Nigoghos Sarafian and Indie Rock: Arto Vaun's Unlikely DIY Hero
Last year, I appeared on BBC 3's The Verb to discuss Armenian diasporic poet Nigoghos Sarafian (1902-1972). I discovered his poems while researching the question of why a genuine and cohesive modernist movement was absent in Armenian literature (a complex question having much to do with the truncating effect of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, when modernism was blossoming elsewhere). To my great delight, Sarafian, though little known, wrote rigorous, tightly crafted, and truly modernist poetry in Armenian. His work struck me more so because of his background.
Arto Vaun's debut collection,
Capillarity
A true diasporic writer, Sarafian grew up in Bulgaria, then lived in Istanbul, and in 1923 escaped to Paris. There, he worked the rest of his life as a typographer, mostly outside of both Armenian and French academic or even artistic circles. When he died in 1972 he was relatively unknown. He still is. And the very fact of his continued anonymity speaks to why I so relate to him. Sarafian chooses not to wrap himself in conventional nationalist or cultural terms. Although his poems are full of longing and vague nostalgia, their coordinates are almost never culturally specific. What is modernist about this is that although he writes in Armenian, there are hardly any specific Armenian motifs or markers (nor even French for that matter). Instead, his focus and world is within the very rhythm, structure, and imagery of the words themselves.
What Sarafian did - though perhaps at times painfully - was choose to disregard rigid questions of identity and nationalist allegiance. He simply went to work each day at a modest job and otherwise focused his spirit and mind to his poems, regardless of circumstances or whether he was validated or not. That sort of quiet perseverance is not only moving; it has readjusted my own perspective as a first generation Armenian American poet and musician. There is freedom in not defining oneself by others' definitions, especially when others don't know that they too are boxed in.
Arto Vaun's debut record, The Cynthia Sessions, is almost complete. He has launched a Kickstarter campaign for support and to get others as excited as he is. You can see the short video and read more here. His first collection, Capillarity, was published by Carcanet in 2009. He's at work on a second collection.