Shushan Avagyan (b. 1976) is the author of the experimental novels Girq-anvernagir (A Book, Untitled, 2006) and Zarubyani kanayq (The Women of Zarubyan Street, 2014). She has translated into English a volume of Shushanik Kurghinian’s poetry and critical works by Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Arvatov. She currently lives in Yerevan and teaches at the American University of Armenia. Photo credit: Lusine Talalyan

FIVE FRAGMENTS FROM “THE WOMEN OF ZARUBYAN STREET” by Shushan Avagyan (self-translated)

1.

The Disappearing Disappeared Language that You Must Find Again

(and at once the apparently familiar is perceived as the unrecognized, allowing for this sudden removal of things to glide past you)

2.

And “Now” Will No Longer Signal the 1990s

(if one has the opportunity to closely examine the ceasefire at the point where one and the others are simultaneously formed)

3.

It Turns Out the Meaning of the Work Was Other than the Intended

(how else should one react to being born a woman, if not by abducting the future?)

4.

Perversions Nonetheless

(I am half, one should think, when I am certain)

5.

A Stalinka with a Balcony

(but who could have imagined language alone is not enough to imagine Yerevan more than “more time”)

 

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