© Rizzoli, 2009 An oversight impossible
Interview Antonia Arslan with on La Strada di Smyrna
by Stefania Garna
Deportate, spurge, profughe , No. 15, January 2011
February 16, Last year, I had an interview with Antonia Arslan, at her home in Padua on his latest book.
- Stefania Garna: At the end of La Strada di Smyrna, you write again: "A novel is the work of a narrator in love: he does not study history, but lovingly tells the stories of his characters credible. And yet you still offers a solid historical construction. Each chapter begins with a specific date to begin. Would you talk about your sources?
- Antonia Arslan: I wrote this sentence about love for the narrator to say that I do not pretend to be art historian, however, probably also because of my thinking and my personal training, I does not mention things myself without documented. The sources were diverse, first virtually nonexistent in Italian: the burning of Smyrna is very seldom discussed and little studied in Italy, few translations of books on this theme, in fact ignored. The most important books are those I have indicated in the acknowledgments at the end. Especially that of Marjorie Dobkin Hovsepian and that of Herve Georgelin (1). I retain a happy coincidence that led him to publish this important book and well documented, there are few. Georgelin not only read all the available Greek sources, but he has consulted directly with the oral testimonies of refugees arrived in Greece from Smyrna, which the census was decided by the Greek government in person - a corpus of documents, many unpublished, which are transcribed and preserved and stored in Athens since the 1920s. Yet the fact that the Greek government in 1922-23 is facing two simultaneous disasters seem to have totally disappeared from our minds. The defeat the Greek army Aboard retired in confusion during the last days of August 1922 and it is not simply a retreat because the command is almost non-existent (there is about this drug episodes) and soldiers returning from several years war pension plus the last campaign in Anatolia and the soldiers ill-equipped and poorly paid have only one idea: to return home. The retreat of the army also means trial and convictions of senior officers who led the army to be defeated in this way, what is the loss of Smyrna, a city commercial that the Greeks could have kept had they been properly advised, etc.. And then the second disaster: the arrival of about one and half million refugees who come from the Anatolian territories and disrupt the economy of Greece, then a small agricultural nation, poor and mountainous, with four million inhabitants; and who, at that time, is facing an economic disaster. What saves it is the solidarity of the famous American organization, the Near East Relief [Relief in the Near East], the first great humanitarian institution which operates on a large scale, organized villages and chuckwagon canvas, orphanages, schools, small subsistence activities, etc.. Money keeps flowing for this purpose in Greece, and the Armenians will never forget that Greece has welcomed all, despite these difficulties. The testimony on this phase of the diaspora, also published in Italy are numerous. I recall in this connection the work of David Kherdian, Lontano da casa , forthcoming in 2010 in a new edition published by Guerini e Associati, translated by Cecilia Veronese (2). Not to mention Pietre sul cuore Tachdjian Alice, published in 2003 (reviewed in Deportate, spurge, profughe , No. 2, January 2005) (3). I also read the testimony of the doctor Garabed Armenian Hatcherian, a genocide survivor who had settled at Smyrna, and then miraculously saved his family. Just arrived, refugee, Mytilene, the island of Lesbos, he engages in small marks day after day in his diary returned "infinite variations of oral histories" which I have drawn - for example, in workpiece Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (4), pages are clearly nature documentary and autobiographical which may belong to the father or grandfather and express a point of view totally different from that of Hatcherian. The most difficult was to reconstruct the topography of the city according to the different stories. Today, the city of Smyrna is different, and thanks to Hervé Georgelin documentation and maps of several publications, however we found it very well. Of course, I also worked on photographic materials, remember that my book still evokes the road from Smyrna, ie towards the city I had the task of recounting the tormented days of the city. That said, both online and in the appendices of these books there are many photographs of that era, because the fire has been covered - those famous pictures which show the burning houses with their facades such as eyes, behind which come the flames ... I was just told not to contradict historical facts.
- Stefania Garna: poignant moment, Chouchanig's funeral in a small cove on the eastern tip of Crete, "under the towering palms of Vai" a character that you have devoted pages very dense. How do we interpret it?
- Antonia Arslan: Burial is a seal, is the homage of men at sea, it is also my personal experience that intertwines here when I went to Vai I experienced very intense days - I've never done before or since, an experience like this: see a city whose columns are still half buried underground. Nearby is the village of Kato Zakros, where they found a splendid Minoan palace, also four large buildings. A land steeped in history.
- Stefania Garna: And then there including major reconstruction in 1919, especially with the presence of Italians ...
- Antonia Arslan: is a chapter that I have dealt with only Incidentally, even if I had to mention the heart; Italy was then in full force, then being in possession of the Dodecanese islands to twelve exceptional strategic position. To my knowledge, this topic has not been very thorough, was perhaps most studied Italian presence in the Dodecanese that this attempt in 1918-19 to enter the continent: Italy wanted Smyrna. The challenge was to convince Greece to land because it had more rights in Smyrna, due to the presence of Greek citizens, both English and French prime ministers gave it the green light, then even if they lent themselves gambling help Mustafa Kemal. Greece has certainly taken an insane adventure, with madness of small quantities of conventional armies, but was encouraged to disembark and to sink into land. The Italians had an area a little further south from there, they also helped Kemal, providing weapons and supplies ; Housing even his loyal soldiers who might need to take refuge during their war of attrition (from 1919 to 1922, naturally) against the Greek army, in summary, the Italians took over from France and England , the main culprits. Now the only who boarded during the burning of Smyrna (and we are in September 1922), at night, in secret, were the Italians, a little confused and violating orders, but in a laudable goal. For example, Coren Minachian fled through an Italian sailor and tells precisely ( Deportate, spurge, profughe , No. 3, July 2005) (5).
- Stefania Garna: Presumably minor characters as Fräulein Nussbaum and Miss Brown are born from the testimony of the missionaries present in the Ottoman Empire, often from newspapers or written texts of the first hand ...
- Antonia Arslan: Yes, of course. But I changed their names, and these texts are another type of evidence and writing private. Let us not forget that in recent years have seen a great deal of evidence in published or unpublished Language little circulation, which translates to As. I want to remind that the cleric Apostolic Grigoris Balakian, great uncle of Peter Balakian, an Armenian-American writers of the best known, which has had great success with his family history told in the novel Black Dog of Fate (6), he discovered, published in Russian in 1920 to be exact, the testimony of his great-uncle, a translated work on in France last year under the title The Armenian Golgotha (7); that other bishop is the sole survivor of the famous group deported April 24, 1915; whereby we are now in possession of a multitude of basic data on how unclear this phase of the deportation. There is also significant evidence in Armenian that have never been translated, for example a collection of 600 testimonies of survivors, a monumental undertaking by a researcher in Armenia, which we have translated a few pages (8 ); the Survivors, spouses Miller ( Deportate, spurge, profughe , No. 8, January 2008) (9), were a hundred and already we recreate a world, think of those 600 votes! The appearance important to note is that none of these sources does not contradict the other, each tells how to survive personal tragedy and the rest of the family.
- Stefania Garna: About oral sources which you have access, how could you for example to reconstruct the "Ballad of the deported?
- Antonia Arslan: In fact, I found on the internet and of course I made the necessary checks. I am part of a forum in which researchers are continually Turkish, English, American, Australian, etc.., a forum for exchange of information and debate. These days, for example, one hotly debated on drowning collective Trebizond; doubts or questions about these events, many of us loved in the space of three days of hard data from official records. Returning to this song I titled the lullaby of the deportees, it was found and restored in this manner until a more complete version that I translated from the English version.
- Stefania Garna: In your novel alternate historical maps and personal cards. For example, you cite the paper, short and occasional, written in Italian, but in the Armenian alphabet, the grandfather Yervant. There also seems to be broken down the shame of having survived. How should we interpret this source?
- Antonia Arslan: This is not really a source, but pages with a purely family. The fact in itself struck me: a few pages discussing episodes often neutral, but the grandfather wanted him to write in Armenian. I remember rather Ambassador Morgenthau's Story , a document required to be published in Italian translation, with extensive photographic documentation of time, during the fall of 2010, still with Guerini e Associati (under the title Diario dell'Ambasciatore Morgenthau ) ( 10).
- Stefania Garna: In this second book, the ratio of attraction (nostalgic) and repulsion between West and East is confirmed through the generational link between father and son, whom you spend most of the pages moving. What you define as "the shame of blood denied" " temptation of forgetting "can be a warning to today's society?
- Antonia Arslan: Yes, I think, provided we have constantly in mind one thing: each person is an individual and may react differently. We have the right to blame those who try by every means to incorporate a company and we have the right to consider the opposite as soon as those who jealously guard their customs, their habits. I wonder. In truth, I have no definitive answer, but my position stems from so many people, really, Friends or not, I have met in my life, of Middle Eastern origin, and therefore non-Western, who were part of the Italian or French. My feeling is that Armenians have always been well accepted and are also able to integrate very well, because they hold so obsessively, to respect the laws of the country in which they live. In Italy, the Armenians are so few that they were virtually integrated, because they also have no schools; transmit their language to children has always been very difficult and it is a phenomenon rare, especially since the closure of the Armenian College in Venice, also for boys. Abroad, however, where large communities they seek and often get to keep their customs, including food, but also language, and also fight for it. Who wants to integrate is regarded with less sympathy. When I write that the Armenians "are not and will never be Westerners, I mean something more intimate, because of so many little things, something that a Westerner strain can also find annoying. For example, decide to make an appointment ... For me, the western has always battled with the East because it is more indolent, while the West, tends to be more excessive in terms of punctuality, because that it does appear that way. Small fractures and oscillations that pass in everyone. In particular, the ratio of Yervant and his son, not only is the move generation, but also the intervention of the mother. In addition, at that time it was much less about defending minority identity is not anything to everything on what has developed debate, the last twenty years, and thus, obviously, who was abroad tended to adopt all he could of the country in which he entered. So I made the choices that are totally Italianized son. And yet they were not ... An oversight impossible.
- Stefania Garna: Armin T. Wegner wrote in 1915: "The Armenians have died of all deaths in the world. "The survivors of your novel, too, have survived all deaths in the world. How did you go with this component of your story, which does not open by accident by the date July 25, 1916, while the bulk of the genocide has been committed? A situation she holds you at heart in particular?
- Antonia Arslan: The world of exile and survival, I have taken in many facets, with the echo of countless stories. When I read from my documentation was filed well, so I can write. And I proceed by instinct. Naturally, I make sure not to have altered data, I seek to be faithful to what I read and found, but in the narrative, this that emerges connects or disconnects, depending also on internal logic, which is the logic of the narrative there is logic in the telling, which is that of reasonableness and that we must respect. Three tragic events following one another, in the space of two days, are not tolerable in a story, even if a witness you say. A very special situation, which is close to my heart, is the children's arrival in Venice, especially this page where I realized that as they advance toward the north, the atmosphere became more tenuous, calmer colors and we enter the world of Venetian I could reconstruct the arrival through the stories of uncles especially, I know for sure that the host Vart went to Venice, because he told his son, the the most important events all happened really, often based on oral histories, as compared with letters or diaries; for me to restore the connections.
- Stefania Garna: You have inserted a few portraits in the book of "friends." I think the doctor Mirachian Coren. How Does it fit on the side of reality, in a natural dialogue with the truth? Would you talk about?
- Antonia Arslan: is what we are used in movies to name cameo, I loved Dr. Mirachian looked like my grandfather, but he did not authority, it was much more moderate, going home only to eat caramels and listen to stories, I accompanied Aunt Harriet was someone important and removes his little book really that great courage. Succeed in passing its diplomas, after losing twice his entire family ... I wanted to honor him.
- Stefania Garna: The penultimate chapter ends with the episode of the church set on fire. The need for a strong gesture that might redeem the Armenians fleeing a second time, their lost land, turns into a sinister prelude to major sacrifice which will be doomed Armenians at Smyrna. Indeed, throughout the community at various events, we must make the accounts with this desire for rebirth, but also death and destruction, the inevitability of fate. In your opinion, what was in Anatolia, the specific contribution of the Armenian culture and the wider Christian community in terms of spiritual dimension and choice of tolerance and sharing?
- Antonia Arslan: On this theme we could write entire volumes ... Of course, I saw the fire in the church as a prelude to the burning of Smyrna, which leads to the following Greeks and, through them, all the Christian minorities in Anatolia. The contribution of the three major Christian minorities (Greeks, Armenian and Syriac) had long been very important, especially in the economic field for the Armenians, and diplomatically, both for Armenians and the Greeks. These civilizations were bridges, with the obvious purpose: living subject within the empire, find their way to inspire great confidence, it's not for nothing that the Armenians were called the "loyal community" .
- Stefania Garna: Fire of Smyrna is the concluding chapter of the novel. The tragic epilogue of the Christian presence millennium, Armenian and Greek, in the town-butterfly, thanks to you, is carefully described, almost at a distance, through the attempt of Isaac and Ismene to save orphans, leading them to port for them then embark on a ship U.S., thus mitigating the scenario of the great fire. In a manner very different from that of a writer as Sotiríu Dido (11), as besides you add as a Greek key evidence. In La Strada di Smyrna, one feels it a sort of dreamy slow action, even as events overtook them. What the reasons for this choice?
- Antonia Arslan: I really believe be made like that. I spent months during which I did not write, knowing that I was fighting the fire at Smyrna, and then one day I heard Carmen and suddenly I thought: "In Town-butterfly they listen Carmen "and a link was created, the largest fire I've always conceived as a series of data required that I could not ignore: the days, the change wind, witnesses who saw the soldiers set fire; a point which nobody denies, even the Turks. Then, as and when, this form appeared somewhat dreamy, the way a very intense involvement, but at the same time with a deep awareness of not being there, as a narrator, in fact, I had to tell so as to involve the reader, it's not in my nature to be morbid, even if the stories are terrible to be faced on all sides, because the truth is that - like the scene of the beheading in Le Mas des Sempad larks, but without adding a word that is not necessary. When I concluded: "Now, patient reader, we can cry together, "my words are different from those of Sotiríu example, because you can not forget that at this moment the Armenian memory is exhausted by more than four years of persecution, or survivors of the genocide, when they arrive in Smyrna, trying to regain a semblance of normality, then suddenly, once again ... At that time many have thrown in the towel and let themselves be killed, the Greeks nevertheless had the opposite shore of the Aegean, there was still a nation on the other side, which has a strong symbolic power. Sotiríu is certainly very hard on the Greeks of Greece and it reflects the composition of this drama: the Greeks of Greece ended up with a million and a half Greeks to rescue, feed, etc.. and they called them "Turks", ie Greeks of Anatolia. Even today in Athens.
- Stefania Garna: In the prologue to La Strada di Smyrna, on the clipboard pen or paper - which, again, back to the grandfather and Yervant East , through Miss Arpiarian and his memories almost mirror - you endnotes description "These colors were screaming to be released. "With this mode of writing and rewriting of yours, you're down and reassembled several times in the world of your childhood, your little girl's emotions, releasing these colors. Have you made the changes during this process?
- Antonia Arslan: No. It is this same impulse terrible. Except that as I wrote La Strada di Smyrna, I realized that the context was much larger, it required more documentation, especially with regard to the Greeks. For Armenians had already mastered the material, I wanted to do otherwise, something that is both serious and documented for them.
- Stefania Garna: recurring presence in the book, that of food, other than that, obsessive, deportation (of which there are still some traces in orphans) evolve around food beings - mostly women - wonderful. Why?
- Antonia Arslan: Because the food is what, in a culture, remains the highest at all levels; at nostalgia, perhaps, who can not cook, even among those who lost their language, it remains a traditional dish ... The classic example comes not from my book, but the book my grandmother mother, Fethiye Cetin: writer recalls the famous focaccia (Easter), his grandmother passing prepare, exchange and receives, though she does not speak his language, it has been converted and married strength, and that he has forbidden to remember that it was Armenian. But the focaccia remained.
- Stefania Garna: In conclusion of your interview of 2005 ( Deportate, spurge, profughe , No. 2, January 2005) (12), you affirm quietly fear more the inability of Europe to handle the negotiations for Turkish entry into Europe that the internal situation of that Turkey. In your opinion, what state are now the Islamic Republic and the European community?
- Antonia Arslan: In an impasse, I would say, first because of the objective situation of difficulty facing the European Union - we are always more disorganized, we must not underestimate the many nations within the EU; add the current presidency of Spain, a country in crisis more than Italy, a stalemate like the new entrants into the EU in general, as more and more people are realizing that in Brussels something goes wrong, a caste which governs the EU enacts laws on extravagant things minor or insignificant and that n ' has not yet understood that we must measure a large country like Turkey with adequate resources, beginning with those of diplomacy, underestimating the impact that in l’U.E. l’entrée d’une nation armée jusqu’aux dents, avec les forces militaires puissantes et motivées d’un peuple musulman. En fait, ceux qui ont fait un pas en avant ce sont les citoyens turcs, car de plus en plus de voix s’élèvent pour défendre les droits fondamentaux ; depuis l’assassinat de Hrant Dink, il y a chaque année des manifestations ; un prix porte son nom ; de plus en plus de journalistes, d’écrivains et d’universitaires lèvent le voile sur ce grand refoulement qu’est pour la Turquie la question arménienne. L’incendie de Smyrne rentre peut-être aussi dans ce cadre et lèche la fondation de la république turque moderne. On the other hand, it is understandable that Kemal acted for obvious military reasons, a maneuver that won great leader: he ended up driving out the Greeks and destroyed the homes of their opposition. Prime Minister Erdogan has signed protocols with those famous Armenia in October 2009, and now he is backing. I therefore speak of "cautious optimism", but it is not appropriate to play the naive, as some Italian journalists who were content to titrate "Peace Agreement between Armenians and Turks."
- Stefania Garna: We expect your third book, that thou hast announced for this year. This is not the conclusion of the trilogy about your family, but a testimony to your life on hold, a collection of reflections on your experience in and around your illness sudden and dramatic, last spring. Easter night began ...
- Antonia Arslan: I understood very simply that I would never have started the third book, if I had taken stock of this experience (13) . I tried to accept and not evade the experience of the ICU (sepsis following renal) because it has actually changed my life. This book will not be a novel ...
Notes
1. Hervé Georgelin. The end of Smyrna. Cosmopolitanism to nationalism . Paris: CNRS Editions, 2005 (Editor's note).
2. French translation by Laurence Lenglet: David Kherdian, Far from home: the story of a young Armenian , Paris: Ecole des Loisirs, 1990 (translator's note)
3. Review translated into French: http://armeniantrends.blogspot.com/2009/02/alys-tachdjian.html (translator's note)
4. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex , Translated de l'anglais par Marc Cholodenko, Editions de l'Olivier, 2003 (NDT)
5. "As the sky half covered, the sun can be glimpsed from time to time, so my memory" - Children in Metz Yeghérn Armenian. " Review by Stefania Garn. deported, exiled, displaced , No. 3, juillet 2005, p. 143-152. Traduction française par Georges Day: http://armeniantrends.blogspot.com/2009/03/enfances.html (NDT)
6. Traduction française par Georges Day, à paraître en 2011 aux éditions MetisPresses (Geneva). (Translator's note)
7. Bishop Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha / Berlin - Deir es-Zor , Hratch Bedrossian translation, published by Le Cercle Writings of Caucasians, 2 vols., 2002 and 2004 (translator's note)
8. Referring to research Verjine Svazlian, The Armenian Genocide: Eyewitness survivors - http://www.cilicia.com/armo_book_testimony-web.html (Armenian) (translator's note)
9. Donald E. Miller - Touryan Lorna Miller Survivors. It genocidio degli Armeni raccontato Allora chi da bambino era , Milano: Guerini e Associati, 2007 - Stefania Garna review, in Deportate, spurge, profughe , No. 8 gennaio 2008, p. 223-225 (translator's note)
10. Henry Morgenthau, Memoirs of Ambassador Morgenthau twenty-six months in Turkey , Paris: Payot, 1919. Repr. Paris: Payot, 1984, with a foreword by Gerard Chaliand.
11. Dido Sotiríu, Addio Anatolia , Milano: Crocetti Editore, 2006 (Editor's note)
12. "Intervista ad Antonia Arslan / La Masseria delle Allodola : Storie e storia al femminile ', Edited by Stephen Garni, deported, exiled, displaced , No. 2, January 2005, p. 147-152
13. Antonia Arslan, Ishtar 2. Reports from my awakening , Milan: Rizzoli, 2010 - the voir de l'entretien. avec Robert I. Zanini, Future , 11/11/2010 (traduction française G. Day - http://armeniantrends.blogspot.com/2011/01/antonia-arslan-ishtar-2.html )
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Source: http://www.unive.it/nqcontent.cfm?a_id=84771
Traduction de l'anglais: © Georges Festa - 02.2011
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