BELMONT, Mass. — On April 27, poetry, medicine and the Armenian Genocide converged at a program at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) featuring Peter Balakian speaking about his classic translations of the devastating poems by Siamanto.
Bloody News from My Friend: Poems by Siamanto, translated by Balakian and Nevart Yaghlian, was published by Wayne State University Press in 1996. The book contains works by one of the most famous modern Armenian poets who with his words captured the horrors of the Adana Massacres of 1909 before he himself was rounded up and executed by the Ottoman forces in 1915.
The poems he wrote about the Adana events were a reaction to the letters he had received from his friend, Balakian’s grandfather, Dr. Diran Balakian, who had been a witness to the calamity.
The stunned Diran Balakian had poured his heart out in letters to his friend, Adom Yarjanian, whose pen name was Siamanto, about the gruesome sights he had seen.
“In Adana, my grandfather wrote back a group of letters to his family and his friend, Siamanto,” he recalled. “Siamanto was obsessed and riveted by them. He used them to write a cycle of 13 poems.” The poems were published in Armenian in 1911 in Constantinople.
The letters themselves are lost, Balakian said.