Reviews of Poem by Prof I H Pilikian 'Mother's Day'

Poem "Mother's Day"

I do not know if all men and women die the same way

Waiting and hoping she would be coming home

I was certain the doctors were entirely wrong

She lacked any signs of a wasting disease

She’d never smoked – a teetotal almost by birth

She looked so healthy and Confucian wise

Only a little old

Mah-mah Ho-kiss * used to banter with me

Pour frequently freezing water over my magisterial confidence

“ Son, tell me, now!

At this very moment, what’s in my heart?

How would you know it? ”

Her mind was in her heart – that much I knew

“ Who can tell what’s in anybody’s mind? ”

As on earth, so in their vision of the Underworld

The ancients thought of the Sea and its shore as a metaphor

The dreaded Charon transported the dead souls ‘to the other shore’

Little did I know how right and true the old Greeks were!

I had feared death mortally

Would change my path to avoid

A funeral cortege on its way to the seaside…

“ When do you think I can take her home, Nurse?

  Shall we call for a taxi? ”

“ Will you not understand, good Professor

  Your mother is dying, No! She’s not going home! ”

The Irish male nurse burst the shores of his temper

Flooding me with furious oceanic anger

“ No, Prof., you won’t be taking her home ”

He repeated and rubbed tons of sea-salt in my just-wounded soul

I trusted my sister alone and she was dead silent…

Okeanus the classical Greek Titan

Encircled the known world like a belt

Overhanging a fat man’s beer belly

The father of all earthly water was a mother too…

My sister Ar-sineh of Montreal thought I was mad

Cracking camp jokes, babbling of ancient Greeks

Mah-mah Ho-kiss was gasping for breath through an oxygen mask

It was the evening of a long day watching over her hospital bed

And I wanted to make her laugh

“ Mah-mah, Ho-kiss, tell me

What’s in your heart now? ”

Leaning over out of a fearful boredom  

I whispered right into her ears my face very close to hers

In the past our cue for a Confucian joke…

But she was not laughing this time

Dead worried I repeated my Armenian catchphrase

Mah-mah Ho-kiss in-dzi ehs-say +

“ I’ve nothing to say ”

The fury of all the fifty Furies chasing Orestes in Aeschylus

Etched suddenly on her visage through the transparent mask

Suddenly

She gulped

And choked on air

Mah-mah Ar-sineh Ho-kiss hold her Nurse help pull her up

She’s sinking in the sea

And the last bubbles of her universal breath

Slowly one by one surfaced from her unfathomable soulful seaful depths

Luce-tania she was and Titanic

  

The fiery chiaroscuro sun-disk at dusk

Floating like a feather down into Turner’s depths of an infinite sea  

Seeworthy

 

I and Ar-sineh left orphans on the shore

Dumb, dead, and broken hearted

Soul destroyed

How and what shall we could we must we tell Israel our father

Ninety years ago he’d seen his people a million massacred by the Young old Turks

What and how might we must we will we tell our absent siblings

Kha-tchik in Hounslow, Mar-karid in Paris, Mari-noss in Toronto

 

Suddenly 

A gust of gentle wind

Her soul I think on the way out of Golgotha

Breezed through the hospital sea shore

Banging doors and blowing the ward windows wide open

Flapping

Suddenly

A quiet rumble alighted in a quick flash lightning

Rain fell painfully on the panes outside for just a few moments

Was my mah-mah ho-kiss Christ’s sister?

The fear of death had almost killed me

Until the day I saw the scene of my Mother’s Day

When the titanic Okeanus sank my mother’s ship

Death the Reaper rapes all life before it

Do not avoid your parents’ death my child

Witnessing their passing away at life’s seashore

Shall give you the courage you need

To survive in sanity in a world harvested

Regularly by God’s own very Rapist

                    END                                                      

                                                                                                                                

+ Armenian, translates my mother, my soul, tell me! – The Indo-European root of the Armenian verb

    “ehs-say-l” (infinitive form) is indeed cognate precisely with the English verb to “say”.  

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Mother’s Day

This poem holds a certain heraldically composed piece of writing, a shorthand of what is known to be the truth in the writers minds eye! 

I challenge the title as not being the traditional ‘Mother’s Day’ but that of the day his mother passes! 

Re-arranged one can read in iambic pentameters, if the writer wished it to be read in that

format. No, he does not write in calm or tranquil tones, but that of his rage! Reading through this narrative one senses, magic yet a yearning in one breath. 

It is written as if through Greek mythology, holding the secrets of death and what remains of us when our spirits have long flown to an ancient world, leaving behind what lays useless, the body she once used to inhabit. 

Pilikian is not a Godless soul, his words are so strong one thinks against God, when writing - ‘God’s own rapist’ - it is an insightful comment to his strong bond he once had, indeed still has even in her death! He used the word as an unfair act shortening her life without consent. God cannot take away what is his! Not in the way that a rapist does, without consent. For God is the creator of man kind, we read in scriptures God breathed life into Adam and Eve. 

Pilikian’s sensitive character uses sayings like, ‘Rubbed tons of sea-salt in my just-wounded soul’ as metaphor. He uses characters from Greek mythology to build on mental pictures, each to his own pallet. 

Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra - brother to Electra and Iphigenia. He kills his mother and her lover Aegisthus to avenge his father’s murder. [Unlike, Oedipus, who killed his father & married his mother]. Using smilie, a figure of speech he gets across a tragic situation.

We note, underlined verses, very few commas in part, full stops and speech marks or exclamation marks! Almost as if a child of school age has written it, yet it contains such adult emotions and thought! Is it that he is reduced to that of a child or can’t get the words down fast enough in life’s cruel blow - She created him in her womb, one does not mean one has ‘Oedipus complex’ to love ones mother! 

Looking at the Shapes of the verses, a reflection of how the expression of torment, wretchedness, imbalance of the brain. 

No, God is not the rapist! That is not what he is saying! God has someone who carries it out for him! Could it be the Devil in disguise as the ‘Grim Reaper’ Only The Professor knows! Why not ask him! No, not God!

Seta Tokatlian

Please read the poem and leave a comment.

http://setasarmenian.blogspot.co.uk/

Alternatively you may purchase the book ref:

The ISBN 978-5-540-052288-0  

Hayastan Publishing House - Yerevan -

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{The ancient Celts believed – and their modern descendents the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots still do – that great poets are life’s great philosophers.  Enriched with classical references, and full of memorable lines, Professor Pilikian’s new narrative poem seems to display this acute insight.   It celebrates Mother’s Day uniquely with a complex of tragic sentiments of inconsolable sadness and emotionalism, which however finally turn into a victory song over Death, with perhaps the most shocking last words of any line in the history of English poetry I can quote with some trepidation – the traditional Christian Medieval image of Death the Reaper, becomes God’s post-modern violator of life – an astounding philosophical revelation the reader shall not forget – Simon Aynedjian, editor, Gibrahayer Internet Magazine}.

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Mr. Jirair Tutunjian is an authoritative literary critic in the Armenian Diaspora.  A most sought after Editor of English publications, he is also the Editor of the English Section of Dr. Dikran Aprahamian’sKeghart.com, the Canadian Armenian cultural website.   

                              

The Sea Scene on My Mother’s Day by Hovhanness I. Pilikian, an English poem and its translation into 19 languages, Hayastan Publishers, Yerevan, Armenia, 2012

Reviewed by Jirair Tutunjian

Books with multilingual translations of poetry are not new to Armenians. However, Hovhanness I. Pilikian’s The Sea Scene on My Mother’s Day must be one for the record books; No less than translations into 19 languages of Pilikian’s single poem – originally written in English – are compiled in the book.

Concept originator and project manager was Artsvi Bakhchinian, an old hand at translating into Armenian. The translations into as diverse languages as Latvian, Peruvian Quechua, and Nigerian Yoruba, in addition to a number of Middle Eastern and Oriental languages, were done by an international group composed of a music promoter, an economist, a university lecturer, a potter, gallery owner, editor, painter… Keeping up with the international concept of the book, the cover illustration is by Elizabeth Romhild, née Davidian, who lives in Bangkok.

Some of the translators include their appreciation of the poem or talk about their methodology. Some have provided their photos. Others have let the translation speak for itself. Bakhchinian explains that the inconsistency reflects Pilikian’s belief that poetry-books should contain some mysteries… “… I have not harmonized or coordinated everything formally strictly with each other,” says Bakhchinian in his introduction.

Picking on Pilikian/Bakhchinian theme, we believe poetry is a mystery. It is meant to be sung and to be heard. Poetry can die when dissected. Thus, we would let the poem speak for itself. Having said that, we would be remiss not to mention the richness of polymath Pilikian’s poetic language, the mythical allusions and alliterations, the neologisms, the play on words (Ho-kiss, Luce-tania, See-worthy) – The poem, dedicated to his dying mother, is a festival of metaphors—the sea coast and the sea are the beginning and end of life, the father of all water was a mother too …The nurse burst the shores of his temper/ Flooding me with furious oceanic anger; the last bubble of her universal breath as her soul departed Golgotha and titanic Okeanus sank my mother’s ship.

The poem is also full of surrealist images. One such evocative line, A funeral cortege on its way to the seaside is right out of a Federico Fellini movie. To add to the mystery and the dreamy last minutes of his mother, Pilikian has written the elegy without punctuation. It works.

The poem is a tribute and a farewell to the poet’s mother Tefarik. It’s a resignation to and a rebellion against Death. Expressing his indignation to the Grim Reaper/Charon, Pilikian calls Death God’s very own Rapist as he ends the gut-wrenching eulogy.  

The mother and child relationship in Pilikian's poem is innovative and sociologically revolutionary – hitherto, in the cultural tradition of Anglosphere, the mother-and-child relations, under the exclusive influence of Freud and his -isms are diseased, and sexual.  In Pilikian's world-view, they are profoundly spiritual, wholesome, not sensuous, and deeply philosophical; the Mother challenges her child to read her mind, not express an Oedipus Complex.  

Interlaced with the farewell is the indomitable silence of Death. When the poet was young, Tefarik often asked him: Son, tell me, now! At this very moment, what’s in my heart? How would you know it?

At his mother’s deathbed, the poet asks his mother the same question. The answer is that of Death’s: I’ve nothing to say.

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Pilikian's poem is immediately powerful and unexpectedly original, from its very first line; hence it is worth reading/hearing it in the music of some of the several languages of the translations (what we can reproduce in Roman alphabet);

I do not know if all men and women die the same way

(The English original)

Je ne sais guère si tous les hommes et les femmes meurent de la même manière  (French, by Loussineh Shoukourian)

Ich weiss nicht, ob alle Maenner und Frauen auf gleiche Art sterben

(German, by Lorntie Jung)

Io non so se gli uomini e le donne muoiono allo stesso modo

(Italian, by Serena Ferrando)

Não sei se todos os homens e mulheres morrem do mesmo modo

(Portuguese, by Nadia Kerecuk)

Kikin niraqtakamachus llapan qharipas, llapan warmipas wañun, chaytaqa manam yachanichu    (Peruvian Quechwa, by Nonato Rufino Chuquimamani Valerand Carmen Gladis Alosilla Morales)

Yo no sé si todos los hombres y mujeres mueren de la misma manera

(Spanish, by Jessica Luong)

Mio mo boya gbogbo okunrin ati obinrin ma nku bakana

(Nigerian-African Yoruba, by Bridget Alabi)

Maanan yachanichu, kasqallantachus llapan qharikunapas warmikunapas wañunku  (Quechwa, by Hilda Cañari Loaiza)