Translation Is an Act of Love, a Gift That Transcends Borders: 15 Minutes with Fruznik Tadevosyan

“The books are my brothers,” Fruznik says, in one of his turns of phrase that sound seamlessly romantic. “They are not lifeless things. They are living.”

At a busy outdoor market in Yerevan, Armenia, stallholder, and bookseller Frunzik Tadevosyan stands next to his piles of books and says, “Our language is our conscious, the holy bread of our table.”

They’re his words, thought not quite. He’s reciting a verse by the poet Hamo Sahyan, translated from the Armenian into English by Fruznik himself. For more than fifty of his seventy-five years, he has been reproducing Armenian poetry in the English language.

Frunzik stoops over his books, then squeezes between the tables which support them to rummage through boxes, looking for a specific publication requested by a customer. He has grey, three-day stubble and a mouth addicted to smiling. A white baseball cap stands slightly wonky on his head. He protects himself from the cold with an old blue winter coat and layers of sweaters. Every sale is concluded with a boyish handshake and a wide grin.

Off the cuff now, he tells me, “The man who likes poems, he likes himself and his people.” Then he points at a neighboring bookseller with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. “That man only likes to drink and think about business,” Fruznik says. “There is no other thoughts in his brain.”

It is somewhat of a surprise to find an elderly Armenian with such a firm grasp of English here in Yerevan. Fruznik was born in 1943, in the city of Vanadzor, then known as Kirovakan under the rule of the Soviet Union. The youngest of four children with a war hero father who fought in Crimea, Frunzik attended a school that was something of an exception: Its students not only learned English, but they also had a British-born teacher. Though foreign language education was widely available in the Russian Republic, schools in states that made up the rest of the Soviet Union, such as Armenia, often only taught Russian and the local language; in Fruznik’s case, Armenian.

But he wanted to learn more. Fruznik displayed a knack for languages and moved to Yerevan in 1965 to study at the Foreign Languages School. There, he would correct his lecturers’ mistakes when they translated into English. Fruznik laughs as he recalls his youth: “All the other students would ask the teacher, ‘Who is right?’ And she would say, ‘Mine is not wrong, but Frunzik’s is preferable.’”

His love of poetry developed at school too. A teacher once told him, as a kid in Vanadzor, to try and learn a new poem in English every day. The first, he recalls, was “The Star,” a 19th-century poem by Jane Taylor—more commonly known as the children’s lullaby, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

He recites “The Star” slowly, word-for-word, stripping away the melody and thus turning the simple lyrics sound into something more profound. He then translates it into Armenian for a local woman browsing through the wobbling towers of books.

A linear conversation with Frunzik is almost impossible. When asked a question, he might provide half an answer before deciding instead to recite a poem. He reels through the works of famous Armenian poets including Yeghishe Charents, Hovhannes Tumanyan, Avetik Ishakayan, and Sayat-Nova during our conversation.

Armenia has a long history of writers and poets who are let down by either poor or non-existent translations. Charents—who is described as the “Che Guevara of Armenian poetry” by Armine I. Matevosyan, a philology professor at Yerevan State University—could appeal to people and nations all over the world through his scrutiny of social oppression and exploitation. Although one volume of Charents’ work was translated into English by Diana-Der Hovanessian in the 1980s, its emphasis on copying the general meaning meant a lack of rhythm in the final product; it remains the only official translation of Charents’ work.

While the number of translations of other poets has increased over time, the quality is often subpar compared to the original Armenian. This frustrates Frunzik and, in the last few decades, he has been doing the work himself. He jots down his translations in notebooks, but, for the most part, he learns them by heart.

“I don’t look for other [people’s] translations because they translate wrong,” he says, defiantly. “There are some great poets, but they will not be discovered around the world because the translations don’t exist. When people discover them, they will like Armenia more and more. The world doesn’t know us, where Armenia is, or even the country, the history, the geography, or anything.”

Frunzik’s stall stands alongside six tables’ worth of books, nestled at the end of a long row of stalls. The other booksellers’ wares are sparse in comparison to his. Fruznik loads around thirty boxes of books into a neighbor’s van every Saturday and Sunday morning, then makes the twenty-five-minute journey from his village of Marmarashen to Yerevan’s Vernissage market.

Vernissage is an open-air marketplace, established in the 1980s, prior to the Soviet Union’s collapse and Armenia’s subsequent independence. Its name is derived from the French ‘vernissage,’ literally meaning ‘varnish,’ but also the term for an art exhibition’s preview. It began as a collection of artists exhibiting their paintings in the city center, near the Artists Union of Armenia, in a square that’s now named after Charles Aznavour, the French Armenian singer-songwriter. (In stark contrast to Fruznik’s favorite poets, Aznavour’s songs have been translated into nine languages, including Italy’s Neapolitan and Algeria’s Kabyle.)

The stock at Vernissage developed as people were forced to sell their household belongings during a period of severe economic hardship in the ’90s when the country was attempting to find its feet in the early years of independence whilst also fighting a war with neighboring Azerbaijan. In recent years, it has been curated more for tourists, now occupying a designated space in the center of Yerevan, between Aram and Buzand Streets. Household items have been replaced by handmade trinkets, knitted clothes, and jewelry. Books, however, have been a constant.

Books, however, have been a constant.

Frunzik began selling books in the ’90s. The economic downturn meant his job as an English teacher was not enough to support his family in Yerevan. After a full week of teaching class, he and his son, Andranik, would spend the weekends working in an early morning market in the sprawling suburban district of Malatia-Sebastia. Their days would start at around 5 a.m., so they could get to the market for the morning trade.

To rise on a weekend before the crack of dawn was too early, in fact, for Andranik, who once turned back his father’s clocks by a few hours so he could enjoy a lie-in. Fruznik recalls the little prank with a wide smile: “We packed everything up and when we got there, it was two or three o’clock and there was nobody there. I asked Andranik what had happened and he admitted it straight away.”

Juggling his two jobs came with issues, most notably Fruznik’s initial embarrassment of the fact that he did not earn enough as a teacher. Whenever his students or their parents wandered past his stall, he would hide from them. “But then, one day I thought, to work hard is not a shameful thing,” he says. “So when they came to me, I started to give them discounts.”

Fruznik moved his stall to Vernissage in 2000 after retiring from teaching and, among the bookstalls, his is by far the most populated by stock. Piled high are the works of Charents and Tumanyan, English language student books, Soviet land studies of Armenia, catalogs of Armenian carpet styles, and hundreds of others. He estimates his total collection is comprised of 18,000 volumes—of which less than 10% are brought to the market each weekend. The rest are piled into an elaborate 300-strong banana box library which he keeps in the house he shares with his wife in the village of Marmarashen.

“Books have taken care of my family,” says Fruznik. “If I was able to live 500 years, I would not be able to sell 5% of these books that I have.” At Vernissage, Fruznik pays around four dollars for his weekend pitch. In the summer, bookselling is great work, he says, but during the freezing winter months, it can be difficult to break even at an open-air market. But we work diligently to provide, to learn, Fruznik says proudly, because Armenians are like that. “We are different from other nations to the world,” he continues. “There is less crime and we like to work, we are very proud of our work.”

Fruznik has the mandatory Armenian pride that comes with being from a small nation that has struggled for independence. This is pretty much the status quo when Armenians are confronted with tourists or outsiders. They will clamor to tell you how Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity as its official religion, or that Winston Churchill once said his secret to old age was drinking Armenian brandy. No doubt they will also tell you that Mount Ararat—a snow-capped dormant volcano which is visible from Yerevan—was where Noah’s Arc rested.

This is the attitude I’ve experienced since arriving in Armenia last June in a trip originally expected to last just six weeks. With Armenian roots myself, I was welcomed with open arms despite having no grasp of the language. And while I have resisted the desire to reel off Armenia’s achievements to those back home in Britain, a subtler pride in the nation’s progress has certainly developed. The self-identity possessed by Armenians should certainly be celebrated—particularly in a country with such a scarred history.

There was the 1915 genocide of Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire by the Ottoman government. There was the devastating 1988 earthquake in the north of the country which almost completely wiped out the second biggest city, Gyumri, killing 25,000 and leaving tens of thousands more injured or homeless. When Armenia declared independence from the Soviet Union three years later, it culminated in the mid-90s conflict with Azerbaijan over the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the country’s first president after independence, was forced to resign in 1998 over opposition to his efforts to compromise with Azerbaijan. He was replaced by nationalist Robert Kocharyan, whose Republican Party has dominated the country’s politics for the past two decades. Both Kocharyan, and his successor Serzh Sargsyan, oversaw corrupt elections in which reports of ballot-stuffing and votes from dead citizens were frequent. In March 2008, this led to post-election protests against the Republican Party. Eight citizens and two police officers were killed in the demonstrations. Those dark days sparked in the Armenian public an apathetic view of political change. Corruption seeped down from the government to the streets. In my first visit to the country in 2016, I was told that if I ever get pulled over by the police, I should just hand them some cash.

But 2018 may have been a turning point for this small landlocked nation of just over three million. A revolution in the streets in May 2018 brought down the Republican Party. In December of the same year, the country held the first free and fair elections since independence. Nikol Pashinyan, the leader of the party of revolution and a former political prisoner, was elected prime minister with more than 70% of the vote. Armenia’s year of successes was capped off by being named The Economists’ Country of The Year—a nod of recognition celebrated both in the Republic and across the world by diaspora Armenians.

The revolution began with youngsters but, to everyone’s surprise, caught the imagination of their more conservative parents and grandparents too. Frunzik was one such enthusiast. “It was not only Pashinyan, but all the Armenian people, together with their children, who made the revolution happen,” he says.

We’re speaking the day after the election on a bitterly cold mid-December morning. Frunzik tells me that he was one of the first to arrive at his local polling booth Marmarashen during the elections, where he cast his vote for the first time in decades.

“For twenty years or more, thirty years, they didn’t hold fair elections,” he says. “It was a joke. They elected themselves. They showed the results of their election, not our election. I am very glad. There is a lot of hope for Armenian people. If Pashinyan is a good man, then he will prove he is a good man.”

After spending more than half of his life in the Soviet Union, Frunzik sees the revolution as an opportunity for Armenia to make up for the mistakes it made since gaining independence. He doesn’t waste too much time worrying about politics, however. In his time away from the market, he opts instead to spend time in the garden at home and to enjoy old age with his wife.

“I wake up when I want, I sleep when I want. I am like a child,” he says.

But even in his seventies, Fruznik remains a student, ever the reader and learner whose translations were, as his teachers said, preferred. “The books are my brothers,” he says, in one of dozens of turns of phrase that sound seamlessly romantic. “They are not lifeless things. They are living.” At seventy-five, he struggles to stick to his old rule of learning a new poem every week, but he still tries.

I’m an old man but I still have my memory, he says proudly. He pauses and resumes reciting Sahyan’s poem—one of more than 100 he has translated:

“Our language is our conscious, the holy bread of our table, / It is at the core of our soul and the taste of our mouth, / Our language is the smoke of our house, our way in the world, / it is the source of ourselves and the grapevine where it starts, / Our language is our blood, more expensive than the blood, it is our scent and color, / Our language is us that exist, it must be our first and our last love.”

It remains Fruznik’s hope that, one day, he will be able to publish a book of both famous and obscure Armenian poems in the English language. “My customers come to me and say give me the book of poems you recite,” he says. “But it doesn’t exist. It’s in here.” He points to his head, his white baseball cap askew. He has his memory, of course, and quite the stories it has known.

“I don’t have the money for a book,” Fruznik says, “but even an old man can dream.”