book review

BOOK REVIEW
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LA VIE COMME ELLE EST (Life as it is): Short stories. By Krikor Zohrab. Translated into French by Mireille Besnilian. 110 pages. Marseilles. Editions Parentheses. 2005.
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A highly respected lawyer, politician, editor, and author, Krikor Zohrab (1861-1915) is remembered today as one of our ablest short story writers. Writes Hagop Oshagan: "Zohrab is one of those rare individuals who do the work and live the lives of eight or ten men and excel in each. He is the most brilliant, accomplished and enduring figure in the Realistic movement of our literature."
According to Mesrob Janashian: "Zohrab viewed conservatives as hidebound obscurantists. He attacked the Armenian establishment of Constantinople - the Church as well as the bosses. He constantly urged the youth to adopt progressive Western ideas. Even when he went to extremes, he at no time passed the bounds of reason and common sense."
In American terms he might best be imagined as a hybrid of President Kennedy (Zohrab was likewise assassinated at the height of his powers), and Hemingway - though as a short story writer he is more like Guy de Maupassant in his subtle depiction of feminine psychology, and Anton Chekhov in his sympathetic treatment of the lower classes.
The collection under review contains some of his most widely admired stories. Their translation is so elegantly executed that they read as though they were originally conceived and written in French.
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The recent study of Armenian women writers by the Canadian academic Victoria Rowe, and now this translation by Mireille (not an Armenian) Besnilian, may suggest that odars are more interested in our literature than our academics and pundits from the Middle East, most of whom happen to be fluent in half-a-dozen languages (or so they tell us), who are, it seems, too busy with far more important projects to have any time left for translating our writers, a great deal of whose works remain terra incognita not only to odars but also to the overwhelming majority of Armenians in the Diaspora who cannot read Armenian.
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