Elegy for Aris Sevag: Editor and Translator of the Armenian People

I imagine, this is the elaborated perception of him, for many of his friends and acquaintances. When I first met him, I was 8, a timid and sad little girl living in a home of turmoil and chaos. He was Mr. Sevag, my third-grade teacher. At the time, I attended an Armenian school in Woodside, Queens. It was a fledgling school with a very small student population. It was where my mother would meet him, and they would marry years later. Not only did he teach at the school, but he was also the school bus driver. He was 35 years old and married with a young son. He seemed a happy wanderer, unsure of himself, yet invested in life.

Eventually, he left teaching for a brief stint in real estate, and then settled into a position as managing editor at the English-language Armenian Reporter, one of the leading Armenian newspapers, for 20 years. He moved on to become editor of the digital edition of Ararat, a highly-respected Armenian literary journal of 50 years at the time, publishing works of notable historians, writers and journalists. At the end of his career at the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), he continued freelance editing and translating.

In a New York Times article “Severing a Link, Word by Word; As Language Erodes, Armenian Exiles Fear Bigger Loss,” Aris reflected candidly about how Armenians may soon loose grasp of their native literature, “We are losing our multigenerational thread. We are losing our ability to understand the Armenian gestalt, our inner world.” Perhaps this is his demure attestation to what drove him to edit and translate so dedicatedly.

The aspect of him that I embrace more fully than any other was his ability to give of himself completely. It was his most compelling grace and his detrimental flaw. I would slip into his office and take a cigarette from his pack, sit on the library bench, and talk. Sometimes I wouldn’t. I would bring him my novice stories, which he returned to me diligently, his neat, red pen marks dancing across the pages. I asked him once, in the midst of a neurotic philosophical crisis: “How do you become intelligent? Where does intelligence come from?” He grinned. “Books,” he said. “You have to read as much as you can.”

After his passing, I received an email from his best friend in college, Don. He relayed stories of my stepfather that shouldn’t have surprised me, but did anyway. On one particular trip to Harvard for a game, the car overheated so many times that it took Aris, Don and their friends 12 hours to drive from Pennsylvania to Boston. Aris entertained them with his violin, playing show tunes and concertos while sprawled out on the car roof. The following year, they dressed up as police officers and pretended to arrest one of their colleagues, causing complete mayhem on campus. And a more predictable bit, Aris and Don revived Penn’s humor magazine, The Punchbowl, where Aris wrote satirical articles and parodies.

Don was kind enough to forward an exchange between him and my step-father, where they discuss Morse Peckham’s Man’s Rage for Chaos, which theorizes that order is man’s freedom, although we rage for chaos. Aris writes to Don, “If it weren’t for the fact that I used my computer to read Peckham’s statement about Man’s Rage for Chaos and tell you I enjoyed reading it, I could swear no time has passed since our college days. That feeling, if momentary, is an instance of man’s ability to reign supremely, albeit ever so briefly.” Two weeks later, Aris passed away.