èצӰÏñ

Bedros Tourian invented the language and imagery of modern Armenian
lyric almost singlehanded. He died of consumption in Constantinople at
the tender age of twenty-one when Rimbaud was beginning his life
Paris. Juxtaposing them and triangulating south we imagine Bedros
as the beautiful boy Poet of the City whom the younger Cavafy might
have hoped to meet but did not.

Lamenting a schoolmate's death and foreseeing his own— and with the
Armenian Genocide not far off— Tourian wrote a poem elaborating the
image of black milk, thereby uncannily foreshadowing one of the two
central features of the post-Holocaust "Todesfuge" of Paul Celan. A
discussion of the two involves the nexus of personal tragedy, modern
constructions of nationalism and of historical fate, and of visionary
art (and there will be some consideration of Anselm Kiefer here).

James Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies and a member
of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard. His most recent
studies include "The Shrine Beneath the Waves", "Solov'i, solov'i",
"The Cross and the Lotus", and "Argawan: The Indo-European Memory of
the Caucasus".