Ten years after his first prose book was published, the poet and professor Peter Balakian (New Jersey, 72 years old), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2016, was able to add an important final coda to the memoirs about his Armenian family, survivors of the genocide of 1915. Now, The black dog of destiny, awarded the PEN/Albrand in 1998, comes to Spanish in its most complete version, translated by Rosa María Bautista and published by the Literature and Human Rights Library of the Berg Institute. “The book has continued to sell for more than 20 years. Who would have imagined it? “I am a poet,” explained the author in a classic brewery in the center of Madrid, where he participated in two talks before visiting Barcelona to offer a reading at the Faculty of Law of the University of Barcelona this Tuesday. He remembers Balakian’s first trip to Spain as a backpacker in the seventies and a route he took through Andalusia in the following decade, and cheekily asks if the photo of Hemingway that he has seen on the door of the establishment serves to attract tourists. . He sports tousled hair and an Armenian kilim bag.
“It was something extraordinary to be able to include that last part of my trip to Aleppo and what I found there about my grandmother’s life. That trip was an extraordinary gift. The next time I visited the place was with the television team of the program 60 minutes to reach the largest cemetery of the Armenian genocide. It was 2010 and a few months later the country exploded,” says Balakian, whose work in verse and prose has brought the American public closer to Armenian history since the 1970s. Today, the violence and murder of civilians continues and the word genocide is once again the subject of dispute. “Genocide, deportation, migration are horribly universal words. It is a huge part of the history of Armenians, but they are not the only ones,” he reflected. “I have been fortunate to be able to visit places where my ancestors lived and the Armenian community had an important presence, and it has happened to me that shortly after being there those places have been destroyed, such as Cizre, the city in southeastern Turkey where until 1915 There was a strong Armenian community that I visited in 2015. A week later the Government laid siege to the place to attack the Kurds. It is horrible to think that the history of your ancestors is repeated.”
Descended from Armenians on both his paternal and maternal lines, in his memoir Balakian recalls with humor and tenderness his childhood and youth in a wealthy suburb of New Jersey, his interest in American football, shared with his father, a doctor who invented isotonic drinks. ; his Jewish friends in the neighborhood, his rebellion and connection with the counterculture of the seventies—the reading of Allen Ginsberg at his university attended by his bourgeois Armenian mother is a memorable episode. As a child and adolescent he had little, if not zero, knowledge of the tragedy that marked the history of his people. The food and customs of the women in his family gave an exotic touch to his home, but it was not until much later that he investigated and discovered that terrifying story. Poetry and literature, he writes, was the path that took him there, in part thanks to his paternal aunts. One of them, Nona, was a renowned literary critic of The New York Times and the other, Anna, an academic dedicated to the Symbolist movement in France. “The women of the family were powerful, academics, business women, full of courage. My grandmother is still in my 2022 poems and my mother, still alive, has continued cooking until she was 92″, she explains. “My aunt Anna thought that poetry did not have to approach the world and she was very rigid about this. I chose another path, Armenian history has been very important in my work, and I have not tried to avoid either the trauma or the violence. The mystical does not have to be totally separated from the world; in my generation, writers and poets wanted to be in the world.”
As a young poet he met William Saroyan at one of the evenings at his aunt’s house. “He put the Armenian people on the map and his work is a good reminder of the power of art. A people, a history and a culture practically erased emerge in his pages full of life. His stories are what I like the most and I regret that he is not widely read today,” he points out, adding that it is in the work of poets such as Yeats, TS Eliot, Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath where he has found greatest inspiration for his writing. “In Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Maxine Hong Kingston, I found the mixture of other cultures with the American one and also in African-American writers like Toni Morrison, James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison.”
A literature professor at Colgate University since 1980, Balakian recalls in The black dog of destiny his participation in the student protests against the Vietnam War. How do you see the protest movement that has ignited American campuses this spring? “Protests are important acts of political and civic participation. Students exercising their voices and their ethical concerns as citizens of a democracy are important. For me they were in my youth. In the United States, beyond Vietnam, there were protests against apartheid and more recently with the Black Lives Matter movement, as now with Palestinian Voices. Teachers understand peaceful protests. Bringing the police to campuses is counterproductive,” she estimates, and clarifies that any act clearly defined as anti-Semitic should not be overlooked. “I think most of what is happening is a political crisis. The conservatives of Make America Great Again “They have used accusations of anti-Semitism to attack university education.”
The writers’ organization PEN, of which Balakian has been an active member, has also suspended its gala and festival this May due to disagreements between its members over Gaza. “In an organization like PEN there should be space for different opinions. This is a crisis that will have to be overcome, it cannot be that people simply leave because they do not agree with each other, we will have to sit down and talk,” he says.
Where does he, who has fought so hard to combat Turkish propaganda that denied the Armenian genocide, stand regarding the fight over whether or not that term applies to what is happening today in Gaza? “The crimes against humanity that occur in Gaza will have to be judged by the International Criminal Court and there these atrocities will be legally defined. Hamas’ crimes will also have to be prosecuted. But the level of violence in Gaza is something that has not been seen in a long time, there is a huge asymmetry between the forces. There is no shortage of voices from Israelis like academic Omer Bartov, a Holocaust historian, who say that everything points in the direction of a genocide. I am cautious when it comes to giving a legal definition.”
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