Samvel Mkrtchyan: Ulysses in Armenian Translation

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit . . . .

I will go to my grave, no doubt, grateful for Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I won’t say I understand them in any conventional, ordinary sense. In the presence of language of this depth, grace, and magnitude, I seek neither Reason nor reason: I listen with my life, and in my bones. Scholars have their approach. I have mine. In my mind, the books are as much music as they are literature. I embrace them as I embrace the symphonies of Beethoven.

I feel the same way about the Armenian language, which I’ve heard spoken throughout my life and have yet to master; which I taught myself to read when I was in my twenties; and which has always, in ways subtle, apparent, and obscure, informed my own writing, to the extent that what I write naturally lends itself to translation. I know this for a fact, having worked directly with Samvel Mkrtchyan, who has translated my work along with that of Faulkner, Eliot, Shakespeare, Saroyan, and now Joyce.

In terms of Ulysses, especially, I am staggered by his accomplishment. In giving this masterpiece of English literature to his native land, Mkrtchyan has also contributed immeasurably to world literature. His translation of Ulysses — a labor of many years, replete with notes, illustrations, and photographs, beautifully designed by his own hand — is truly a gift for the ages. When I think of the toil, the long nights spent with aching neck and bones, the restlessness, patience, and defiance that are part and parcel of such a task, I return to my own small life inspired and renewed.

It is, of course, logical to ask if and how I will read this book. Of the if we will quickly dispense: books live through their readers; it is my joy and responsibility to respond. And of the how: aloud, from cover to cover, in a voice that tells of my own memories and trials, almost but not quite laughing to the end.

Ulysses

Translated into Armenian

with a foreword and notes

by Samvel Mkrtchyan

“Translation of the unabridged republication

of the original Shakespeare and Company edition,

published in Paris by Sylvia Beach, 1922”

ISBN: 978-9939-53-778-8

Yerevan, Armenia

2012

735 pages

Chronology. Forty-eight Color Plates. Pictorial Appendix.