Search results for ""Author Razmik Davoyan""

A requiem for all the losses of the living throughout history, seeking to bridge the centuries by echoing another poem created in the tenth century by an Armenian mystic monk, Grikor Narekatsi. Unsurprisingly, it also touches upon the theme of the Armenian Genocide as a vivid example of loss for mankind as a whole. And yet Requiem is not simply an outpouring of tragedy and grief: throughout, there is a sense of resilience, a desire for life and faith, and a joyous optimism that goes far beyond the boundaries of Davoyan's native Armenia.Requiem is the first publication in English of one of the most extraordinary long poems published in Armenia in the last century. Written over fifty years ago, and originally blocked from publication in Armenia for five years by the Soviet regime, Requiem now appears in the author's revised and shortened version, offering the English-language reader an opportunity of encountering this monumental yet highly personal work by Armenia's best-known and most highly-regarded poet.

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After the Ottoman empire's entry into the First World War on 29 October 1914, the Armenians were accused – in a few cases justly – of conspiring with the advancing Russian forces to ensure Turkish defeats. The legend of 'Armenian treachery' gave the Ottoman government the pretext to sanction measures designed to remove all traces of the Armenian population from the empire.For someone whose family suffered immeasurably, Requiem is an amazingly measured and considered narrative of loss and survival. In an attempt to answer the moral questions brought about by the event and its aftermath, Razmik Davoyan remembers and commemorates without bitterness.Razmik Davoyan was born in 1940 in Mets Parni, Spitak, Armenia. His first poem was published in 1957 in the Leninakan Daily Worker. Since then he has published well over thirty volumes in Armenian, Russian, Czech and English. His children's poetry book Winter Snowflake, Spring Blossom, published in Russian in 1980, sold 450,000 copies in only two weeks all over the former Soviet Union. Requiem was banned for five years before it was published in Yerevan in 1969. In 1986 he received Armenia's State Prize for Literature. In 1997 he received the Order of St. Mesrop Mashtots, the highest non-military order of the Republic of Armenia, from the President of Armenia for his achievements and services to the country.

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Armenia's most significant contemporary poet, Razmik Davoyan is one of a handful of names in Armenian literature which define not only an era, but go much further to embody an entire history. Davoyan's work reflects the experiences of an old nation, yet it is fresh and very personal at the same time. It is impossible not to feel the struggles, hopes and aspirations of his native land in his work. "Whispers and Breath of the Valleys" is a book charged with energy - indeed, W. N. Herbert, in his introduction, describes it as being 'saturated with joy'. Davoyan displays 'an equal empathy for the suffering and the exultant, finding for both a voice that implies such oppositions are finally resolved in the poem'. This is accessible, readable poetry from a world, a way of life and a culture unfamiliar to most English-language readers and, as such, it fascinates and enthrals.

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This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.The latest anthology in Arc's 'New Voices from Europe and Beyond' series features the work of six of Armenia's poets – three men, Anatoli Hovhannisyan, Khachik Manoukyan and Hrachya Saroukhan and three women, Violet Grigorian, Azniv Sahakyan and Hasmik Simonian. Together they have all helped to shape the face of contemporary Armenian poetry.Of the six, Grigorian and Hovhannisyan originally began writing in the age of Stalin, only becoming more visible and appreciated since independence. Saroukhan, Sahakyan and Manoukyan established themselves in post-Stalin Soviet Armenia, while the youngest poet, Hasmik Simonian, is a writer of the new Armenia, out of the shadow of the Soviet past. This is a bi-lingual edition, with the Armenian original and the English translation on facing pages.Razmik Davoyan is the unofficial Armenian poet laureate, and recipient of the President's Prize for Literature (2003). Widely published in Armenian, Russian and Czech, his collections in English are Selected Poems (Macmillan, 2002) and Whispers and Breath of the Meadows (Arc, 2010).

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