商品簡介
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz's new translation of A Book, Untitled (Girqa-anvernagir, 2006) makes Shushan Avagyan's revolutionary Armenian text available to English-speaking audiences.
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz's new translation of A Book, Untitled (Girq-anvernagir, 2006) makes Shushan Avagyan's revolutionary Armenian text available to English-speaking audiences.
Written as a literary experiment, Girq-anvernagir was published as samizdat in Yerevan. As the reader navigates 26.5 chapters of seemingly unrelated vignettes, they discover that Avagyan, while writing the novel as a translator's diary, is also mapping out a larger archival or archeological site: an imagined encounter between two early twentieth-century feminist writers, Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan. Having been obscured and forgotten through both Stalin's regime and the patriarchal rendering of the Armenian literary and historical canons, this book recovers the legacies of these two feminist authors.
Kurghinian's and Yesayan's imagined encounter is juxtaposed with a contemporary conversation between the novel's unknown narrator--an archivist and translator referred to as the "typist/writer"--and her friend Lara, who are both piecing together the writers' fragmented stories. Uncovering these stories is no easy task: documents are censored, authors uncited, and text is missing or italicized, as if in draft form.
If the reader finds themselves asking--How can we distinguish voices or why are they indistinguishable? Who has written, and who is writing?--then Avagyan has succeeded in her experiment to "deprivatize words," enabling them to "belong neither to the typist/writer," the translator, "nor to you, reader" so that instead, they "unite our past, present and future" (Girq-anvernagir, 106).
In this multi-authored experiment, penned yet anew by its translator, A Book, Untitled is perhaps best understood not as an original; not as a copy; it is an/other reading.
"History unravels as A Book, Untitled unearths an archive of two Armenian feminist writers and activists. At once lyrical and theoretical, personal and protest, Avagyan's singular approach fabricates a polyvocal palimpsest tinged with exile and opacity, distortion and estrangement. Authorship, and the hegemony from which it hails, will never be the same."--Alex Brostoff, co-translator of Ailton Krenak's Life Is Not Useful
"The English-speaking world already owes Shushan Avagyan a tremendous debt for her essential translations of the Russian formalist, Viktor Shklovsky. Now she has composed a brilliant novel of her own. A Book, Untitled is a powerful pastiche of voices and eras, as well as a feminist reclamation of Armenian women writers lost to time. For all its shifting, its purposeful resistance, its sharpness and darkness, I found this book simply delightful."--Martin Riker, author of The Guest Lecture
"Written in fragments, excerpts of dialogue, quotations, parts of poems, and imagined postcards, Shushan Avagyan's A Book, Untitled poses the question: how does writing create understanding? In commendation of two largely ignored Armenian women writers--Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan--this book is a kind of answer."--Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Fiction. Hybrid. History. LGBTQ+ Studies. Women's Studies.
購物須知
外文書商品之書封，為出版社提供之樣本。實際出貨商品，以出版社所提供之現有版本為主。部份書籍，因出版社供應狀況特殊，匯率將依實際狀況做調整。
無庫存之商品，在您完成訂單程序之後，將以空運的方式為你下單調貨。為了縮短等待的時間，建議您將外文書與其他商品分開下單，以獲得最快的取貨速度，平均調貨時間為1~2個月。
為了保護您的權益，「三民網路書店」提供會員七日商品鑑賞期(收到商品為起始日)。
若要辦理退貨，請在商品鑑賞期內寄回，且商品必須是全新狀態與完整包裝(商品、附件、發票、隨貨贈品等)否則恕不接受退貨。