Free To Soar: Silva Kaputikyan’s Lyrical Poetry in English

• In Event: Translation as Liberation: Breaking the Barriers

Abstract

Literary translation has an outsized ability to shape national literatures. In the Soviet Union, translation from and into minority languages of the Soviet Union, formed an inextricable part of the top-to-bottom cultural planning, thus leaving an indelible mark on the formation of literary canons. The collapse of the Soviet Union fundamentally altered the literary marketplace of translated literature in Armenia. This paper examines the liberating impact of literary translation on the reorganization of the Armenian post-Soviet literary canon through a discussion of Sylva Kaputikyan’s poetry. Sylva Kaputikyan, the “great dame” of Armenian Soviet poetry, widely translated and read in Russian in the Soviet era, was relegated to the margins of the Armenian poetic tradition in the 1990s and all but erased from Armenian literary history. Two current translations of Kaputikyan’s lesser-known poetry, which includes works dedicated to Sappho, Cleopatra, Lilith, the mythical Nvard, and Anna Karenina, into English liberate her legacy and reposition her as an important voice of Armenian 20th century feminism. Using Kaputikyan as a case-study, the paper considers translation’s ability to liberate national literary canons in post-Soviet space.

Author

• Margarit Ordukhanyan, Independent Scholar