National, International, Armenia, and Community News and Opinion

14 The Armenian Reporter | February 7, 2009
Community
Peter Balakian discusses the new edition of his Black Dog of Fate
by Lola Koundakjian
NEW YORK – It used to be
nearly impossible to find an English-language
book, published by a
major house, that dealt with personal
memories interwoven with
the topics of the Armenian Genocide,
the emigration of survivors,
or Armenian freedom fighters. The
tide has changed thanks in part to
Peter Balakian ’s groundbreaking
work, Black Dog of Fate. Continuously
in print since 1997, with 23
editions, it has been translated into
Armenian, Dutch, German, Greek,
and Turkish.
[Today the firmly established
genre includes recent books such
as Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan
(English translation from
the original Italian, published
in 2007), The Knock at the Door
by Margaret Ajemian Ahnert
(2007), My Grandmother: A Memoir
by Fethiye Cetin (U.S. edition
published in 2007), Marie-Antoinette
Varténie Arzoumanian-
Bédanian ’s Traverse Mère de Dieu
- Marseille (published in French
in 2003), and Nancy Kricorian ’s
Zabelle (1999) and Dreams of Bread
and Fire (2004).]
This month, Basic Books, a division
of the Perseus Books Group,
published an expanded, tenth-anniversary
edition of Black Dog of
Fate , with two additional chapters.
Recently I caught up with Mr. Balakian
during his winter break in Europe,
for a conversation about the
new edition.
When asked about his expectations
regarding public reaction to
the book, Mr. Balakian said he had
none. “I was just happy it was published,”
he noted.
Embraced as a modern classic,
Black Dog of Fate was awarded
the PEN/Albrand Prize for Memoir,
was a New York Times Notable
Book for 1997, and recognized as
Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles
Times , Publishers Weekly, and
Library Journal . Publishers Weekly
called the book “A prose masterpiece
by an acclaimed poet,” and
the Philadelphia Inquirer hailed it as
“a landmark chapter in the literature
of witness.”
Author Chris Bohjalian said
that when he read the book, he saw
in it echoes of his own childhood.
In 1997, New York Times reviewer
Dinitia Smith wrote that authors
such as Carol Edgarian , Leslie
Ayvazian , Mark Arax, and film
director Atom Egoyan , in addition
to Mr. Balakian, have “at the heart
of their work . . . a search for justice
and acknowledgement.”
It is therefore gratifying to learn
that Mr. Balakian’s book is now
taught at numerous U.S. colleges,
universities, and secondary schools.
“Students and teachers are using it
in the classroom fairly consistently,”
Mr. Balakian said, adding that students
send him emails and letters
as they write reports on the book
and the Armenian Genocide. He
A revised edition of Peter Balakian’s
Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir includes two
new chapters.
said that they ask good questions,
and that it is rewarding to be in
dialogue with them.
Asked about current front-page
stories about genocides around the
globe and how the citizens of the
world and their leaders react when
they read such news, Mr. Balakian
said he believes that “the general
population knows more about the
concept of genocide today than ever
before,” due largely to genocides in
the Balkans, Rwanda, and Darfur
in the past decade. “Certainly some
heads of state and governmental
organizations, at least in Europe
and perhaps here - and we’re hopeful
with the Obama administration
on human-rights issues - are realizing
that they must make stopping
genocide a priority. Whether this
will happen remains to be seen.”
In its December 7, 2008 issue,
the New York Times Magazine published
an excerpt from the latest
edition of Black Dog of Fate (see
below), in which Mr. Balakian describes
his trip to Lebanon and
Syria in 2005. “I had a beautiful
experience in Beirut and Aleppo
lecturing in May of 2005,” he said,
and added that he couldn’t believe
the size and intensity of the audiences.
He found the Armenians
there to be highly engaged in their
history and culture, and said he
learned a lot from them and being
in the Armenian neighborhoods
of those great cities.
After his lecture in Beirut at the
50th-anniversary celebration of
Haigazian University, Mr. Balakian
continued on to Aleppo, where he
discovered vestiges of his grandmother’s
refugee life, and then to
Der-Zor. “I had no idea I would find
my grandmother’s world in Aleppo,
but I’ll leave that story for readers
to read about in the new chapters
[of Black Dog of Fate ,]” Balakian
said.
Commenting on the book’s translation
into Turkish, Mr. Balakian
credited publisher Ragip Zarakolu,
the human-rights activist and
director/owner of the Belge Publishing
House. “Zarakolu is a brave
man who has done so much to try
and bring intellectual freedom to
Turkey,” Mr. Balakian said. “The
Turkish edition of my memoir is a
beautiful book.” Although figures
are not available for the translation’s
sales in Turkey, Mr. Balakian
believes that it circulates along a
non-mainstream path but that it
gets read. The Armenian edition
came out in 2002. Two years later,
Mr. Balakian traveled to Armenia
for a book tour, which he recalls as
a wonderful experience. Another
indication of Mr. Balakian’s acclaim
in Armenia was that he was given
honorary membership in both the
Writers’ Union and the Academy of
Sciences.
Since the original edition of
Black Dog of Fate , Mr. Balakian has
appeared widely on television and
radio shows including “ABC World
News Tonight,” “Charlie Rose,” and
Terry Gross ’ “Fresh Air” (NPR).
No doubt the list will expand after
Mr. Balakian’s tenth-anniversary
book tour is announced in the near
future.
Mr. Balakian is also the author
of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America’s Response,
a New York Times bestseller, first
published in 2003. In addition to
his writings, Balakian has co-translated
(with Aris Sevag ) and edited
an eyewitness account of the Armenian
Genocide written by his
great-uncle, Grigoris Balakian
(1873–1934). The translation, titled
Armenian Golgotha, will be released
on March 31.
Bones: an excerpt from the revised edition of Black Dog of Fate
by Peter Balakian
For Armenians, Der Zor has come
to have a meaning approximate to
Auschwitz. Each, in different ways,
an epicenter of death and a systematic
process of mass-killing; each
a symbolic place, an epigrammatic
name on a dark map. Der Zor is a
term that sticks with you, or sticks
on you, like a burr or thorn: “r” “z”
“or” — hard, sawing, knifelike. Der
Zor: A place to which hundreds of
thousands of Armenians in 1915
and 1916 were forced to march, a
final destination in the genocide of
the Armenians carried out by the
Ottoman Turkish government under
the cover of World War I.
In May 2005, after I was invited
to lecture in Beirut through the
auspices of the U.S. State Department,
the Armenian church arranged
for me to travel into Syria
— to Aleppo, an important city of
refuge during the Armenian genocide,
and farther east to Der Zor.
The highway from Aleppo followed
the Euphrates River through
Syria toward the Iraqi border. The
river appeared and then disappeared,
fresh and flowing and teal
green, not brown and sluggish as I
had imagined it, and certainly not
red with blood and clogged with
corpses as recorded by eyewitnesses
during the worst period of the
genocide.
By noon we were passing through
the commercial district of Der Zor
city. The streets buzzed with cars
and mopeds as we drove up to the
high stone facade of the Armenian
church, called Holy Martyrs. The
Der Hayr (parish priest) ushered us
inside. Downstairs, under the sanctuary,
there were archways and a
giant marble pillar that rose up
within a large opening in the ceiling.
Circling the pillar were glass
cases containing bones and soil.
Hundreds of bones: partial skulls,
femurs, tibias, clavicles, eye sockets,
teeth. Case by case. Bones and
more bones.
I asked the Der Hayr where they
came from. “You’ll see soon,” he
said. And after mezze we were off
farther to the east. I realized now
that Der Zor was a huge region of
arid land. After a couple of hours
of nothing but the occasional flock
of sheep, the car stopped in the
middle of nowhere, and up the hill
at the side of the road I saw a small
chapel of white stone.
“This is Margadeh,” my guide, Father
Nerseh, said. “About 15 years
ago, the Syrian government was
doing some exploration for oil here
and put their steam shovels in the
ground, and piles of bones came up.”
“Right here,” I said pointing
down.
“Yes.” He explained that the Syrian
government had offered the
Armenian church a plot of land for
a memorial.
I walked up the slope toward the
chapel. I put my hand in the dirt,
grazing the ground, and came up
with hard white pieces. “Our ancestors
are here,” I muttered. Then
Google launches free Turkish translation service
I began, without thinking, picking
up handfuls of dirt, sifting out the
bones and stuffing them in my pockets.
I felt the porous, chalky, dirt-saturated,
hard, infrangible stuff in my
hands. A piece of hip socket, part of
a skull. Nine decades later.
I filled my pockets with bones,
compelled to have these fragments
with me as I continued up the hill
to the chapel. The floor was cool,
and behind the altar was a wall of
alabaster with a carved cross. With
the evening sun pouring through
a yellow glass window, the whole
space was floating in saffron light.
I tried to empty my head and let go
of the graveyard I was standing in,
to let go of myself. Let the breath
go in, go out.
On the plane back to the United
States, I kept waking and sleeping.
It wasn’t until we were over Labrador
that I realized I was carrying
organic matter from another country.
The declaration card asked: Are
you bringing with you fruits, plants,
cell cultures, “soil, or have you visited
a farm/ranch/pasture outside
the United States” The bones, now
in resealable bags, were caked with
soil, and although they weren’t cell
cultures, what were they now, 90
years later
I reached down into my briefcase
and felt them through the plastic,
glancing around to see if a flight
attendant might be looking. What
could I say These are bones of my
countrymen I had visited a pasture
of bones in the Syrian desert
This one might be from my grandmother’s
first husband; this one
from a farmer from Sivas. I filled
out my declaration card. “Are you
bringing with you … ”
I put an X in the “No” column.
As I stood in line at customs at
Kennedy Airport, I remembered
my State Department hosts telling
me that, because of where I’d
been, they might want to check my
bags. But the customs agent looked
at my passport, looked at me, then
stamped the passport and said,
“Welcome back.”
by Lou Ann Matossian
MINNEAPOLIS – Merhaba.
So you’ve found a Web page in
Turkish and want to know what
it says. Maybe you’ve come across
an archival document, a family
letter, the back of an old photo, or
today’s newspaper. Years ago, the
elder generation might have been
able to read it. Now you don’t
know who can help, and your
Turkish-English dictionary offers
only bits and pieces of a scrambled
mosaic. To sort out the word
order, the inflections, the idioms
of Turkish, you need a translator.
Unfortunately, the free translation
software online is almost
worse than your dictionary. Instead
of clarifying the picture, it
serves you word salad.
Thanks to Google, help is on the
way. On February 1, the popular
Internet search engine added Turkish
and six additional languages to
its online service, Google Translate.
While not comparable in quality
Google Translate
now offers
translations to
and from Turkish.
to a human translation, Google’s
machine translation can provide a
rough idea of a Turkish text in a
fraction of the time you would take
to look up every other word in the
dictionary. And it’s free.
In addition to deciphering Turkish
texts or entire Web pages, English-speakers
can now surf the
Turkish-language Internet. Google
translates English search terms
into Turkish, finds the most relevant
Web pages, and displays them
in both languages.
The process also works in reverse.
Anything written in Google Translate’s
40 other languages can now
be translated almost instantly into
Turkish.
Popular demand may have
helped to spur the availability of
Turkish translation, says the “unofficial
blog” Google Operating System.
Last September, when 11 languages
were announced, many of
the commenters requested Turkish,
“so Google listened to the feedback.”
Turkish has an estimated 63 million
speakers.
But popularity isn’t everything.
Maltese, with its 400,000 speakers,
was among the 6 new languages introduced
with Turkish this month.
Can Armenian be far behind
connect:
http://translate.google.com/