Where Stones Grow High as Trees: Armenian Voices and Memory in the Work of Varujan Vosganian

Participants: Varujan Vosganian (author), Cristina Sandu (translator)
Moderator: José Luis Rico
Language: Discussion in English. Book excerpts translated into Finnish

The wreckage left behind by the 20th century has one of its few consolations in the wealth of literary works that, grappling with the unspeakable, manage to encapsulate hitherto unseen aspects of the human soul, and portray the dilemmas of the vanquished in the maze of history. Just like the more familiar examples of Finland and Eastern European countries, the peoples of Western Asia also found themselves in the crossfires of nazi and soviet totalitarianism, but with the addition of even more inimical powers. The work of Romanian-Armenian writer Varujan Vosganian (Rumania, 1958) is an unavoidable contribution to the lineage of others who, like Primo Levi, portrayed nazi brutality in Central Europe, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Svetlana Alexievich, who documented the soviet system’s scorn for individuality.

In the acclaimed and widely translated The Book of Whispers, Vosganian guides us into the mesh of Armenian migration, persecution and forced repatriation, from the stony Armenian Highlands to the streets of Constantinople, from the murderous Syrian desert to the roads of rural Romania. The Book of Whispers begins in the guise of a nostalgic reminiscence of childhood, intended to function as a touchstone for the rhizomatic—and gut-wrenching—development that follows. In the book, most of the characters’ lives are framed by two tragedies: the Armenian genocides of the late 19th century and early 20th century in the Ottoman Empire, and the arrival of communism in Romania. Those who managed to escape extermination during their youth in Anatolia, were thirty years later deported to Siberia, or stripped of their livelihood and patrimony, or repatriated under false pretenses to a Soviet Armenia that Stalin had turned into a trap.

By unearthing and interweaving the stories the elders could only tell each other in whispers, in the middle of impoverished backyards or hiding in a cemetery crypt, Vosganian recomposes a history rendered senseless by massacre and censorship. Thus, the book redresses—albeit symbolically—the evils of history. The Book of Whispers ends when the narrator has finally metabolized his lineage’s fate: “My grandfather’s voice had become my inner voice.” The grandfather’s burial gives way to “a bittersweet-tasting melancholy, like air through which no bird has passed.”

In this conversation, Sivuvalo Platform ry’s José Luis Rico and Varujan Vosganian—who is currently serving as the president of the Romanian Writers’ Union—will expound on the intricacies of the book’s places and plotlines and will discuss the literary devices required to bring them all together into one cohesive piece of literature. Novelist and translator Cristina Sandu will read excerpts from The Book of Whispers in Finnish translation.

This event is made possible with the collaboration of the Romanian Cultural Institute, the Romanian Language Institute, the Lectureship in Romanian Language and Culture at Helsinki University, CoCoLaC (Comparing and Contrasting Languages and Cultures), and Tekstin Talo.