Interview... Shmavon Azatyan
In May, 2017 we were able to interview Shmavon Azatyan and obtained the following three answers that help us understand what his main beliefs are.
Shmavon Azatyan was born in 1976, Yerevan, Armenia. He got his Diploma in English Language and Foreign Literatures at Yerevan State University (1993-1998).
What's your main motivation to write?
It is a natural feeling, or a desire. I haven't been taught or told to write. I get inspired by people around me, by what they do, think, how they behave and react in different situations. I like expressing my views of human nature in writing.
When and how did you feel the first impulse to write?
After I fell in love as a teenager. At that time I wrote poems. And then at an older age, I felt the desire to write fiction after I read John Updike and William Faulkner.
Do you think a writer separates life experiences from his/her writing?
A writer can separate these experiences, but it depends on what the writer wants to do with the piece in question. It also depends on what the writer writes about. I get inspired by a real-life figure and write a short story about his/her life. In this case I don't add or add very little from my lfie experiences. But I may be tempted to write about something that I was once involved in - in this case my life experience may form the basis of the piece.
Do you think that your writing helps nature conservation?
My poems about nature can. Most of my poems, in general, contain elements of nature. Some of them celebrate nature. It's hard to say if these works will inspire people to care for conservation of nature, but I hope that they will do so.
Shmavon Azatyan, 25 May, 2017
Here we present three of Shmavon Azatyan’s poems: “My Island”, winner of the International Literary Contest Nature 2015; and “Blushes” and “The Snowflake” (included in the poetry book “Rainbow Flavours and Other Scents” published in 2016). First, we can have a careful look into “My Island”.
MY ISLAND by Shmavon Azatyan (1976 - )
You are the heavenly island
I swim to
to be harbored
from the gloating of all world.
The sea is cold,
day is gloomy,
I’m numb -
my feelings turn frigid.
Yet you
have power on my heart.
I toil to you;
the autumn day sinks
beyond the high waters -
life draws away,
and the jump of
the blindfold lightening
speckles my anticipation.
And then the predisposition
I divine
in your manner
loses its advantage.
The time
we at last come to speech
the island has gone.
In between you and I
seas lie laden with somber skies;
only the anonymous topography
we’ve both cared to observe
is what can lead us
to one another.
Source: http://talesforlove.blogs.sapo.pt/first-place-of-the-first-international-46381
This poem seems to start with a hidden metaphor when the poet says “you are the heavenly island I swim to.” In fact, a person is compared to an island that can only exist in the imagination of the poet. Nevertheless, dispite the distance, the speaker must find that island regardless of nature’s odds - the cold sea, that can be compared with the cooless arising from the geographic distance between two people who love each other. Additionally, the anonymous topography is the unique bridge that can be able to get those lovers together. There is a very strong melancholy enfolded with hope in a better future, even if, when the lovers both get to speak together - the island has gone. As the poem advnaces, the speaker becomes a real person, and the island a non-existent object, because if the lovers are united nothing can separate them. Reality overcomes the imagination created by the speaker’s emotions.
The next poem, “Blushes”, is also a love poem, but the approach is very different. There sesms to be no place for melancholy or distance between lovers. They are there together and happy, hand in hand with the shore lights.
BLUSHES
In the violet twilight
the ocean is tender
ransacking the shore lights
that propound love riddles.
The palms’ rustling kisses
carry on the breeze and
gather between us.
The tipsy cactus harks
to the caballero
thrumming on the guitar;
the russet cheek suitors
delightfully dance with ladies;
the lone swooping jay
courts the dwindling waves,
the unsearchable zephyrs
bring the ripple of awnings.
Beneath the ogle of the horizon bow
the ocean moves and murmurs
about the myriad dreams
happening on the ocean-floor.
Your cherry lips trill out
notes that summon
blushes
from unnamed ports.
Our voices tremble.
The enchanted jay
squeaks,
and then
the word
is spoken:
it surfs the twinkling furbelows
and floats away into the placid hugs
of somnolent waters.
This poem encloses within its limits several references to natural elements, which seem to have human characteristics, for example: the ocean is tender, the palms’ rustling kisses, your cherry lips trill out and the somnolent waters. These references have a poetic objective, but also a social objective to remind people that nature is important, and we should protect her, as she is a part of our bodies. This involvement of nature with poetry in this poem and others give Shmavon’s poems an almost classical touch but, at the same time, an objective as if they were a tool to serve a certain purpose. All this is tied with happiness, because lovers are experiencing placid hugs and sweet kisses (as cherries).
On the contrary, the next poem “The Snowflake” lends us a feeling of reasoning mixed with emotions of astonishement. Lets look into it closely.
THE SNOWFLAKE
When I study a snowflake -
a hexagon with branches and limbs
linked to the centre -
I understand when it really snows in winter.
Each snowflake is unique,
and one of them reminds me of
her –
almond shaped eyes
pushing forward her lyrical nose
that graces her frilly mouth;
her penchant for the funky boots
and rainbow dresses,
from behind which
her vigor to choreograph
thunders.
And I know
why we married choreography with literature,
for it truly snows
only once in a wintertime.
When the poet introduces us his thoughts he mentions “I study a snowflake” and “I understand” - actions that we could associate with formal reasoning and even logic. But this logic takes us to an emotional momentum when he notices that “Each snowflake is unique, and one of them reminds me of her”. We can say that logic is trapped by love in between the thoughts and actions the speaker lives through, because it is a simple action emotionless that leads to a beloved person. Furthermore, “her vigor to choreograph thunders” describes the speaker’s feelings of hidden passion, which are opposite to logic. Nobody can “choreograph thunders”. At the end there is a marriage, between “choreography with literature” something that might explain why “it truly snows only once in a wintertime.” Maybe it is thanks to the fact that our life might be like an almost eternal wintertime where true love (the snow) happens only once in a lifetime.
Enjoy
