Siamanto

Who Siamanto was

Siamanto was a Western Armenian poet of the Ottoman Armenian world. He was born in the town of Akn on the Euphrates and killed in the Armenian Genocide at the age of thirty-six or thirty-seven. He published verse from 1898 onward and brought out collections in Geneva, Paris, Constantinople and Boston. He edited a newspaper in the United States for about a year, and in the last years before the war he travelled through the Russian Caucasus.

His life is also one of the hardest to pin down. The reference books contradict one another on his birth date, his schooling, the year he crossed the Atlantic, and even the many forms of the name he has been filed under over the past century. This article says where the sources disagree instead of choosing the version that reads most smoothly.

The outline of his career, though, is not in doubt. He began as a poet of exhortation, writing for a revolutionary party's newspaper. He then went through a long middle period of exhaustion and doubt. In 1909 he wrote the book that made his name, about a massacre he did not witness, from letters sent by someone who did.

The name and its forms

He was born Atom Yarjanian. The surname appears in Latin script as Yarjanian, Yarchanyan, Yardjanian and Jarjanian, and the first name as Atom or Adom, because Armenian consonants have no single agreed romanisation. These are one name passing through several systems, not a dispute about who he was. In Armenian the two spelling systems part company as well: Ատոմ Յարճանյան in the reformed Eastern spelling used in Armenia today, and Ատոմ Եարճանեան in the classical spelling he himself wrote in.

The pen name splits the same way, and here it matters more, because it is the name on the books. Սիամանթօ is the classical and Western Armenian form, with the final ligature-vowel. Սիամանթո is the Eastern Armenian form, and the spelling under which he is catalogued in Yerevan. Armat prints Սիամանթօ in the Western Armenian edition and Սիամանթո in the Armenian one. That is not inconsistency. It is the rule the whole archive follows: each edition spells a name the way its own readers spell it.

Behind both lies a third name. Armenian accounts of his childhood say he was baptised Աստվածատուր, Astvatsatur, meaning God-given, after the feast day on which he was born, and that he later set that name aside and called himself Atom. Armenian writing about him records this widely. Most English accounts leave it out and begin with a birth name he had already stopped using.

Where the pen name came from

Armenian sources agree on who named him. Garegin Srvandztiants, the priest, ethnographer and folklorist who in 1874 was the first to publish a version of the epic Daredevils of Sassoun, gave the pen name to the boy at the Nersisyan school in Akn.

They do not agree on where the name came from. English accounts say it was the name of a hero in one of Srvandztiants's own stories. Armenian accounts give a more specific version that is easier to check. In their telling, it comes from a folk poem about two lovers, Sia-Mandon and Khaché-Zaré, who die together, and Srvandztiants gave the second lover's name as a pen name to Siamanto's sister Armenouhi, who wrote as Khechezare. A single naming that produced two matching names is harder to invent than a vague memory, and Armat gives that version more weight.

One part of the story does not fit, and it should be said. Srvandztiants's known career runs through Van, Mush, Erzurum and Constantinople, and from 1886 he was a bishop and prelate at Trabzon; no biography of him records a teaching post at Akn. He was travelling the eastern provinces collecting oral material in exactly these years, so a meeting is entirely possible. But what the Armenian tradition preserves is the naming, not the classroom. Armat treats the naming as the well-supported part, and the schoolroom setting as the part no independent source confirms.

Akn, on the Euphrates

Akn was a town on the right bank of the western Euphrates, in a narrow valley between the Taurus and Anti-Taurus ranges. Armenians called it Ակն, meaning eye or spring; in Turkish it was Eğin, and since 1922 it has been Kemaliye. It was an old Armenian settlement with its own schools, churches and dialect. Like much of the Armenian interior, it sent its men away: they went to Constantinople to work and sent money home.

Its place on the Ottoman map is usually given wrongly, so it is worth being exact. Akn was a kaza, an Ottoman district, in the sanjak of Harput within the vilayet of Mamuret-ül-Aziz, the province English-language sources usually call Harput. It was not in the province of Sivas, and it was not a province of its own. It lay inside the region Armenians call Western Armenia, but that phrase names a cultural and demographic geography rather than an Ottoman administrative unit, and Armat keeps the two vocabularies apart.

He lived there until he was about fourteen. English sources describe his family as upper middle class, and Armenian sources as a merchant household. That is the same fact in two registers, and it explains the rest: the family could afford to educate him, first at home and then in the capital.

The birth-date question

Three different birth dates are in print for him, and they are not equally reliable. Most sources, Armenian and English alike, give 15 August 1878. A smaller group of biographical pages gives 1 January 1878. That is very often what a database records when it has a year but no day, and no source backs it with evidence. A third date appears on the jacket of the standard English translation of his best-known book, which dates him 1875 to 1915.

The 15 August date has something the others lack: a reason. Armenian accounts link it to the feast the Armenian church keeps in mid-August, and to the baptismal name Astvatsatur that the family chose because of it. A date that explains a name is evidence of a different order from a date that simply sits in a database field.

So Armat uses 15 August 1878 and records the two rival dates instead of deleting them. The choice has one consequence. He was thirty-six when he was killed, or thirty-seven if he was killed after his birthday, and nobody has fixed the exact day in that month. That is why the article says thirty-six or thirty-seven. It is precision, not vagueness.

Schooling in Akn and Constantinople

His first school was the Nersisyan school in Akn. In 1891 he went to Constantinople with his father, who was already working there, and studied at two schools in turn: first the Mirijanian school at Kumkapı, then the Berberian school (Perperian in Western Armenian pronunciation) at Scutari, on the Asian shore. He finished there in 1896.

English and Armenian reference works tell this differently, and the difference can be resolved instead of split down the middle. English accounts usually name only the Berberian school and give 1891 to 1896 as one stretch there. Armenian accounts name both schools in order. The two do not contradict each other. The shorter version has simply dropped a step, and Armat gives the full sequence.

The Berberian school was one of the serious Armenian secondary schools of the capital. When he finished there in 1896, at eighteen, the massacres of Ottoman Armenians of 1894 to 1896 were under way, and he left the empire because of them. This is the turning point of his life. Everything he wrote afterwards was written by someone driven out of the country he was writing about.

Exile: Cairo, Geneva, Paris

He went first to Egypt, where he spent some time in Cairo, and from 1897 he was in Europe, in Geneva and in Paris. Sources disagree on the order. English accounts have him reach Paris first and then move to Geneva; Armenian accounts have him reach Geneva first and go on to Paris. The years are the same either way and nothing in the work depends on the sequence, so Armat names both cities and does not invent a route.

In Paris he attended the Sorbonne. No fact in his biography has been more inflated, so it is worth being exact, and the exact version takes nothing away from him. Armenian sources are specific and agree with one another: he was an ազատ ունկնդիր, a free listener (what French universities call an auditeur libre) in the literature faculty, attending lectures without being enrolled for a degree. English reference works have quietly converted this into an education at the University of Paris and list him among its alumni.

He did not take a degree there, and no source that claims one says where the claim comes from. He was a poor student in an expensive city, taking whatever work he could find. What the Sorbonne gave him was four years of access to European literature and philosophy. That was a real gain, and it needs no diploma attached.

Droshak, and the first poems

His first published poem appeared in 1898 in a newspaper printed in Manchester, under a title he later changed more than once. After that his work appeared in the Armenian press on three continents: Անահիտ in Paris, Բանբեր in St Petersburg, Հայրենիք in Boston.

In Geneva he wrote for Դրօշակ, the newspaper of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and his early style took shape there. These are poems of address and exhortation, spoken to a young Armenian reader and asking something of him. The two usually named from this period are the one that became the title poem of his first collection and a companion piece called The Knight's Song.

His party ties are a fact about him, not an accusation. He wrote for a party paper, he later went to America partly as the party's fieldworker, and the poetry of his first decade is openly the poetry of a national movement. But it is not only that, as the next fifteen years show.

The collections

Դյուցազնորեն, Heroically, was written from about 1897 and printed in Paris in 1902. Its epigraph comes from the Rigveda (that there are many dawns which have not yet broken), and its poems are messages to Armenian youth. Հայորդիներ, Sons of Armenians, followed in three separate series: the first in Geneva in 1905, the second in Geneva in 1906, and the third in Paris in 1908. The first two were reprinted together in Constantinople in 1908.

Հոգեվարքի և հույսի ջահեր, Torches of Agony and Hope, appeared in Paris in 1907, and it breaks the pattern. The exhortation is gone. It is a lyric notebook of exhaustion, private grief and doubt about the very calls to struggle the earlier books had made. Armenian critics read it as the moment the public poet turns inward.

Next came Կարմիր լուրեր բարեկամէս, in Constantinople in 1909, and Հայրենի հրավեր, a sequence of twelve verse letters to Armenians who had emigrated. He wrote it in America, and it was printed with the collected works published in Boston in 1910. The long poem Սուրբ Մեսրոպ was written in 1912 and published in Tiflis in 1913. Some catalogues date Հայրենի հրավեր to 1909 and others to 1910. That is the usual gap between writing a sequence and printing a book, not two different works.

• Դյուցազնորեն, Heroically, Paris, 1902
• Հայորդիներ, three series, Geneva 1905 and 1906, Paris 1908
• Հոգեվարքի և հույսի ջահեր, Torches of Agony and Hope, Paris, 1907
• Կարմիր լուրեր բարեկամէս, Constantinople, 1909
• Հայրենի հրավեր, twelve verse letters, in the collected works, Boston, 1910
• Սուրբ Մեսրոպ, written 1912, published Tiflis 1913

The return of 1908

In July 1908 the Young Turk revolution restored the Ottoman constitution, and Armenians who had lived abroad since the eighteen-nineties began to come home. Siamanto returned to Constantinople that year, after more than a decade away.

Armenian accounts are careful about his motives. He went back to test the political weather, not to celebrate it, and he did not share the optimism of the community's leaders. A biography cannot settle whether his doubts were as clear at the time as they look in hindsight. Armat reports them as what the Armenian sources say, not as a proven prediction.

The test came within a year. In April 1909 Armenians were massacred at Adana in Cilicia, under the new constitutional order and not the old regime. The argument that the constitution had changed the community's position did not survive the massacres.

Կարմիր լուրեր բարեկամէս

He wrote his next book immediately afterwards, and it was published in Constantinople in 1909. His reputation rests on it. The title is Կարմիր լուրեր բարեկամէս: Bloody News from My Friend in the standard English translation, or more literally red news from my friend. The form is the point, because the poems are letters, written as if passed on by a correspondent who was there.

He was not at Adana. He built the sequence from accounts sent to him by people who were, and its method is to report, not to transform. It sets down what a witness said, with very little of the metaphor and symbol that fill his other books. English critics describe its language as raw and blunt, refusing the comfort of figurative writing. That refusal is a deliberate technique, not a lack of one.

Armat does not reproduce those scenes. The sequence opens with a lament, runs to eleven letter-poems, and closes with a poem of endurance. That makes twelve pieces in all, which is why the English edition is described as a cycle of twelve. The last of them turns from what was done to the people who survived it. That structure, and the fact that a poet wrote down a massacre in the year it happened, is what a reader needs to understand the book. The details of the atrocities are available in the historical literature to anyone studying the events. Quoting them here would put the horror ahead of the writing, which is the opposite of what this article is for.

America and the Caucasus

In December 1909 he sailed for the United States, sent as a party fieldworker and to take over as editor of the Boston daily Հայրենիք. He lived in the Boston area, edited the paper for about a year, and used the time to see Armenian emigrant life at first hand. English sources usually date the move to 1910 and Armenian sources to 1909. The gap is between sailing and settling, and Armat gives the earlier date and notes the later one.

He came away with an argument more than an impression, and Հայրենի հրավեր puts that argument into verse. A people scattering across the world would not survive as a people, and the way back was to the land itself and to working it. He returned to Constantinople in 1911.

In 1913 he travelled the other way, into the Russian Caucasus. He went to Tiflis, Baku and Etchmiadzin, visited the historical sites of Eastern Armenia, and met the writers and public figures of a literary world that had never been under Ottoman rule. He was warmly received. It was the only time he saw the other half of the language he wrote in.

Սուրբ Մեսրոպ

He wrote the long poem Սուրբ Մեսրոպ for the national celebration of the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the Armenian alphabet, which was marked across the Armenian world in these years. He wrote it in 1912, and it was published in Tiflis in 1913.

It is a hymn to Mesrop Mashtots, and the least typical thing he wrote. It is a poem of confidence, not alarm, imagining a free country where thought and spirit would flourish. Set beside the rest of his work, it is the clearest sign that his lamenting was a response to events, not his temperament.

Here his subject meets the archive's oldest one: a poet writing in a language under threat addresses the man who gave that language its letters, fifteen centuries later.

Free verse, and the shape of the line

Armenian scholars make a precise claim for him, and it is usually mistranslated. The Soviet Armenian Encyclopedia says he ձև է տվել, gave form to, Armenian free verse (ազատաչափ, vers libre). That is not the same as inventing it, and Armat does not inflate it. The claim is that the loose line already existed and he made it into something with a shape, not that he was the first Armenian ever to write one.

Some scholarship sharpens the point. A metrical study of his verse argues that he was linking the metres of medieval Armenian lyric poetry to the structure of modern free verse. On this reading his line does not break with Armenian prosody; it builds a bridge across it. A poet who reaches modern free verse by way of the medieval metres has kept the tradition, and that is a stronger and more interesting claim than being first would have been.

His other technical achievement is easier to check and less often mentioned: he enlarged the vocabulary. Armenian critics credit him with new words, compounds and combinations coined for the occasion, and with piling up epithets, qualifier on qualifier, until the noun almost disappears. A reader can spot this feature of his style without knowing any of the criticism.

Romanticism, symbolism, and Narekatsi

He is routinely labelled a symbolist in English, but that is too simple. Armenian critics place him among the leading figures of Armenian neo-romanticism. They describe his art as weaving together the principles of classical romanticism and those of symbolism, without belonging to either. His own development supports this double label. The Հայորդիներ series is described as moving out of a mystical symbolism toward images of the real world, which shows a poet leaving a manner behind, not settling into one.

The comparison Armenian scholars actually make is older than any European movement. They see in his poetry an affinity with the Book of Lamentations of Grigor Narekatsi: the sustained intensity, the visionary abstraction and, above all, that piling of epithets, which is one of the most recognisable features of the tenth-century text.

That comparison says more about his style than the movement labels do. A poet who sounds like Narek and reads Verhaeren cannot be summed up by either half.

Western Armenian as a literary language

He wrote in Western Armenian. In his lifetime it was not a heritage language but the standard written language of a large population, with its own press, schools, publishing and readers across the Ottoman Empire and its emigrant communities. Western and Eastern Armenian are two standard forms of one language, differing in pronunciation, verb system and vocabulary, and by 1900 each had a full literature of its own.

His generation was still working out what the western standard could do. It had been shaped for journalism, the pulpit, schooling and patriotic speeches. The question in these years was whether it could also carry poetry of sensation, private despair and formal experiment. He is one of the writers who answered by writing the poems, and his new compounds and his free line were the tools he used.

The different fates of the two standards have nothing to do with their merits. Within a few years of his death the western language lost its territory, its institutions and most of its readers. It became what it is now: a language kept up by a scattered population, and classed as endangered. That is why Armat publishes a Western Armenian edition, and this article appears there in the spelling he used.

Siamanto and Varoujan

The two names almost always appear together, but the pairing is usually asserted, not shown. There is a documented link, and it runs one way. Daniel Varoujan, six years younger and by 1913 the better known of the two in Constantinople, wrote about Կարմիր լուրեր բարեկամէս and called it a տաղանդավոր ոճրերգություն. The phrase can be rendered a gifted song of crime, or a talented crime-poetry, and Armenian critics have quoted it ever since. His piece appeared in the Constantinople volume Գրական ասուլիսներ in 1913.

That is a real connection: one poet writing about another's book, in print, in their lifetimes. It counts for more than the usual biographical pairing, that both were arrested on the same night and killed in the same summer. That is true, but it is true of a great many people.

They were also close in a way the vocabulary tends to hide. Siamanto wrote a Navasard prayer to the goddess Anahit, and poems glorifying the pre-Christian Armenian past, in exactly the years Varoujan was writing Հեթանոս երգեր. Both drew on the same current of literary paganism in Constantinople between 1911 and 1914. Armat links to Varoujan from here, and not the other way round. The Varoujan article was written before this one, and it noted then that its strongest possible link did not yet exist. That is no longer true, but a link is added only where the evidence supports it, and is not mirrored back for symmetry.

Arrest, Ayaş, and death

On 24 April 1915 he was arrested in Constantinople, one of a few hundred Armenian writers, editors, teachers, clergy and public figures seized in the capital that night and in the days that followed. The date is commemorated as the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. It is the date of the arrests and not the date of his death, and confusing the two is the most common mistake made about him.

The men taken that night were split between two places of detention, and which one a prisoner was sent to largely decided whether he lived. Chankiri, in the province of Kastamonu, was an open detention town, and a number of those sent there survived. Ayaş, near Ankara, was a secure military depot, and almost none did. Siamanto was sent to Ayaş. Daniel Varoujan was sent to Chankiri. Most short accounts lose this distinction, and it explains why their deaths are documented so unequally.

He was killed in August 1915, when the Ayaş prisoners were killed outside Ankara. Beyond that, very little is known. Of roughly eighty-four men held there, some fourteen were released and the rest were killed in groups within hours of being taken from the prison, and no survivor's account fixes the day for him individually. Sources that give him a precise date are supplying one. Armat gives the month, because the month is certain.

Armat does not describe the killings. Accounts of how the Ayaş and Chankiri prisoners died are documented and very widely reproduced, but this is a biography of a poet.

What survived

His books survived, which was not guaranteed. The collected works were reprinted at Beirut in 1954 and again in 1974, at Cairo in 1960 and at Antelias in 1989, by diaspora publishers who took over the job the Constantinople presses could no longer do. A selected works appeared at Yerevan in 1957, and a volume of previously unpublished work in 2002.

In English he is known mostly through one book. Bloody News from My Friend, translated by Peter Balakian and Nevart Yaghlian and published in 1996, put the Adana sequence into English for the first time. That is why English-speaking readers who know one thing about Siamanto know that. The rest of the work (the early exhortations, the doubt of 1907, the alphabet poem) is largely untranslated, so English accounts tend to describe a narrower poet than Armenian ones do.

His lasting effect is on the line more than on any single poem. After him, Armenian poets could use a loose measured line as a normal tool, and the next generation on both sides of the language inherited it. That part of him outlived his image as a witness, and it is the part this article has tried to keep in view.