Hagop Oshagan - a literary reconstruction of the pre-genocide world of the Armenians. Set in an unnamed Armenian village in the Bursa region of Turkey, the novel spins a story of sex and murder; spans several generations of Nalbandians; gathers into its sphere an array of memorable characters and an inventory of habits and customs

Hagop Oshagan, Remnants: The Way of the Womb, Gomidas Inst, 2013.         


excerpt


An unfinished, eighteen hundred-page work written between 1928 and 1934 in Cyprus, Oshagan's Mnatsortats (Remnants) is his magnum opus and the culmination of a series of powerful, innovative novels that have as their theme Muslim-Christian, and especially Turkish-Armenian, relations in the Ottoman Empire. Mnatsortats is a literary reconstruction of the pre-genocide world of the Armenians told through the horrific collapse of a family the Nalbandians. The author intended the novel to be divided into three parts (Part I: The Way of the Womb; Part II: The Way of Blood; Part III: Hell) but was unable to write the third part, which was to be devoted to the extermination of the Armenians, depicting the twenty-four hours during which the Armenian population of Bursa was annihilated.


A towering figure in modern Western Armenian literature, Hagop Oshagan casts a long shadow as a prolific novelist, literary critic and historian, short-story writer, and dramatist. He was born in Bursa (Western Anatolia) in 1883, and died in Aleppo (Syria) in 1948.
Oshagan's life was shaped by turbulent events in the Ottoman realm and beyond: the decline of the empire; World War I, the 1915 genocide of the Armenians—the massacres, deportations, and dispersion. Between 1915-1918, he was a fugitive in Istanbul and narrowly escaped arrest and certain death several times, seven by his own account. He fled across the border to Bulgaria in 1918, disguised as a German officer and returned to Istanbul a year later, only to leave again, this time for good. After 1924, Oshagan lived in Egypt, Cyprus, and for the last fourteen years of his life in Jerusalem, producing a prodigious body of writing—often deemed controversial, subversive, even pornographic—and gaining an enduring reputation as a demanding and charismatic teacher of Armenian literature.




Set in an unnamed Armenian village in the Bursa region of Turkey, the novel spins a story of sex and murder; spans several generations of Nalbandians; gathers into its sphere an array of memorable characters and an inventory of habits and customs; describes the region's religious, political, spiritual and material culture; and delineates the relationship between the Turkish authorities and their Armenian subjects—all this projected against the background of a disintegrating empire. The selection presented here is from Part I. It describes the early life of Hajji Anna, the wife of one of the Nalbandian sons, and the mother of five daughters, and one illegitimate son, perhaps.
We first meet Anna at the very beginning of the novel, when she is scheming with the mother of her daughter-in-law to couple the young woman with the family's hired hand, so that the family line will be continued. The son, the last scion of the renowned family whose origins Oshagan grounds in the story of Hajji Artin, the legendary progenitor of the Nalbandians, is either impotent or homosexual. Such conniving is not as unusual at it would seem: Anna's mother-in-law Sara is rumored to have produced her son in the same way, and Anna herself had her son either by "weakening" her husband to death or through the help of another hired hand. In this context, the "melancholy air" that hangs about Anna's wedding is suggestive not only of the "twin curses" that the story mentions but the entire silent, scheming system which, in a manner of speaking, produce and reproduce Anna.
Oshagan poses huge challenges for his Armenian-language reader as well as his translator. This is one reason why Oshagan's novels, which are in the tradition of Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Proust and Joyce, are not more widely known. In addition to his formal complexity, Oshagan often seems deliberately ambiguous, the sequence of words pointing in several, often contradictory directions at the same time. The translator is tempted to make Oshagan accessible by standardizing his language, making it seem natural, in short, by domesticating its semantic multiplicities and harnessing its torrential energy.
In G. M. Goshgarian's groundbreaking English rendition of Mnastortats, Oshagan's novel has found its translator. Goshgarian has translated into English more Oshagan than anyone else, most of it as yet unpublished. He says: "Oshagan's Armenian is not at all natural but barbarously beautiful." Being faithful to Oshagan, therefore, can appear to be bad translation until the reader begins to understand the author's logic, deliberate puzzlers, and snares. The meanings begin to multiply, and, to paraphrase Oshagan, the reader is home—in literature.—Taline Voskeritchian
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/from-the-remnants




This is my book from Armenia for the Read The World challenge. Oshagan was born in 1883 in what is now Turkey — then the Ottoman Empire — and this novel is set in the Armenian community in Turkey before the genocide. ‘The Way of the Womb’ is actually just the first volume of a three volume novel; the third, unfinished volume tells the story of the genocide itself.
The Way of the Womb works well enough as a stand-alone novel, but obviously it would be a very different experience to read the whole work. Even without any explicit references to the approaching horrors, the context is unavoidable. It creates both dark foreshadowing and an elegiac note for a lost world. Not that Oshagan presents the lost Turkish-Armenian life as a golden idyll — his characters are feuding and manipulative — but there’s a certain amount of stuff about straight-limbed, strong Armenian youths living simple, honest lives among the olive groves, contrasting with an (understandably bitter) representation of weaker, more degenerate Turks.
This volume tells the story of a woman who, desperate to produce a grandson to continue the family name, is scheming to persuade her daughter-in-law to sleep with the hired help. That is used as a framing device to look back at the history of her family, the Nalbandians; once wealthy and powerful, built up by one man, Hajji* Artin, and in terminal decline in the generations after his death.
I would like to be more enthusiastic about this book. The story itself, the characters, and the setting, are striking and interesting. But reading it was really hard work. The prose is quite dense and difficult anyway; I often found myself having to reread sentences several times. But it is made much harder by a lack of white space. The framing story has some pretty long paragraphs, but at least it’s frequently broken up by dialogue. The flashback to tell the story of the Nalbandians is 60 pages without a single paragraph break. 60 pages! I assume that’s a reflection of the original Armenian, but it was a real struggle to get through it.
It’s a pity. I can see why this is an important book for Armenians, and there really were things I liked about it; but it was just too much of a chore. It’s possible that’s the fault of the translation, rather than the original text… but either way, I won’t be picking up the next two volumes, if they get translated. For once I can see the appeal of a Reader’s Digest Condensed version, just for sake of the story, if anyone feels like producing one. - heracliteanfire.net/2015/08/24/remnants-the-way-of-the-womb-by-hagop-oshagan/