Vahe oshagan biography

This landmark documentary shows clearly how Oshagan’s work ranges from the gritty realm of the quotidian to the urgent world of politics to the existential questions that animate living and dying. As Oshagan says, reading his own work toward the end of the film:

"squatting under the mossy, thick fences of chaos having understood nothing, 

unable to move or to stay there and not even return…” 

Vahé Oshagan: Between Acts leaves us as viewers with dirt stuck in our soles, longing lodged in our hearts, 

and politics pressing on our limbs. 

David Kazanjian Professor of English

Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory

University of Pennsylvania

"This is everything an intellectual might want in a biography, and simultaneously everything one might want in a biography of an intellectual. It offers a genuine sense of Vahe Oshagan's work, from his own readings to the major critical thinkers and their perspectives on his oeuvre. Simultaneously accessible to any viewer and rich enough for any scholar, this film is the definitive audiovisual work on Oshagan and a model for would-be film biographers."

Anahid Kassabian, Aslop Professor Emerita, University of Liverpool

Sound, Music and Film Scholar

"A truly unique film about one of the most radical diasporan Armenian poets of the 20th century.”

Arto Vaun, Senior Lecturer Director, Center for Creative Writing

English & Communications Dept. American University of Armenia

« Ce documentaire, rare et précieux, redonne sens et vie à l’œuvre du plus diasporique des écrivains arméniens du XXe siècle ».  

Tigrane Yegavian, Hebdomadere France-Arménie

Վահէ Օշական` միջնարար ֆիլմը մի կողմից առարկայացնում, մյուս կողմից տեղ է 

ստեղծում «անհամբեր բանաստեղծության» համար, ինչպիսին է Վահե Օշականի 

բանաստեղծությունը: Բանաստեղծությունը` զգայական ու միաժամանակ կտրուկ, 

ըմբոստ ու միաժամանակ խուսափուկ` կարծես փախչում է ի

Armenian poet, writer and literary critic

Vahé Oshagan (Armenian: Վահէ Օշական; 1922 – June 30, 2000) was an Armenian poet, writer, and literary critic.

Life

Vahé Oshagan was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1922. His father, Hagop Oshagan, was a prominent writer and critic. Raised in Cairo, Jerusalem, and Cyprus, he studied in France and received a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Sorbonne, in Paris.

Like many Armenians, whose villages and homes were destroyed by the Turks in 1915, Oshagan drifted throughout the Middle East and Europe, never finding a permanent home. He lived in Beirut after 1952 and taught philosophy and psychology, as well as Armenian, French and English literature. He was again uprooted at the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 and forced to move to Philadelphia, where he taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1976 to 1982. The American cityscape became a focus of his work, as exemplified by his volume Alert (Ահազանգ) (1980).

In the 1990s, he taught at the university of Stepanakert during the war of Karabagh. He later lectured at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, from 1993 to 1998. He was a prolific contributor of the Armenian press in the Diaspora, from Beirut to California, during half a century. His essays on literary, cultural, and political issues may fill several volumes.

Oshagan died of complications after heart surgery in Philadelphia on June 30, 2000, at the age of 78.

Literary output

Vahe Oshagan, who also wrote short stories and novels, "reformed Armenian poetry by rejecting its imposed formality, which shunned the concerns of daily life and themes of alienation and loss." He often wrote in colloquial language and was for many the voice of the Armenian diaspora. His second book, The City (Քաղաքը), published in 1963, became "the most radical book of Armenian poetry in the 20th century," according to Marc Nichanian,

~~Today marks the thirteenth anniversary of the death of the Western Armenian poet and literary critic Vahé Oshagan, perhaps the most radical, innovative poet of his generation. A native of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, an exile who turned the condition into the source of a prolific body of work, Oshagan died in Philadelphia, from complications following heart surgery.  He was 78.  He was also my beloved maternal uncle.

On this occasion, I’m re-posting  my translation of his Tebi Gyank (Toward life). The translation is followed by the obituaries in the New York Times and the Guardian.~~

TOWARD LIFE

This midday too
god sits in death’s shade wipes the sweat off his forehead
takes out the round gold watch
looks
thousands cross-legged in circles listen to fairy tales
that swing from the tongues of tiny, suspended bells—
this is our life
dragging a torn fishing-net on our shoulder we walk the streets
the shrieking mob chases a decrepit whore ten months pregnant
liquid-eyed vagrant seven times over
for twenty-four hours we celebrate a single instant’s birthday
arms thrust in the wind fingers of nakedness opened
the longings throb incurably bit by bit—
oh this life
from the cradle they anointed us married us off in the stealth of darkness
we have now left home gone to the villages whoring with every passer-by
day and night hungry sleepless I’m out on the street I search
who is it? what is it? no one knows no one has seen
innumerable fetid wounds pave the world
I will bend down kiss
life is a street where the urchins have seized me chasing me, laughing at me
miniature holy desert I rent out to predators of human beings
and I flee stumbling through photocopy corridors:
How to live?
the invisible steel webs of wisdom cover the universe
caught in it I soar on the surface of consciousness
brand new useless furniture and housewares parade all day
isolated from the