Geoffrey Goshgarian honored with a PEN Club award

PanARMENIAN.Net - Geoffrey Goshgarian's English version of an extract from Hagop Oshagan's The Remnants was one of eight translations honored with a PEN Club translation fund award at a ceremony in New York.



Mr. Goshgarian, a freelance translator, was educated at Yale and UCLA. He has to his credit sixteen book-length translations from French and German, including Louis Althusser's writings. He is the author of To Kiss the Chastening Rod.



Mr. Goshgarian began englishing Oshagan's 1,500-page novel cycle in the 1990s. His translation of part of the first novel in the cycle was originally intended for inclusion in a projected multivolume work on modern Armenian literature by Marc Nichanian, then professor of Armenian studies at New York's Columbia University.



"Except for a short passage published in Ararat in 1998 and another released by the online journal Words without Borders in December of last year," Mr. Goshgarian said, "my translation would probably still be moldering in the same closet in which reams of Armenian prose and poetry that I've translated have been languishing for more than a decade if Nanor Kebranian and Taline Voskeritchian hadn't taken an interest in it last year. The fact that Oshagan's text has been singled out for an award means that I can now translate enough of it to bring an English translation of at least one novel in the cycle into the realm of possibility."



While the $3,000 PEN award cannot cover the costs of translating a full-length work of fiction, it often attracts publishers or sponsors who can. It remains to be seen whether a major Anglo-American trade publisher or university press will now take the risk of putting out an English version of a work by a novelist who is virtually unknown to Anglophone readers and wrote in an "exotic" language such as Armenian.



Considered the foremost Armenian novelist by many Armenian literary critics in the Diaspora, Oshagan (1883-1948) is also a chronicler of Ottoman Armenia's modern political, social, and literary history. His life's story reflects the tragedy of his people.



Born and raised in Bursa, a predominantly Turkish city with a big Armenian population located not far from Istanbul, he worked, before the first World War, as a teacher in various Armenian schools in nearby villages.



He managed to elude the April 1915 roundup of prominent Armenians in the Ottoman capital that marked the beginning of the Genocide, and lived underground there through the war; arrested by the Ottoman authorities on at least seven different occasions, he managed to escape each time.



In the last year of the war, Oshagan escaped to Bulgaria, returning to Allied-controlled Istanbul at war's end to teach in various Armenian schools until 1924. He died suddenly during a visit to Aleppo in 1948, on the eve of a planned pilgrimage to the killing fields near Der Zor.