notes and comments

[Haykakan]

Re: denis donikian

Wow Ara those are great suggestions. The last two very much apply to you.

[arabaliozian]

denis donikian

Translations from
“GOD IS GREAT
(& I AM HIS VOICE)”
By DENIS DONIKIAN
*************************************************
Denis Donikian’s aphorisms have a poetic elusiveness
that is hard to capture in translation.
Keep that in mind, please, when you consider
the translations that follow.
*************************************************
*
“One God kills another
and man kills in the name
of the one that was slain.”
*
“When the son repeats the father,
what happens to the man?”
*
“At the end of life it is sleep that dies.”
*
“Naked we came into this world
and naked we shall leave it.”
*
“Heaven’s silence is its only answer.”
*
“Man is the agony of the world.”
*
“There is one appointment
that we can neither delay nor postpone:
the hour of our death.”
*
“That which is not written it is not lived,
and that which is written
it is not always lived.”
*
“Long-winded writers write too much
because they have nothing to say.”
*
“Intellectuals drown themselves
in a verbal sea.”
#

[arabaliozian]

q/a

Q/A
***********************
Who took Muslims seriously in the 19th century?
Things began to change when the world realized
where there are Muslims
there is oil.
*
Who takes Armenia
(also known as Karastan) seriously?
Not even Armenians.
#

[Haykakan]

Re: facts

Ara Baliozian is one of the greatest Armenian writers and thinkers of our age. But he seems more than happy to be challenged on points he raises

Wow. Quoting others qualifies one as a great writer/thinker? The bar has dropped through the floor.

[arabaliozian]

god & country

GOD AND COUNTRY
*************************
Until very recently in America
“separate but equal” meant
separate and unequal.
*
With us today patriotism means
love of God and Country
even if the regime
is in the hands of godless traitors.
*
At the turn of the last century
in the Ottoman Empire we were encouraged
to hate the Sultan until it became apparent that
those who overthrew him
replaced oppression with massacre
in the name of “progress.”
*
In politics, language is perverted
to the point that it means the opposite
of what it says.
*
Moral I: After shaking hands with a politician
count your fingers.
*
Moral II: The real function of politics
is to moronize the masses.
*
Moral III: God and Country form a sinister alliance
and those who speak in its favor are godless swine.
#

[lampron]

Re: facts

Fact: You start way too many threads and fill this forum with mainly junk.

Ara Baliozian is one of the greatest Armenian writers and thinkers of our age. But he seems more than happy to be challenged on points he raises

[Haykakan]

Re: facts

Fact: You start way too many threads and fill this forum with mainly junk.

[arabaliozian]

facts

FACTS
********************
Whenever I deal with someone
who speaks in the name of an ideology
or belief system
– the most popular being self-interest –
I immediately assume he is lying.
Call it prejudice.
Call it experience.
I don’t care what you call it.
I am just giving you the facts as I see them.
*
What is said, what is heard, and what is understood
wouldn’t recognize one another if they ever met.
*
I have been wrong so many times
that when accused of a transgression
my first instinct is to plead guilty as charged
even when I am as innocent
as a freshly laid egg.
*
Michelet: “What is difficult is not to rise in the world
but to remain oneself as one rises.”
#

[arabaliozian]

leaders

ON LEADERSHIP
********************************
Our political leaders survive by assuming
fools and cowards like us don’t deserve any better.
Their self-esteem must be as sold and unshakable
as Mt. Ararat.
*
We will never understand the deep unconscious ties
that exist between the German people and Hitler.
Remember, even Thomas Mann identified him as “a brother.”
*
Jean Guehenno on the German occupation of France:
“How will we climb out of this shame and degradation?”
I can’t think of a single Armenian writer
capable of producing such a sentence.
*
Zarian on his contemporaries like Oshagan:
“When they speak of Homeland,
they mean Istanbul.”
*
Khachatur Abovian on Russians:
“Blessed be the hour they set their blessed foot
on our sacred soil.”
*
Ruben Zarian (no kin of Gostan) on Abovian:
“He assigned a messianic role to the Russians.”
*
In the eyes of the world Putin may be
no better than swine, but I have every reason to suspect
in the eyes of our oligarchs, including the Catholics,
Putin is what the Pope is to Catholics:
not just a statesman of vision
but a savior and the keeper of their power and money,
#

[arabaliozian]

on understanding

ON UNDERSTANDING
**************************************
“Turks are worse than animals!”
an angry reader writes.
Why should that surprise me?
What surprises me is the fact that
it took us 600 years,
a series of massacres, and genocide
for us to reach that obvious conclusion.
One may be justified in suggesting that
in the understanding department
we cannot be said to be in the same league
with Speedy Gonzalez.
*
After the collapse of the USSR,
Sylva Kaputikian declared:
“I am proud to have been
a member of the Communist party!”
The very same party, be it noted,
that in successive waves of purges
systematically exterminated our ablest writers.
*
Why was she proud?
She never explained.
I can only guess.
She was proud because
she was awarded the Stalin Prize –
not exactly the Nobel Prize
but, in her warped mind, damn close.
*
She was proud because
when she met Gorbachev in the Kremlin,
he recited lines from her poetic works.
*
She was proud because
all her works were translated into Russian,
among other Soviet languages,
and she amassed a fortune
in Moscow banks from royalties.
*
On the positive, when the USSR went bankrupt,
her millions of rubles vanished into thin air
and she was forced to beg
from our corrupt and degenerate capitalist benefactors
in the West.
*
Vauvenargues: “Servitude debases men so much
they begin to love it.”
*
After quoting Renan (“Young man, young man,
France is dying: do not disturb its death-throes.”)
Guehenno writes in his wartime diary:
“I can find neither pleasure nor honor
in thinking of France,
nothing but an immense sadness.”
#