FRANKFURT — The annual Frankfurt Book Fair represents a cultural highpoint in Germany, as authors, publishers, booksellers, literary agents, and booklovers from around the world gather to honor one country’s literary contributions, and explore the vast offering of new titles in every language culture. This year’s guest country was Italy, which presented its new selections under the rubric “Roots in the Future.”
As always, the Republic of Armenia is present with a stand to exhibit works by Armenian authors in the original, as well as numerous volumes as part of its ambitious “Armenian Literature in Translation” project. Armenian publishers and authors are eager to make their works known abroad. This year, the delegation from Yerevan organized an event dedicated to this pursuit: “Looking for a Place: Armenian Literature in Europe” was moderated by Jürgen Jacob Becker, deputy director of the Literary Colloquium in Berlin. Guests included writers Anush Kocharyan, Aram Pachyan and Sargis Hovsepyan, as well as Literary Critic Tigran Amiryan.
It has become traditional for cultural associations even outside the book fair to organize readings and performances in and around the city, among them, the Armenian Cultural Society in Hessen (AKV). This year the co-chairs of the board, Shushan Tumanyan and Armin Preuss, invited renowned photographer and writer Anahit Hayrapetyan, and myself to share the podium. I presented my work on German General Otto Liman von Sanders, an exceptional figure who contravened Young Turk deportation orders during the Ottoman genocide and saved thousands of Armenians and Greeks.
Anahit Hayrapetyan dealt with the suffering of Armenians in the present day, specifically in Artsakh. The selection of her photographs, projected on a screen, included portraits of individuals whose lives have been radically altered by the repeated wars and recent expulsion. There is the young man shaving, not at home in front of a well-lit mirror, but outdoors, in a soldier’s uniform, doing his best with a makeshift razor and small mirror balanced on a stone wall. There is the elderly couple, whose faces appear only in part, as if to symbolize that half of their own being has been taken away—that missing part we see between them, behind them, a photograph on the wall of the dead soldier. And in contrast, there is the joy of a young wedding pair, travelling in traditional means of transportation.…
The photographer has printed the pictures on postcards and published them in a collection entitled, “Բացիկներ Արցախից” (“Postcards from Artsakh”). Anahit Hayrapetyan, whose photos are highly poetical, composes poetry in words as well, and she read several of her compositions in Armenian from the collections, Վաղուց նամակ չեմ գրել (Haven’t Written a Letter in a Long Time) and Սիրուն (Pretty), with German translation provided by Shushan Tumanyan. One poem from the latter volume, entitled, “new war” evokes again the tragedy of Artsakh. It reads, in part:
new war
