by Dan Caragea

Niram Art Website

If  my memory doesn’t fail me, I do not know, in all art history, of an artist in whose genesis did not lay the fertile kernel of another artist, like seed of inspiration and interior aesthetical blossom. The beginning of any creator is partly epigonic, partly a gesture of breaking away from his  teacher.  One cannot renew anything without having experienced the nuisance of “the exercises of admiration” and whoever thinks otherwise is either blind or lying to himself.

Mara Athanasios’ universe of ideas originates from Romeo Niram’s Humanography. She  assumes this openly as two of her photographies are proposed as explicit links to the painter’s work. Apart from these “replicas”, she opens a door in which the feminine mystery, the   accentuated shadows, the lingerie, the hidden face, the intimacy closed in ephemeral gestures, the black and the red, the photographic instance are elements that allow us comparative   reflections.

Firstly, let us take a closer look at what inevitably separates them. I would say that, definitely, the sexuality of the way they look at women. The feminine body has been, in art, a creation of manhood. In modern times, the artists who tackled the most dazzling artistic theme (I would call it an arch-theme) had to answer to many cultural, aesthetical, psychological demands altogether. As there are no ingenuity and neither naturalism in modern times, the artist premeditated on what he would choose to hide and to reveal, the seduction and the limitations of decency, the canon and the anti-canon, the intimacy and the psychological conventions of his times.

A woman’s view of the feminine body (a perfect metaphor for the mirror) is recent and maybe this is why it deserves to be dwelt upon. Mara Athanasios chooses 2 models (one of them being a “self-model”) who ingeniously melt  into a unique vision: the young, almost teen-like body, and the skin of the colour of ripe whey, mostly exposing the back, shoulders, arms and knees. Other times, we see bendings of “The Wisdom of the Earth” in which the body folds   itself, in a fetal manner, towards the center. Her bodies, often dynamic, reveal themselves like a promise outside of the space of the photographic instance. Why is that?

I think there is a deliberate desire to avoid revealing too much, something that has   become so abundant in our days.  The collective imaginary is confronted today with a proliferation of the nude, from the anorexic bodies on the catwalks to the models who publicize, in a game of seductive   transactions, cosmetic   products and perfumes, to the silicon-injected ones who   saturate the media with erotic exposures and up to pornography. The myth of feminine beauty as a target of the masculine desire is today dispersed, anti-canonic and profoundly sexualized. This is why I think that the  message of the exhibition is the rejection of this universe of objectual and exciting transformation of the body. Mara Athanasios gives back to us the tenderness of the naturalist view, of juvenile harmony, of the sublimation of desire into aesthetic pleasure.

“There is music in the air, it surrounds us, the world builds itself upon it, every one of us can get what one wants from it.” Edward Elgar

When we look at Baruch Elron’s paintings it feels like getting on a journey. A time travel to distant shores, and even, maybe, a journey toward the depths of the human soul.The present exhibition concentrates on two important subjects in Elron’s works: time and music. Two themes of rather important symbolic value in surrealist art, which most of Elron’s creations belong to. Why then does Elron belong to surrealism? In principle, because he paints, with refined realism and impressive craftsmanship, characters, objects and nature scenes which seem perfectly real, instead the connections and relationships he is setting create a new world, a fantastic, enigmatic one, a world that raises questions about our being here and now.

When Andre Breton defined the surrealist movement (in the Surrealist manifesto), he required from art ”pure psychic automatism” by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. ”Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations”. Everything making us believe that there is a certain spiritual point where life and death, reality and imagination, past and future, the high and the down, all these cease to be perceived as contradictory.

Surrealists like Elron have insisted on rendering such ”self representations” as most accurate descriptions, at the same time taking them out of their normal media and relationships.

In more than a few works, Elron employs time as a subject. Thus, he clearly gets closer to surrealist artists from the beginning of the 20th century, especially Salvador Dali, who has been trying to represent time as a fluid concept, evading control.

One of the most impressive paintings by Baruch Elron, with time as the main theme, is ”All is in his hands”, from 1995. The painting depicts a character, dressed in brilliant red, half imersed in the sea, the same infinite space whose limit we cannot perceive. The source in the shape of a circle appears to simbolize the time cycle, or maybe the clock itself, made up of several watches floating along inside of air bubbles. Among the flying watches: a bird, as a symbol of the soul, a fish, as a symbol of sacrifice, the abyss – meaning the end but also a (new) beginning.

Elron used to paint his characters in images that are his own reflexion. Maybe even here he alludes to the same identity? The character is positioned within a glowing aura, resembling the sun. Looks like Elron, who was ill for a long period of time, feels as if he had been leaving in the netherworld. Time is following him, and, like a magician, helps him to preserve his balance. The balance of the biological time, at least.

No doubt that this chapter in his life is connected to a subject very meaningful in the history of art – ”vanitas”, the vacuum of the human existence, our ’from dust we came and to dust we shall return’. Likewise, in the works where he creates connections between musical instruments, Elron does not for a moment leave out the human being as a character, or the metaphoric expression of the human condition. Elron paints celloes, double basses, trumpets, even violins. He anthropomorphises each and every musical instrument and turns it into a breathing human body. Generally a woman’s body, but not always. Instruments as the cello or the double bass (the viola as representation for the woman body is not a novelty in the art world) looks like they are perfect for it – the body of any musical instrument with long cords suits the warmth of the womanly body, only that the paintings suddenly invent quite surprising connections. For example, in the painting ”I” (2003), where the double bass is ”dressed” in a long, decent dress, the head covered with a delicate veil. The lady is seated in an imaginary scenery and looks like she would be playing her own body.

The relationship woman-musical instrument is clear in most works, but even here Elron tricks us, because we do not know which is the dominant figure – the woman or the instrument.

The metal blowing instruments gather some new forms, always in connection with the hands. A hand takes hold of the instrument; the other hand holds the trumpet like a flag; in the painting ”Musical notes”, a hand, exiting a trumpet, carefully writes musical notes. In these works, Elron connects music with the muse of artistic creation, and expresses his love for art by underlying the importance of music for the human life in general, and particularly for his life.

In the painting „Untitled” from 1926 he creates a male being on the stave. In yet another work he associates an impressive male torso with the biggest instrument in an orchestra, the drums.

Writer Nathan Shaham once said that when we are listening to music, we are in fact listening to ourselves. It is only fair to assume that many of Elron’s creations with this subject could be connected with this remark.

The relationship between works structured on time and on music subjects is a most demanding, heavy connection – in all the paintings featuring musical instruments time is difficult to appraise. It is as if here, in creations dealing with time and the atemporal, everything floats between sky and earth, our existence included.

In the last series of paintings before his death (one work has remained orphaned, unfinished) he returns to the theme of time. The main characters are beautiful women surrounded by various clock forms, especially sandglasses – under each of these women, variants of the old Latin dicta about the passage of time: time flies, time destroys everything. There lingers here the ideea of ”vanitas” as well; no doubt because he was then so deeply concerned by the frailty and ephemerity of time. Surprising it is still the fact that he chooses to illustrate this idea by means of a woman’s tears. His most powerful work in the series is that of a woman painting. Besides her, an imaginary bird with brilliant blue plumage (the fact that the bird is a symbol of the human soul is not to be forgotten), and on the background a fantastic, un-earthly landscape. On the table next to the woman painter the following is written: ”art is long, life is short”, while on the colours box Elron ironically puts his name. It is this painting that sets to clarify, beyond any need for words, the artist’s attitude to his life and art.

Through both themes, time and music, Baruch Elron is sending us in a kind of an adventure – a spiritual adventure, indeed towards the depths of our souls.

From: Niram Art Israel

por Héctor Martínez Sanz

Niram Art Website

The Project “Homo Urbanus Europeanus” (HUE) is the fruit of 3 years of work and has already been exhibited in 31 European capitals. His author, the photographic artist Jean Marc Caracci, has covered the urban places of the European man in the same way that an archeologist searches for, digs up and tries to reconstruct the primitive spaces of the first humanoids. Nevertheless, neither vessels, spear heads nor rupestrian paintings are brought to light – maybe some graffiti and street painting – but spaces which are still present in front of the lens and of the human eye. This regards the “homo sapiens” who lives in geometrical spaces formed by rectilinear lines, parallels and angles which transform themselves into lights and shadows that may afterwards recreate them. This regards us, the Europeans.

The photographies are in black and white, shades that are adequate to the urbanscape which we are accustomed with (steel constructions, sidewalks, façades) and do not allow us to get distracted by colors. Thus, we contemplate the man who walks within his natural habitat steadily and self-confidently, surrounded by the verticality of the arquitectonic structures, may be a metaphor of the biped pedestal of the man. There is also a clear poetic emphasis when choosing the black and white. We are not in front of the great natural landscapes which the man has already distanciated himself from, but in front of landscapes which suit a new man on the evolution scale, a new human being who has had the intelligence to create his own universe, for his personal and collective use. Jean Marc Carraci shows us the personal and individual view of a child who is playing in a Commercial Centre of Berlin, of a man who is waiting for somebody at a street corner in Helsinki, or another one standing on the Vasco de Gama Bridge in Lisbon…

Loneliness? Jean-Marc Caracci denies it, there is nothing here to suggest the urban solitude that has been so many times expressed. On the contrary, the man who appears alone in every shot does not feel lonely, is not out of place, he travels from here to there, moves naturally, feeling the city as the refuge once offered to man by the ancient cavern. The city surrounds him like a cloak, works as a frame for him – as in Athens II, Stockholm I or Sofia II -, reflects him – as in Luxemburg II, or Ljubljana-, or even threatens him – like in London I. Man and city melt together. According to Jean Marc Caracci, there is no contradiction between them, and the artist does not seek the ordinary “against nature” message. It also differentiates itself from another line of urban photography, centered upon the human mass as principal element, like the epicenter of a city. In HUE we have the basic defining elements of an urban photography: it is sufficient for this to have a person, a building, and crossroads. Jean Marc Caracci plays with these elements until he succeeds in making the light of Madrid I or Vienna II for instance to act as a focus on the human protagonist and the building behind him while shadows sustain and protect them.

Nevertheless, there are several works that go further and deeper into a more symbolic field, or, at least, into a more hermeneutical space. I am talking for instance about Athens I where the human character proceeds on the marked path and does not shorten his way using the middle short cut. It is normal. All of us would chose the stoned road, especially in a well cared for garden. However the perspective of this photography could suggest this new attitude of the urban man, who chooses to walk down the firm road of civilization and does not take risks and launch himself headlong. It is the educated attitude of not walking on the grass, or, to put it simply, of the man who does not want to stain his shoes. It is not criticism. I say it once more. This is about us, the Europeans. The façades may smile to us – Vilnius II – creating beautiful effects of symmetry; we can find enormous barcodes – Luxemburg –which contrast the horizontal lines of the pedestrian’s shirt, or the optical effects of the passers-by who seem to be walking on the border of a litter bin – Stockholm- .

We quickly discover a great deal of effort put in creating symmetrical balance – Reykjavik II- in places where the cuboid and trapezoidal forms are predominant – Madrid II or Oslo I, thus counterbalancing the elements and creating harmony. Each image is carefully thought of and prepared in a way similar to dramaturgic scenography or the cinematographic take in which the movement is implied by the presence of persons whose walking we can prolong in a natural manner. The general quick shot is dominant in the series, suitable for emphasizing the human figure without losing its background, that is to emphasize the human being within the city. This technique, together with the usage of neutral angulations and low angle shots as alternatives, signifies more rhetoric and puts an emphasis on the importance of the chosen theme.

To sum up, what Jean Marc Caracci brings us is documental photography in which he pursues and makes the most of subtle aesthetic touches that the photographic medium offers in terms of light, shadows and geometry. Thus he is very similar to a pioneer of this anti-pictorial tendency of the photography, Paul Strand, who advised: “First of all you have to take a good look at the things around you, your immediate surroundings. If you are alive then this may mean something to you, and if you have sufficient interest in photography and know how to use it, you will want to photograph this very meaning.” (Paul Strand, Letter to Students of Photography, 1923)

by Héctor Martínez Sanz

In 2000, Eran Eisen published his book of poems Between Us, a biographical versified essay on romantic experiences. I read several of these poems in Niram Art magazine (Nº15-16), 9 years after their publication. More than ever, I found precision of the expression and of the use of language. Eran Eisen exemplifies with his poetry the constant battle of the poem with the word, the struggle between emotion and reason. And it is not casual, as one is about to discover.

Eran Eisen is a genuine strategist of writing. In Present You, his business website, I found a text entitled “Business Writing”, in which he pedagogically instructs us on the use of the expression and language and their consequences on our objectives. This is where one understands that writing can be a powerful tool when properly mastered.

One of the consequences of the writing capabilities is to express the genuine sense of will, at 100%.

Indeed, will is nothing more than impulse and intention, and it is necessary to know how to express its meaning by means of language. Will is “to want something”, but, as I used to say, this does not imply “power” just because we want it to. We must therefore be ready to give, too, when necessary. When we introduce ourselves, the language becomes essential, and this is even more important when the introduction is done in writing. But, how does one express the sense of will?

We should “feel” the written words by means of three values: direction, strength and sense and put them in the correct order.

Not every word may serve for this purpose, because each word has its own peculiarity. The order is also of importance because we can alter what our will confines. It is fundamental that in our writing the values of the words complement each other, without annulling each other, that direction, strength and sense support each other from word to word. The direction allows us to expand and contract the meaning within the words by means of positive and negative loads. The strength is the force of the word, a force that we need to know how to balance and moderate in order not to provoke disproportions in the text and not to hinder our expansion by being too aggressive. To draw to a close, the sense or the meaning is the identity of the word with its semantics, root and origin; these are vital to know to ensure that the message can be successfully conveyed, without any room for doubts, bearing in mind that the order of the words may alter their meaning.

When such balance is present in the text, we endow it with precision, clarity, legibility and shortness. A lazy writing is of no interest, neither is losing ourselves in the word, we do not want it to be difficult to read or to extend it more than necessary. We make ourselves appropriate to our receptor. We give away a piece of information about ourselves and it should reach the public in a straightforward and simple manner, without semantic, syntactical or morphological interferences, errors or difficulties. Our purpose is to be objective.

Hence, I followed the practical advice of Business Writing (which, as a language professor, I was familiar with) and I used them as lens to take a look at the poems in the book “Between Us” where a poetic “I” introduced itself. The result of the experiment was clarifying in showing the style in which Eran Eisen writes poetry.

The first aspect that caught my attention was the absence of adjectives and the strong presence of verbs and pronouns. Whoever is familiar with the futuristic manifestos -among which, The Manifesto for Literature, – may know that it was precisely in this manner that they employed their destructive aesthetics on the syntax. In Eisen’s poems, the syntax disappears, because it is the word itself that carries within it that direction, strength and sense. The same happens to the verbs that are indicators of action, state and process. We can see it, for instance in

Waking up:

When I left

You were sleeping

When I walked

You were dreaming

When I came home

You woke up

Inside me

It gets even more visible in the poem Passion:

To turn

To crush

To torn

To bite

To control

You give

Likewise, we can found similar aspects in the poems The Doormen and San Francisco. On the contrary, in the poems dedicated to New York, the verbs are the ones that disappear. In these poems, all the stress falls upon the substantives whose task is to weave the image as if it were a nucleus and envelop it only by verse.

Nevertheless, together with the precision and clarity obtained by giving the leading role to one or to the other grammatical category, we notice the shortness of the verse and of the poem. The lines become direct darts, without twists, without windings where to get lost.

If we take a separate look at each of the poems, new characteristics emerge, unseen by the reader at this point. I am talking about the effort put in the rhythm built on parallelisms and recurrences, as we can see in the previously cited Waking Up. Continuous paradoxical counter positions are also emphasized, with the precise use of the conjunction. Let us take a look at the poem San Francisco:

Sitting

Angry

In San Francisco

Ten hours

From touching

You

and Messages where the suspension marks and the counter position break in and give the idea of the passing of the time between 2 lines and with 3 simple words, the poem Where are you:

Calling you

There is no answer

Screaming your name

Silence

Where are you?

What are you doing?

Are you close,

Or far away?

where the tension is maintained in harmony until finishing up with answered questions, The Doormen:

They open

They close

They invite

They smile

They keep

Day and night

The secrets!

and last but not least New York.

The poems New York and Night in New York made me very curious. In the first one, together with the previously cited counter position, we find ourselves in front of an interpretational ambiguity. Let us see it in full:

Restless rain

Yellow controls traffic

Walk….don’t walk…

Second Avenue

Uptown coffee

In the corner

People in movement

With an umbrella

Every reader’s questions: “who is in the centre of the city and who in a corner? The coffee or the persons in movement? In this case we notice that the order of the words is fundamental: we rapidly understand that the persons in movement are in the centre of the city, and that the café is drunk in a corner, where the movement is impossible. However, the coffee, the persons in movement, the city centre and the corner must happen simultaneously and this simultaneity is magnificently expressed without more words, just by altering the order of the current and necessary ones.

Likewise, it is enough, in Night in New York, to pay attention to the order of the elements in order to sense the downward action by following a logical line:

East

And

West

Fifteenth floor

Fifth Avenue

Night

Morning

Tooth Brush

Sun

Yellow Cab

To the first

Avenue

We descend from the fifteenth floor to the street, from the fifth to the first avenue, we travel from East to West, we pass from night to morning, we descend from the sun to the typical yellow painted taxi. We feel the action and the movement without verbs, with the presence of only one adjective, which in New York is also an epithet. All that remains – only names. Nevertheless, we are able to reconstruct the narrative of a man who lives on the fifth floor on the fifth avenue in New York, who passed the night without sleeping and who showers in the morning and brushes his teeth when the sun is already at the horizon, and moments later he takes a cab towards the first avenue. Isn’t Eran Eisen precise and exact? Is it by magic that we are able to understand all this without any verbs? It is enough to read “night” to know that he did not sleep, simply because it names it. Nobody calls the night by its name unless he did not sleep well. Maybe he didn’t get a good sleep because of other things but the poet isn’t interested in sharing them with us. The theme is the daily routine. The message is direct, accurate, short, clear…and it reaches everybody..lyrically.

Poetry is not Business Writing…or is it? The poet portrays himself. And if Ortega y Gasset proclaimed that the objective of a philosopher was not to write badly, so that he couldn’t be understood, we can also say that making himself obscure is definitely not the aim of a poet. Eran Eisen wants to be understood. The poet should not make things difficult by excessive and baroque decorations, by horror vacui, exaggerations in the name of aestheticism. What is fundamental is to communicate, because the language, oral or written, is for Eran Eisen, communication between him and the other. Showing oneself is courage, the literary value lies in revealing oneself and not hiding behind intricate usage of the language. Eran Eisen comes “between us” by means of his word.

Poems translated into English from Hebrew by Eran Eisen

English version of the text by Eva Defeses

Baruch Elron existed so that he could live close to us. Life helped him to realize that the natural order of the things represents a challenge with a view to discovering the opposites, giving birth to the concept called „the natural disorder of the things”. According to Baruch Elron the color could be „read” as if it stood for a declaration of the onlookers’ rights.

It entitles him to promulgate the barbarous associations of the bright, raw, violent colors smoothed only by the movement of the lines towards the voluptuousness of the shapes and the combination of the real with the fantastic. Flying hands, bottles with breasts, pears with bikini, bullet-shaped egg etc.

Baruch Elron’s world is not ours. Actually, it gathers all the possible worlds into a single one, especially the impossible ones. Imagination that upholds this adventure of shape and color is in fact the breath that keeps us alive.

Baruch Elron does not look around him in order to paint what he can see, he owns that incredible force of preserving in his mind everything that belongs to this world, to create parallel worlds, worlds dedicated not only to shapes, but especially to emotions. Therefore, the trees have legs and try to make visible the wind that moves them on the rhythm of the dance or take part in the erotic scenes of the Nature. Being metamorphosed into young men and women hungry for love, the instruments come to life, offering the onlooker the image of the winged palm and of the handed leg, playing the cello, or the image of a hand writing its score and emerging from a winged trombone. We can still admire a file of trumpets walking on the fingers that come out of them, while through their mouth pipes a furnace smoke turns up, thus giving a reason for movement. This painting cannot be otherwise than unique, as long as Baruch Elron existed only once for ever.

We meet fish everywhere, either squeezed through the branches of the trees, or hanging by the necklace of some voluptuous women with breasts as free as the leaves painted while inevitably falling down. Candles also represent a well-studied theme. They borrow the faces of the old men for whom decomposition seems natural by the time the flame melts the wax and deposits it in layers, thus suggesting the white hair of the old age or the knotty fingers that can also be used as feet for a round-shouldered body.

Fish, clocks, flowers, sandglasses, egg, woman, birds, trees, musical instruments, biblical scenes narrated by means of the 20th century, beaked, footed and winged eyes, winged hands, candles burning within the shells of some broken eggs, coupled swans. In a visibly erotic dance with the woman of his dreams there are the bricks on which he builds his own world, a world offered to us as a refuge, as an extra chance to protect ourselves from what we do not like, from events that we do not want to happen.

Baruch Elron, through his motifs, tries and even succeeds in having a good command of a series of concepts such as time and space, imposing on us, the onlookers, new manners and a new way of assimilating a reality that, even if it does not have to do with that reality to which we are considered to be contributors, all it can do is to use it as a reference system.

Thus, one discovers a world of Baruch Elron that is impossible in the same degree in which it is real, that is incredible in the same degree in which it seems natural to the people that are willing to accept the real as a direct change of the imaginary.

Surrealism offers Baruch Elron the ground on which he managed to build up his own identity, to make his dream come true in such a way that he was able to produce one of the most touching story of love, life, death, so that nobody may be hurt, so that not even an eye, be it winged as well, may shed tears.

Baruch Elron’s painting is becoming more and more lively, fleshy, dynamic, waving, more and more dominated, managing to create the obsession of the impossible that finally turns into possible. Obviously, this time, with other means that those used by the uninspired governments for instance.

They may show you who you really are

The fact that an artist like the Spanish photographer MIEDHO would have been burnt at the steak in the glorious times of the Spanish Inquisition is enough to make me curious about his works. The fact that in 2010 an artist like MIEDHO still faces a negative reaction from the public because of his “dark”, “gothic” works is troubling. Haven’t we been able yet to see through the stereotypes? Haven’t we learned that art should be loved for art’s sake and that the purpose of art is art itself?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, indeed. For I see true Beauty in the photographies of this young Spanish artist who breaks all rules but the artistic ones. MIEDHO’s photographies show an ellaborate research work, a solid pictorial knolwedge as well as a bewildering sense of creating beauty by mixing colours and textures.

MIEDHO is a revealer, not a manipulator. He doesn’t state his creed abruptly and bluntly, he doesn’t tell us what we should see in his pictures. He invites us to follow him on the intricate and profound path of depthness, soul-search and loneliness. Do you dare follow him? If so, you are in for a surprise. Those who tried to venture on the path that MIEDHO proposes found at the end of the journey, after having been put to all shorts of tests to prove their faithfulness to their own selves, their true nature, a huge, misty mirror, with gold and silver embroidered edges. With bewildered eyes they managed to look into the mirror. The image kept on changing with each breath of wind, blast of air, glow of fire or handful of earth. Beautiful women enchant the visitors with their long hair and aetherical eyes. Haunting images of dark demons appear from time to time in the misty reflection. The courageous visitors are afraid to look deeper. They are overcome with fear. Fear to see the image hiding behind the beautiful, poetic faces, an image stronger even than the demonical faces. Many of the visitors run away.

Those who stayed and searched in the reflection of MIEDHO’s mirror found themselves. MIEDHO’s gift to his courageous visitors: freedom from themselves – freedom from fears, freedom from infectious mediocrity and vulgar stereotypes. MIEDHO shocks and bewilders you, shows you beauty and ugliness, courage and fear, pleasure and disgust, love and hate, all the primary emotions that a man always encounters in life. The ones he always wants to avoid because they are the ones that define him as a human being. The ones that he always makes up excuses for. MIEDHO offers the shivering reality of seeing yourself for the first time and the harsh epiphany of grasping in one breath the nakedness of the soul, truthfulness of the heart and boldness of the mind. That is, nothing that your friends may like.

Do you dare enter MIEDHO’s artistic realm? You have been warned. For better or for worse, you will return a changed man.

Excerpt from

THE STORY OF YUSUF

Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

The Book of Whispers begins in a picturesque register, on a lane of the Armenian quarter of Focşani in the 1950s, among the steam of freshly roasted coffee and the scents of grandmother Armenuhi’s larder, among the old books and photographs of grandfather Garabet. But the reader is not left to savour the intimacy of this hearth and home and nor is he invited to chat with the merry folk who in peacetime spin stories about Ara the Fair and Tigran the Great. Varujan Vosganian’s “old Armenians from childhood” have no delectable tales to tell, but rather events that are thoroughly disturbing. In narrating these events, they attempt to disburden themselves of a trauma – their own and that of their forbears.

The history of the 1915 genocide against the Armenians, the history of the interminable convoys of those banished into the Circles of Death, into the Deir ez Zor Desert, the secret history of Armenian freemasonry in Romania, of General Dro’s army, the history of the Armenians who followed the path of exile in the Stalinist period – all these and many other biographically filtered histories are to be found illustrated in the pages of this unsettling book.

In The Book of Whispers there are no imaginary characters, since they have all existed in this world, in their own place and time and with their own name. There is one character alone that might seem imaginary given that his existence gradually transforms The Book of Whispers into a self replicating reality, like two parallel mirrors. I often write about the storyteller of The Book of Whispers. In my tale, the storyteller tells of The Book of Whispers. And in the telling of this new book, there appears once more the storyteller who tells the tale. He tells of the storyteller and his story. If the order were reversed and we arrived at the final storyteller, the one who does not possess the weakness of describing himself, and if we were to move from his direction toward me, then we would have the dream, then the dream in the dream, and so on. In this way, however, writing about the one who writes, while he in his turn bends over the manuscript in which there is also a character named the author and writes, it is as if we were gradually going deeper, like those toys made of hollowed wood, the matryoshka dolls that old man Musaian brought back from Siberia, losing count of the years and forgetting that in the meanwhile his son, Arachel, was already old enough to be drafted into the army.

Among so many real life characters, some names you will find in the history books, others you will find only in The Book of Whispers. Although it more often than not tells of the past, it is not a history book, for the history books above all tell of the victors. Rather, it is a collection of psalms, for it tells of the vanquished in particular. And among the characters of the book there is also one who did not exist, but in spite of this fact or precisely because of it, he too bears a name : his name is Yusuf. This Yusuf was nothing more than a borrowed name and exists in The Book of Whispers only due to the fact that, in spite of not being part of the Book’s fabric, he is nonetheless the key that opens the door to the room of the most lamented chamber of the liminal era, with bare walls scored by fingernails, with buckling floorboards and earth heaped haphazardly in mounds, as is the case with graves dugs in haste. And the graves dug with the greatest haste are mass graves.

The living and the dead belong to the Heavens and the Earth. Only the dying wholly belong to Death. Death walks among them tenderly and she takes care not to break off the state of dying too quickly. It is her fresh rice. The state of dying is an initiation into Death. From Mamura to Deir ez Zor, for a distance of more than one hundred and eighty miles, an entire nation traversed the seven circles, which is to say the road of initiation into Death. It was at the end of this road that Sahag Sheitanian met Yusuf.

MAMURA. THE FIRST CIRCLE. The road runs straight, for the length of the railway line. The entry into the first circle, that of the convoys that had gathered the Armenians from the most various places, from European Anatolia, Smyrna, Izmid and Adrianopolis, or from the vilayets of Eastern Anatolia, from Trebizond, Erzerum or Kharput, was made on foot. Seen from afar, as they walked huddled together, their heads bowed, they looked like pilgrims. Except that pilgrims are driven by their faith, not by soldiers who thrust them from behind, butting them with their horses’ muzzles or herding the stragglers back into the convoy with blows of the whip. Sahag Sheitanian’s family was made up of five persons : the grandmother, the parents, himself and his younger sister. The other two, older children, Simon and Haigui, had been sent clandestinely to Constantinople. His mother, Hermine, was a fiery woman. She was still steady on her feet. She held her arms around the children and kept a straight path, in the middle of the convoy, to shield them from the horses’ hooves. And to shield them from the sight of the corpses rent by the crows at the edge of the road. They had some money. Rupen, the father, kept it hidden under his shirt. With a part of the money, they had been able to pay for a kind of ticket, or rather they had bought the goodwill of the stationmaster in Izmid, and they had boarded the train that crossed the Eşchişer Konya Bizanti Adana line, as far as half way to Mamura, where the train stopped, at the orders of the Army, which had barred the railway line. But even if the journey, crossing rocky wastes and the scorching plain, would have been exhausting, the train stopping saved their lives, for there was no room in the cattle trucks in which they were crammed, their food had run out, and no one had given them water. The dead that had remained in the cattle trucks were those who had barely breathed their last, for all those who died on the way had been thrown from the train onto the embankments.

Thus they were fortunate twice over. Firstly, because they had not had to travel for hundreds of miles on foot. And secondly, because they had been released from the cattle trucks when they were all on the verge of dying of suffocation. But the majority, especially the convoys from the eastern vilayets, did not have such luck. They made the whole journey on foot. Some of them, the wealthier, had managed to get hold of carts and mules. Because of the exhaustion, the cold, the hunger, the robberies and the massacres, of the almost one and a half million people deported half a million died before reaching the edge of the first circle. To which can be added those who nonetheless did arrive, not on their own legs, but rather borne by the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
In September, the nights begin to grow cold, without the scorching heat of the day abating. They were herded onto open ground by the railway station in Mamura. As far as the eyes could see, folk erected makeshift tents from whatever they could – blankets, clothes, sheets. Most of them stood on only four sticks, extending over a surface area of about ten square feet. The faded tent fabric was good against the sun and the rain, but wholly ineffective against the cold. Sahag counted with his eyes so many ramshackle tents that where they came to an end could not be glimpsed. They were situated deliberately at the edge of the town, on the other side of the railway line, because it was easier to guard the boundary of the tracks, and so that no one would dare to go into the town for bread. They still had meagre provisions. They ate in haste and watchfully, under the shadow of their tents, so that they would not be seen by the others around them.
Now and then, scattered groups approached the railway station, but were driven back into the camp. Nevertheless, the soldiers ceased to threaten them in the end, allowing them to see to their business. For this time they were those who, going from tent to tent, helped those inside to carry away their dead. And so as not to leave the dead all alone, they laid them one next to the other. Later, when the dead had multiplied exceedingly, they laid them one on top of another, so that death built mounds that surrounded the camp like watch towers. The animals snuffled because of hunger and the smell of death. These were above all mules, tethered to carts or carrying bundles on their packsaddles. The mules proved to be the sturdier. The horses had died either of thirst or with broken ankles on the mountain paths. The dogs kept apart. They sensed in the eyes of the people the same hunger and harrying. They waited patiently, together with the flocks of crows, for evening to fall.

They slept huddled together, to keep warm. In the daytime, they undressed and hung out their knotted clothes overhead. They had come to an agreement with a betrothed couple from Konya to share their cart, and the men took turns pushing from behind, to help the mule. The woman offered to darn their sheets, better to resist the gusts of wind. She was with her fiancé. They were to have wed, but the wedding guests had died on the road.
Sahag’s mother had two pots in which she collected the rainwater. When the water had almost run out, they wiped their lips with the rags they hung out at night to be moistened by the hoarfrost.
When the host of tents stretched too far, threatening to spill over the railway track, and the number of corpses was so great that the air was thick with the scent of death, the soldiers descended on horseback among the tents and forced a few thousand folk onto the road once more. The tents collapsed under the horses’ hooves, the people were herded to the edge of the field with blows of the whips. When they did not manage to cram their things into their bundles or to pack away their tents, the horsemen made haste to set light to the roofs of dry fabric.
Their turn came at the end of October. Until the next stopping place it was a five hour walk for a hale man, but it took them almost five days.

ISLAHIYE. THE SECOND CIRCLE. The road would lead through the Amanus Mountains, over the crests, then down toward Islahiye, on the banks of a river. When they reached the second circle, the first snows fell. Many were clothed in thin rags and only dust imbibed with sweat thickened their clothes, keeping them warm. They threw the blanket over the mule and for the whole way they wrapped themselves in sheets. They abandoned the cart, which could no longer pass along the narrow paths, and the men carried on their backs as much of the things as they could. When it grew a little warmer, they tore a sheet into strips and tied it to one another, so that they would not lose their footing and slip among the steep drops. It was a clean, mountain path, and clean it remained even after the convoy passed, for those who fell, at the end of their strength, were thrust with blows of the walking stick into the ravine. The old woman rode on the mule, which helped her to endure the journey, in contrast to many others, who died of exhaustion or collapsed dying and tumbled down the rocks. When they reached the plain, the convoy was met by a band of a few dozen armed Kurds. At a signal, the soldiers guarding them blocked the way ahead, leaving the convoy powerless to advance. The people came to a stop, gazing in fear at the horsemen that fell upon them, waving their muskets and sabres. The plateau was narrow, with mountains behind, precipices on either side, and the horsemen before. A scene we know from hundreds of accounts. Abandoned convoys, defenceless, mostly women and children, scattering over the plain, each seeking to escape, without knowing that when you manage to break away from the crowd you become the easiest prey of all for horsemen bent on plunder and slaughter, be they murderers released from the Turkish prisons for that purpose and given weapons, be they Kurds, Chechens or Bedouins. They rarely attacked at random. More often than not they were informed of the convoy’s time and route, and the soldiers had instructions to move aside, leaving them to do their work. Sometimes only to plunder and take the young women, or, as more often happened, to slaughter them to the last man. There was no rule. You could be killed for having money or jewels, or because you had nothing to give them. The best thing was to curl up into a ball or to stretch out and pretend to be dead. If you were lucky enough not to be trampled under the horses’ hooves, you might escape until the horsemen grew weary, having chased moving targets, or until night fell and they went away, whooping and grasping struggling women over their saddles. Behind them they left a plain dotted with corpses, from which those still alive were slowly climbing to their feet, dazed.
The fiancé of the woman they had befriended was also killed. Around his neck he wore a worthless but shiny chain, which a horseman coveted and did not take the trouble to steal from him other than by chopping off his head. They were forced to abandon him there, prey to the wild animals.
Dragging the wounded behind them, it was not until daylight that they reached the plain at Islahiye. On either side of the entrance to the camp there were two mounds of corpses, above all children. They unfolded their tents. The food was almost gone. In the morning, mounted soldiers cut across the plain, tossing loaves of bread at random over the tents. The people swarmed, most grabbing at pieces of bread, fighting for their share. Toward noon, the camp grew quiet. The people crawled under the tents, keeping watch over those who were nearing death.
The soldiers kept their distance, for the oppressive smells of death were not sweet, but sharp, presaging the spread of dysentery. The commandant of the camp called the men that still had strength and ordered them to gather the dead. In those autumn months, at the camp at Islahiye, starvation and dysentery had caused more than sixty thousand deaths, and so the commandant ordered the corpses to be left at the edge of the camp for two or three days, before burial. Left in the wind, the dead dried and shrivelled, taking up less space. In this way, there was more room in the mass graves.
Then, they drew their tents closer together, so that the raiders, especially the Bedouins from the surrounding villages, would not have room to move among them. And they did not fear one another, for none of the deportees stole money or gold, not having any use for them. And the things that might be coveted, flour, sugar or dried meat, had long since run out. At the foot of the walls or among the embankments, the animals sought tufts of grass. Those wracked within by dysentery lay curled up, awaiting death. The others chewed long on the pieces of crumbly bread tossed from the galloping horses.

A miraculous and at the same time terrible thing happened : the snow came. They rushed outside the tents with outstretched palms. They still had enough life in them for the snowflakes to melt in their cupped palms, so that they could lick the drops from between their fingers. Then, when they saw that the snowfall was thickening, they waited for it to settle and licked it from the ground, together with the dogs and mules. Sahag drank his fill more than the others, for he had observed that the snow thickened and persisted above all on the brows of the dead, colder even than the ground

.
But with the snow came a bitter frost that froze the earth, turning the sheets from which the tents were patched together into jagged folds. It cleared the air. The putrefaction of creatures of every kind ceased and the miasmas settled on the ground as hoarfrost. The people huddled together, from many tents gathering beneath the most capacious. And there they managed to scrape together a fire, softening a few chips of wood. They crowded together, even if they managed only to see the dying flame from afar.
And those at the point of death were so emaciated from hunger and scorched by the cold that when they dragged them between the tents, by the arms or legs, their ankle and wrist bones broke, snapping like dry branches.
When the snows melted, the convoys began to form once more. The heavens grew damp and the rain began to fall. The roads were mired in mud. They tied strips of sheets around their feet, otherwise their bare soles would have stuck in the ground and the people no longer had the strength to tear them from the mud. Under the drizzle, that blurred every outline, the new journey lasted almost a week. They could not number the dead, for on this misty road no one could see anything other than the bluish mist of his own breath. The flesh of those who fell, soaked in the rain, was as soft and sticky as clay. They were trodden underfoot by those that came behind and their flesh was churned into black dough and swallowed by the mud of the road. And nor did the rain cease when they arrived.

Varujan Vosganian was born in Craiova on 25 July 1958. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Focşani. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Commerce of the Academy of Economic Studies and of the Faculty of Mathematics of Bucharest University. He is a Doctor of Economics, a founder of the Romanian Society for Economics, an International Adviser to the European Union’s Centre for Political Studies, based in Brussels, and a member of the Young Politicians Club (London). He is the Senator for Jassy and between 2006 and 2008 he was Minister of Finance and the Economy. He is President of the Union of Armenians in Romania and Vice President of the Romanian Writers’ Union. Besides various theoretical works, mainly on economic subjects, he has published three volumes of poetry : Şamanul albastru (The Blue Shaman) (1994), Ochiul alb al reginei (The White Eye of the Queen) (2001), and Iisus cu o mie de braţe (Jesus with a Thousand Arms) (2004). His collection of novellas, Statuia comandorului (The Statue of the Commander) (1994) was awarded the Prize of the Bucharest Writers’ Association. Varujan Vosganian has written more than five hundred articles, studies and essays on economics, politics, and literature, which have been translated in English, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Armenian. The novel The Book of Whispers, published in 2009, was greeted as a revelation by the Romanian critics. It has earned extensive praise and is already regarded as one of the most important books of contemporary Romanian literature

“Cartea soaptelor” (“The Book of Whispers”) by Varujan Vosganian, Poirom, 528 pages

No one expected Varujan Vosganian to write the best novel in Romanian literature. He was, after all, the finance minister of Romania until not very long ago. He is an economist and mathematician by profession, a talented rhetorician, a brilliant intellectual, president of the Armenians Union of Romania and vice president of the Romanian Writers’ Union. Although he has written poetry in the past, this book (which has not been translated as yet into English) is entirely different. From the first page of his first prose work, “The Book of Whispers,” the unbelievable happens and the surprise is clear and powerful: This is a classic, a true literary celebration.

Vosganian’s whispers are truly mesmerizing. Regardless of cultural status or political-literary association, readers bleed with the vanquished, are persecuted and flee with them, and become Armenians like them. How does Vosganian, an Armenian Romanian, succeed in depicting the events and at the same time elevate the reader and deepen his belief in and grasp of humanist values? How does he create speech with universal validity? Without preaching, without pathos and without overwhelming guilt, he lets the facts speak for themselves, at the same time becoming a more reliable and convincing narrator who reveals the incomprehensible. In Vosganian’s depiction of events in the history of the Armenian people, he awakens our own experiences, our pain, our lives – lived at times without shield or armor in the bloody 20th century – our vanquished lives. Vanquished, but surviving and reviving, in order to allow us to declare: We exist, we have survived and now we must also remain human, because of what happened, and despite what happened. “We are not distinguished by what we are, but rather by the dead whom each of us mourns,” says the narrator’s grandfather Garabet from the small town of Focsani in Moldova. Garabet, who claimed that the best taste of all is the taste of wind, and who believed that as long as you live you are immortal, found a similarity between Armenian carpets and the Bible: “You find everything in both of them – from Genesis to our day.” The grandfather had “an almost Kantian” vision of the world: “The roof over your head, the altar before your eyes and the soft carpet beneath your feet.” In truth, “The Book of Whispers” contains another book, consisting entirely of this nonchalant grandfather’s pearls of wisdom, based on his experience: “‘Don’t rush,’ he’d always say. ‘The person who has won is rarely the real victor. History was made by the vanquished, not by the victors. In the end, victory means exiting history’ … Precisely for this reason, grandfather Garabet thought the real heroes who make history are not the generals but rather the poets, and the real battles are not to be sought under the horses’ hooves.” “Victory,” says the other grandfather, Starak, from Craiova, “isn’t the power to spill other people’s blood. Victory is the power to spill your own blood.” Every great writer is first of all a poet, and every fiber of this novel is rich in metaphor. With verbal thrift and precision of language, the novel creates an electrical-emotional tension, as though the reader is taking part in what is happening. When a Russian soldier threatens the narrator’s grandfather and orders him to move away, down the street, the narrator writes: “No one would be able to say what silence is if he has not heard at his back the rustle of a weapon being cocked.” In another place the prison is described as dampness that comes and goes, “And the moment it penetrates your bones you carry it from within.” Perhaps the book succeeds in sinking into the soul because of the richness of the poetic characters, because “the soul cannot think in the absence of an image,” as Aristotle has taught us. ‘Abandoned path’ After recounting his memories from his grandfathers’ homes (we hardly know anything about his parents’ homes), the narrator brings alive the Armenian folk epic, which survives and abounds in open wounds. Nevertheless, he writes, “Every open wound is the start of an abandoned path. To the extent that it heals, you are damaged.” And the dead? “The dead have moved house in the pictures on the shelf.” Or: “The picture became the request for forgiveness by those who in this hasty century left without having time to bid farewell.” Dante, under instructions by Virgil, built in his poet’s imagination the sad spaces of hell. Vosganian guides us through the hell of his people at the start of the 20th century. He reconstructs this hell meticulously, basing it on historical documentation and his own intuition as a poet and writer. The author does not look back in anger. He is there and he takes us with him. It is clear to the reader that, had we been born in another place and another time, we could have been those Armenians. “More important than death is memory,” according to the narrator. “Among the many lives I carry inside myself the most real, like a bouquet of snakes tied at its end, are the lives I have not lived.” Every character in “The Book of Whispers” is a unique and actual case. Vosganian, who is not of that period, could not have lived those lives, but each of the characters he depicts – with his own unique habits, dreams and history – joins the other characters to create a bouquet of people. These are people connected to one another by the ties and tissues of the human catastrophe caused by those who saw the Armenians as a human mass that had to be annihilated. Writes Vosganian: “All the means they used to kill the Armenians on the roads of Anatolia served the Nazis against the Jews, except in the Nazi camps the Jews had numbers on their arms.” It is amazing to find that among the Armenians, too, the generation that survived the genocide, and even its children, did not talk about the horrors in Anatolia. The generation of survivors has died and its memories have been buried with it. Suddenly the third generation has discovered it knows nothing about the slaughter of its family and people. Is this a trauma that lasts a lifetime? Guilt? Shame? David Grossman, who was a guest of honor at the International Literature Festival in Berlin in 2007, devoted a large part of his speech to this phenomenon. Interestingly, he used the word “whispers” in the context of the explanation of why he refused to answer his son’s question, “What did the Nazis do? I did not want to tell him. I, who had grown up within the silence and fragmented whispers that had filled me with so many fears and nightmares, who had written a book about a boy who almost loses his mind because of his parents’ silence, suddenly understood my parents and my friends’ parents who chose to be mute. I felt,” said Grossman, “I felt that if I told him, if I even so much as cautiously alluded to what had happened over there, something in the purity of my 3-year-old son would be polluted; that from the moment such possibilities of cruelty were formulated in his childlike, innocent consciousness, he would never again be the same child. He would no longer be a child at all.” There isn’t a shadow of a doubt that there is a similarity between Grossman’s silence and broken whispers and those depicted in Vosganian’s book. Just as a painter mixes many colors together to obtain a unique hue, “The Book of Whispers” is full of numbers, data, historical facts and literary portraits, bringing us closer and closer to a picture of the reality. An ordinary writer might have failed in this thicket of exact and meticulous detail, or might have surrendered to sentimental, moralizing excess. But Vosganian is not an ordinary writer. He knows how to navigate elegantly and skillfully between Scylla and Charybdis. Riri Sylvia Manor is a poet and president of the Israel-Romania Writers’ Association.

Niram Art Awards

Niram Art Publishing House together with Niram Art Magazine announce the finalization of the Literary Contest (Novel) entitled “Eminescu – as seen by the Spanish” and the Ceremony of the Niram Art Awards 2010.

From all the works about the great poet Mihai Eminescu that were submitted to the contest, the jury selected, in a second phase, 10 novels. Out of these, the winning novel will receive the Niram Art Novel Award of the amount of 6000 Euros, as well as the Niram Art Trofy – sculpture by the artist Bogdan Ater and the publishing of the literary work.

The Jury consisted of: Horia Barna (dir. ICR Madrid and Editor of Niram Art Publishing House), Fabianni Belemuski (Director of Niram Art Magazine), Eva Defeses (journalist, Defeses Fine Arts PR Agency), Thomas Abraham (Niram Art Publishing House) and artist Ruben Dario (owner of Niram Art Magazine).

The Niram Art 2010 Awards Ceremony will take place in May, in Madrid and will also include Awards for outstanding activity in Poetry and Fine Arts.

http://www.niramart.espacioniram.com

SCULPTURE BY THE SEA BY GREG JOHNS, AUSTRALIA