#zabel yesayan

[kammartinez]

Sally Foreman on Zabel Yesayan

Welcome to Lit Century: 100 Years, 100 Books. Combining literary analysis with an in-depth look at historical context, host Catherine Nichol

[kamreadsandrecs]

Sally Foreman on Zabel Yesayan

Welcome to Lit Century: 100 Years, 100 Books. Combining literary analysis with an in-depth look at historical context, host Catherine Nichol

[xiyade]

My dearest daughter, do not be scared of coming across as ambitious. A person who strives for high ideals can't be modest, humble and obedient.

Zabel Yesayan (1878-1945), Armenian novelist, translator, teacher

[bernamegeh]

Zabel Yesayan kimdir

1878’de Üsküdar’da doğan Zabel Yesayan, 20. yüzyılın en büyük Ermeni yazarlarından biri. Döneminin en önemli olaylarını edebiyatında işleyen, özellikle kadının toplumdaki yeriyle ilgili mücadelesiyle sonraki kuşaklara ilham veren Yesayan, Türkçe çevirileriyle de bilinir. Zabel Yesayan, 1909’da Adana’daki Ermeni kirimina tanık olduktan sonar tüm bu dehşet verici manzaraları ayrıntılarıyla kaleme…

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[anlatmakgerekbazen]

"Eğer bir kadın herhangi bir suni vasıtayla güzel görünmeye çalışıyorsa, bu onun köle olduğunu ispatlar."

[armeniangenocidehistory]

One evening I expressed a desire to visit the children after they had gone to bed, and was ushered to their dormitory. A terrible, unforgettable sight met my eyes. In that spacious hall, on mats arranged in rows on the floor, was a welter of young, half-naked limbs. … Because there wasn’t enough room for all of them, the children seemed to be piled up on each other. What with their breathing and all their other exhalations, the air was stifling and unbearable. Something unnameable, something nightmarish and unsettling drifted through the semi-obscurity. The children’s bodies were indistinguishable from the blackness of the sheetless beds; only the outlines of their limbs could be made out here and there, an arm, a leg. … Those rooms seemed as sad to me as desecrated, devastated graveyards. Sometimes one of the children, prompted by a bad dream, would raise his head and look right and left, shuddering. One cry of his would be enough to throw all those shapeless, almost undifferentiated piles into agitated motion and, sometimes, uneasy heads would be lifted here and there. In the first few days, it sometimes happened that the ravings of one of the children rattled all the others sleeping in the same room; still half-asleep, not knowing where they were, they would all jump to their feet screaming, in the belief that they were reliving the hours of the massacre. Although I had resolved to maintain my sangfroid, I was deeply shaken by that throng of children, deprived of affection and a mother’s love and care. … I decided to leave so that we wouldn’t disturb their sleep with our presence. Some were sighing, and all had woken up and were casting uneasy glances our way. We were getting read to leave hen I noticed a little slip of a girl almost directly at my feet. Two bright, unblinking eyes were looking at me. Her blond hair was strewn over the pillow, and her emaciated neck and emaciated arms and legs spoke of such severe mental and physical suffering that I lost control of myself, and started to cry. And, although I managed to stifle my sobs, the children heard me and woke up. For an instant, a strange stillness prevailed: they were all holding their breaths; then heads were raised, and a child started to cry. At that, as if on a signal, all at once, hundreds of children overcome by a terrifying attack of nerves suddenly began sobbing, screaming, and weeping, twisting and turning their frail, strengthless limbs on their shabby straw mats and calling out to the parents they had lost. It took us a long time to calm them down. When their tired heads at last came to rest on their pillows, the little girl’s two bright eyes were still looking at me. Before leaving, when I stepped closer to see why she hadn’t gone back to sleep, she stretched out a pair of arms toward my neck and held me close for a long time. … Before I left, I looked at all the children again. The room was quiet and peaceful. I was assured that now they would sleep soundly till morning. It seemed to me, however, that those children would dream unceasingly, with relentless insistence, of the days of horror they had lived in Adana, and that the nightmare would hover constantly over their dark-haired heads.

Zabel Yesayan, “In the Ruins” (written in the wake of the anti-Armenian 1909 Adana massacre, in which many thousands were killed and much of the Armenian quarter of the city destroyed) from My Soul in Exile and Other Writings, translated by G. M. Goshgarian

[sariaghjik]

We didn't talk much along the way; the jolting coach and the other passengers' curiosity disturbed us. "I've heard abut you and was glad to learn of your successes abroad. I'd like to come see your paintings." "Oh, Mrs. Danielian," I answered, "I didn't dare invite you to come." "But why?" she exclaimed, surprised. She briefly fastened her smiling, almost mockingly shining eyes on Cherkezian, who stubbornly continued to say absolutely nothing at all. Then she added, seriously: "There are so few people in this city capable of understanding one another. … I hope we'll become good friends." I wanted to say many things in reply, but I don't know what I stammered. My heart was overflowing with gratitude. "That's how it is, you know?" she went on. "It's as if we're exiles in a remote foreign country. We're exiles in the land of our birth because we're deprived of the kind of environment that our people's collective existence would create around us. Only fragile, loose threads bind us to our native land." Pensive for a moment, she looked at Cherkezian's frowning face, but then, as if she had suddenly gotten a hold on herself, she continued: "But we artists, at least, can become comrades in exile." She made these last remarks without sorrow, as if she had already resigned herself to the sad implications of that condition. An emotion made up of a confused medley of thoughts and feeling arose in me. I wanted to say a thousand different things, but my voice seemed stuck in my throat. No! I have not resigned myself to that sadness: neither the despair of someone like Cherkezian, paralyzed by a fixed idea, nor Mrs. Danielian's sagacious serenity shall ever appear on my face. Nor shall I ever indulge in the dubious pleasure associated with the kind of feelings that drape a young woman's face in an insouciant smile. I shall pursue my dream down every road, and my soul shall have its freedom. I want to inspire everyone with my hope and faith, disseminating them with an open hand everywhere. I want to say: let us become, not "comrades in exile," but "comrades in struggle," seeking pure, authentic sources of inspiration together. But then my exalted gaze alights on Mrs. Danielian's mocking countenance. In the glowing red atmosphere of sundown, hers is so entirely the look of someone resigned to everything. … Her delicate profile has acquired a strange transparency and the clear light of her eyes resembles a sun that dawns over a bottomless abyss. And I, who would have considered myself so different from her--in temperament, character, tastes--suddenly felt not just similar to her, but the same, as if we were two soul sisters: companions in exile.

Zabel Yesayan, My Soul in Exile

[sariaghjik]

This is brain fever, but it is also Constantinople fever, a sort of physical agitation inseparable from the city’s spring nights. There are so many stirring scents in the air, so much humidity, and at the same time the balmy waves of the southerly wind, and above all, that unstable, constantly shifting, intense emotion that resembles endless death and rebirth. Lights flicker and go out, while an imperceptible murmur, a sort of trembling in the atmosphere, agitates the air and sometimes makes it stifling. It seems as if, from time to time, an invisible flies by: the lights are snuffed out by its shadow, and the whispering of the trees ceases. Everything becomes a dream, wild emotion, or nightmare. People roam through the streets, staggering as if drunk. Everything–the natural scene, human emotion, the urban skyline, the soaring poplars, the muezzin’s call–everything is not only carried to a fever pitch of excitement, but also mingles with everything else. I remember that, from a very young age, I felt all this, vaguely; curled up in bed under rose-scented sheets, I would pull the comforter all the way up to my feverish forehead and shiver, just as I am shivering tonight. In no other city in the world, perhaps, does the unrest of spring invade people’s inner being in this supremely subtle, unhealthy way.

Zabel Yesayan, My Soul in Exile