In Nora Nadjarian’s beautiful poem, ‘Letters to Parajanov’, a speaker awaits a bird’s return with news from her homeland and recalls words lost and gained in this new ‘country’.
Letters to Parajanov
In the Armenian folk song Groung (Crane) the singer calls out to the migratory bird, begging for word from the homeland.
1.
Whisper, Parajanov, that colour from long ago. The alphabet melted when
my mother in church said: for each a candle. We learned to smell that wax,
it was tears. My father stabbed the sky ten times and fled. A bird became a
decade and then a century and we slept in another country, it was the crane.
2.
The story starts off a delicate girl, climbs stubborn mountains. The secret of the ark,
a magician gave me thirty-eight letters to write: My name is – I come from – We speak –
and other phrases repeated on loop. The long climb of not forgetting, Parajanov,
open and close my mouth, give me the pride of a nation to swallow. It hurts like love.
3.
We grew up, our eyes that beautiful black, our silences multilingual, and that glue,
Parajanov, which fixed us and sealed our lips, peeled. Years later, the lyrics returned,
the crane. Did you bring news? I asked. The question was burning my throat,
that absence. Where is the place where language lives? Did you bring news?
About Nora Nadjarian
Nora Nadjarian is an award-winning Armenian-Cypriot poet and writer. She has won prizes and commendations in international competitions, including the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize, the Ken Saro-Wiwa Poetry Competition and the Live Canon International Poetry Competition. Best known in Cyprus for her book of short stories Ledra Street (2006), she has had poetry and short fiction published internationally. Her work was included, among others, in Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press), Being Human (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), Capitals (Bloomsbury, 2017), Shipwrecked (Sampson Low, 2019) and Europa28: Visions for the Future (Comma Press, 2020). Her latest book is the collection of short stories Selfie (Roman Books, 2017). Nora also writes in Greek and has been published in numerous newspapers, magazines and anthologies in Cyprus and Greece. Follow her on Twitter @NoraNadj and Instagram noranadj
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This piece was completed for Life in Languages, a new series conceived and guest edited by Elodie Rose Barnes
Language is our primary means of communication. By speaking and writing, listening and reading, by using our tongues and our bodies, we are able to communicate our desires, fears, opinions and hopes. We use language to express our views of the world around us. Language has the power to transcend barriers and cross borders; but it also has the power to reinforce those demarcations. Language offers a form of resistance against oppression, yet it can also be used to oppress. Language has the power to harm or to heal.
In these times of shifting boundaries and physical separation, when meaningful connection has become even more important yet seemingly difficult to attain, language has become vital. The words we choose to read, write, and speak can bring us closer as individuals and as a collective. During lockdown, unable to travel, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to reading works in translation from all over the world – not only for the much longed-for glimpses into different cultures and ways of being that I cannot experience in person (for the time being, at least), but because they offer new words, new viewpoints, new ways of expression. Grief, loss, uncertainty, anger, hope, joy, love: these are universal emotions. Finding my own feelings mirrored in the writing of womxn from all across the world, from different times and different situations, across generations, is a massive comfort. It’s also led me to examine my own relationship to language and languages: what I read, how I write, the roots of my communication, and how that’s changing today.
In this series for Lucy Writers, I’ll share some of my personal reflections on how language has shaped my life and writing, and review some of my favourite works in translation written and/or translated by womxn. Writing on works written and translated by the likes of Natasha Lehrer, Saskia Vogel, Leïla Slimani, Sophie Lewis, Deborah Dawkin, Khairani Barokka and many more will feature in Life in Languages.
Elodie Rose Barnes
Submissions are now open for this series. See our Submissions & Contact page for full details.
Feature image is by Miguel Pinto on Unsplash.