ancient lutes, the bend
of blood-red flowering roses in the accents,
the lilt of Naiyirian steps still danced by girls.

I love the arch of skies, the faceted waters
running through its syllables; the mountain
weather, the meanest hut that bred this tongue.
I love the thousand-year-old city stones.

Wherever I go, I take its mournful music,
its steel-forged letters turned to prayers.
However sharp its wounds, and drained of blood,
or orphaned, for my homesick heart there is no other
balm.

No brow, no mind like Nareg’s, Kouchag’s.
No greater utterance. No mountain reach
like the peak of Ararat.
Search the world there is no crest so white.
So like an unreached road to glory. Massis.
(No other language tells my want.)


Eghishé Charents

from Anthology of Armenian Poetry, translated and edited by Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978)

translated by Diana Der Hovanessian

Reproduced by kind permission of the translator.

Tags:

Armenia Homesickness language nationalism synesthesia tradition & heritage

About this poem

This poem, representing Armenia, is part of The Written World – our collaboration with BBC radio to broadcast a poem from every single nation competing in London 2012

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Eghishé Charents1897 - 1937

Eghishé Charents was born in 1897 in Kars – then part of the Russian Empire – into a family of rug traders. He published his first collection of poetry in 1914. In 1915 Charents volunteered in an expeditionary force...
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