For its play with text and genres, its multiple female narrators, and its autobiographical underpinnings, A Book, Untitled, by Shushan Avagyan and its translator Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, might best be considered a thought experiment along the lines of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. While recalling the metafictional tendencies of much Western postmodern fiction, it also evokes a host of assertive female voices—Can Xue, Bhanu Kapil, Ghada al-Samman and even Shelley Jackson, whose hypertext Patchwork Girl dramatized the creation of a whole from disconnected textual parts. In A Book, Untitled, the categories typically associated with books, literary work, criticism, translation, and the multiplicity of literary genres are held up for examination. The experiments might be read as mere linguistic fun and games, if there wasn’t so much atrocity buried in the background. 

The 2006 edition, published in Eastern Armenian, had this as its basic situation: the narrator, Shushan, and a friend, Lara Aharonian, have been researching two early twentieth-century Armenian writers, Shushanik Kurghinian (1876-1927) and Zabel Yesayan (1878-1943). Each has been dismissed and largely forgotten or ignored. Although the two women apparently never met, the narrator imagines a 1926 meeting between them.

What follows is a novella, of twenty-six and a half chapters, consisting of an assemblage of encounters of real and fictional people and texts. Many of the encounters only marginally address either of the two writers, and there is little by way of establishing or describing time, space, bodies, and other physicalities. But textual encounters—with Woolf, Tolstoy, Benjamin, Brontë, and other familiar figures—abound. Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam are brazenly claimed. Postcards and letters are included (some delivered, others not); among them is one to Avagyan from a contemporary literary critic and scholar who details, over several pages, the importance of her work on and translations into English of Kurghinian’s poetry, some of which she’s included in the novel, as well as his own observations of both Kurghinian’s and Yesayan’s lives and times.

For Shushan and Lara, the story is in part one of finding information about Kurghinian and Yesayan. The translator offers one specific incident: “The book is based on a scandal. To be more precise, it’s based on one unpleasant incident that took place in a museum, when an original letter disappeared due to the carelessness of one employee.” Shushan and Lara have access to Kurghinian’s unpublished autobiography and Yesayan’s memoir, as well as their novels, stories, poetry, and articles. Even so, much is left to Shushan’s imagination. Shushan imagines Yesayan under a series of interrogations for her work reporting, among other things, the Armenian genocide and the sufferings of refugees. The interrogators move slowly to a critical appreciation of her writing to, in one case, his growing attractions to the woman herself. The effects of such “appreciations” and “attractions” help the interrogators objectify the woman, her work, and the threats her feminist ideology poses to them. As with Yesayan, Kurghinian is vested in the rights of women and in socio-political revolution, partly through her own, feminist claims on language. Avagyan gives Kurghinian her due by drawing lines from her poems to use as titles for the majority of her chapters. That said, A Book, Untitled is hardly biography. Linguistic portraiture, perhaps. The real struggle for Avagyan is that of any collagist: the selection and arrangement of her materials.

As much as A Book, Untitled is a thought experiment in the abstract, it is also an experiment performed, or, rather, scripted for performance. The translator identifies four narratives associated with the book’s four main characters, and these narratives emerge out of their speaking voices and texts. Imagining those voices would help highlight interactions within and among the twenty-six and a half chapters, as well the underlying rhythms to the work. 

Into that multivocal performance, there is translator Deanna Cacholian-Schanz’s own performance of her theory of translation as deviance. She openly inserts herself into the novel, though she does not always appear as clearly as the other characters. How might her voice might be enacted as she intrudes by inserting herself as a new character? How might she represent what she has omitted or rearranged? One explicit example is in a chapter about a chapter that is out of sync with the others, in which all four authors and the translator weigh in about the chapter itself.

In addition to translating the text, Cachoian-Schanz surrounds the novel with her own writing, making A Book, Untitled something of a critical edition. There is the opening introduction: “A Note on Book and Its Historical Protagonists.” The section entitled “Chapter Guides” works as end notes, but largely attends to the voices/textual performances. Her lengthy “Translator’s Afterword: Deviations” provides her own biography and develops her theoretical position. Oddly, this is followed by a “Notes to Translator’s Afterword.”

A Book in this case means a writer, a reader, a language, a translation, a form, genres, fundamental distinctions among poetry, prose, fiction, autobiography, literary criticism, and more pragmatic and “official” genres like interrogations. One exercise is sussing them all out.

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Shushan Avagyan is the author of the novels Girq-anvernagir (A Book, Untitled, 2006) and Zarubyani kanayq (2014). She has translated into English a volume of Shushanik Kurghinian’s poetry, and critical works by Boris Arvatov and Viktor Shklovsky. She currently lives in Yerevan and teaches at the American University of Armenia.

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Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is a translator and literary theorist who writes on translation, gender and nationalism, and technologies of race in the geographies of Armenia, Turkey, and their diasporas. She is living in Istanbul as she completes her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. 

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Rick Henry has lived across the United States but usually returns to the sensibilities, landscapes, and histories of upstate New York. There are slippages. Most recently, “The Other Daughters,” an audio production of a performance poem featuring 117 contributing voices. Find him at www.rickhenry.net.