A Book, Untitled by Shushan Avagyan, translated by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz
A Book, Untitled (Girq-anvernagir, 2006) by Shushan Avagyan has been translated into English from the Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, and is now available through AWST Press.
Girq-anvernagir was written as a literary experiment and published as samizdat in Yerevan. As the reader navigates 26.5 chapters of seemingly unrelated vignettes in disparate and unidentified voices, they discover that Avagyan, while writing the novel as a translator’s diary, is also mapping out a larger archival or archeological site: an imagined encounter between two early twentieth-century feminist writers, Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan, whose legacies have been obscured and forgotten as a result of Stalin’s regime and the patriarchal rendering of the Armenian literary and historical canons.
Kurghinian’s and Yesayan’s imagined encounter in 1926 is juxtaposed with a contemporary conversation between the novel’s unknown narrator—an archivist and translator referred to as the “typist/writer”—and her friend Lara, who are both piecing together the writers’ fragmented stories.
The lines that separate the narrative plots, past, present, and imagined, are blurred. Words are censored, authors uncited, text is missing, italicized, as if in draft form, and neologisms are rendered within neologisms. In this multi-authored experiment, penned yet anew by its translator, Girq perhaps is best understood as a work that proliferates meaning through what Bakhtin called a heteroglossic imagination, where “another’s speech in another’s language…express(es) authorial intentions [through] refract[ion].”
A Book, Untitled, Girq’s English translation, then, is yet another layer of this refraction: not an original; not a copy; it is an/other reading. If the reader finds themselves asking—How can we distinguish voices or why are they indistinguishable? Who has written, and who is writing?—then Avagyan has succeeded in her experiment to “deprivatize words,” enabling them to “belong neither to the typist/writer,” the translator, “nor to you, reader” so that instead, they “unite our past, present and future.”
“Shushan Avagyan’s Girq-anvernagir is among the most interesting phenomena of the post-Soviet era.” — Taguhi Ghazaryan, literary critic
“Avagyan’s book is absolutely new writing within the Armenian world, as much in its form and mode as in its content.” — Marc Nichanian, author of Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century
“The English-speaking world already owes Shushan Avagyan a tremendous debt for her essential translations of the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Now she has composed a brilliant novel of her own. A Book, Untitled is a powerful pastiche of voices and eras, as well as a feminist reclamation of Armenian women writers lost to time. For all its shifting, its purposeful resistance, its sharpness and darkness, I found this book simply delightful.” — Martin Riker, author of The Guest Lecture
Shushan Avagyan is the author of the novels Girq-anvernagir (A Book, Untitled, 2006) and Zarubyani Kanayq (2014). She has translated into English a volume of Shushanik Kurghinian’s poetry, and critical works by Boris Arvatov and Viktor Shklovsky. She currently lives in Yerevan and teaches at the American University of Armenia.
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is a translator and literary theorist who writes on translation, gender and nationalism, and technologies of racialization in the geographies of Armenia, Turkey, and their diasporas. Having called these places, and likewise Italy and her native New York home, she is currently based in Istanbul as she completes her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania.
Purchase A Book, Untitled now at a discounted price through the publisher, AWST Press, here. And get a chance to meet Avagyan and Cachoian-Schanz in March at our monthly reading series, Literary Lights.
Book Cover Design by Cinzia D’Emidio.