To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? by Tenny Arlen

July 28, 2022 marks seven years since Tenny Arlen’s death. Her book, “To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? (Կիրքով ըսելու՝ ինչո՞ւ հոս եմ)”, was recently published by the ARI Literature Foundation in Armenia, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The publication is one of the first volumes of poetry written in the Armenian language by a United States-born writer.

Arlen, who grew up in San Luis Obispo, California, wrote the volume with no prior knowledge of Armenian. In 2011, 20-year-old Arlen began studying Western Armenian language and literature at UCLA. Over the next two years, she started writing poetry, before her untimely death in a car accident in 2015 at the age of 24. The title of this posthumous volume is a line taken from one of Arlen’s poems, in which the Armenian language speaks about its own existence in the 21st century Diaspora.

The book was edited by Dr. Hagop Kouloujian (UCLA), who also wrote its afterword, in which he points to Arlen’s creative journey in Armenian. Kouloujian highlights the book’s significance as one of the first full-length volumes of creative literature written and published in Armenian by a US-born author.

The majority of Arlen’s poems are about the “desire or need of human beings to understand their existence, their being here, and to give that meaning,” wrote her brother, Dr. Jesse Arlen (UCLA). “The poet courageously faces such questions and is not satisfied by simple or superficial answers, tired clichés. Instead, in her effort to ponder them deeply, she offers meaning to others. This book presents itself as a companion to those readers who seek to think and live life’s most fundamental questions.”

On May 20, 2022, Tenny Arlen was remembered at an event organized by the UCLA Armenian Studies Department in conjunction with the Promise Institute. Among the speakers to pay tribute to Arlen was Prof. Peter Cowe of UCLA.

“Despite an atmosphere of malaise in which Western Armenian has been considered an endangered language only utilized in conversation and community life in the Middle East, its literature all but dead, Arlen’s work is a sign in the opposite direction,” Cowe said. “For someone who, like many or perhaps most Armenian-American young people today, did not speak the language growing up, Arlen serves as a role model for others to follow.”

Click here to read more about the event in The Armenian Mirror-Spectator.

To obtain a copy of “To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here?”, visit the Abril Bookstore.

You can also request a copy by contacting Dr. Jesse Arlen at the Zohrab Information Center.

The book is available for sale internationally here.