The Last Representative of the Western Armenian Poetry

Compiled by Vahe H. Apelian

Today Hrach Kalsahakian covered the life and the literary works of Mateos Zarifian (1894-1924) in a Youtube broadcast, linked below. He frequently posts there presenting persons and events pertaining to Armenians and Armenia. In his recent broadcast he also read a poem Mateos Zarifian wrote inspired by the ancient ruins of Baalbek, in Lebanon and likened its magnificent past and its sad reality to his tumultuous young life. He had gone to Lebanon hoping that its sunny and temperate weather will have a beneficial effect on his health.

Mateos Zarifian is considered to be the last representative of the Western Armenian poetry. This distinction is presumably accorded to him because he was born at a time when the overwhelming majority of the Western Armenians inhabited their ancestral lands and his literary productivity occurred there and then and outlived the rest. He passed away in Istanbul in 1924.

I quoted the following from the “ThisWeekInArmenianHistory” blog “prepared by the Armenian National Education Committee (ANEC), a joint project of the Eastern Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Armenian Relief Society.” I thought the readers of my blog might find it interesting and informative. Hopefully, I am not infringing any exclusivity.

It is unfortunate fact of the Armenian literature that a number of Armenian poets, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, died of tuberculosis at a young age much like Mateos Zarifian. The blog also names the following young poets who died young: Bedros Tourian (1851-1872), Vahan Derian (1885-1920), Misak Medzarentz (1886-1908).

The quote:

“Zarifian the less known of the four (poets who died young) was born on January 16, 1894, in the neighborhood of Gedik Pasha (Constantinople). He spent his childhood and youth in Scutari. He studied at the school of Ijadieh, the Robert College, and the Berberian School, which he finished in 1913. He was an active sportsman and earned prizes in the Armenian Olympic games organized in Constantinople (1912-1913) 

He went to Adana to work as a teacher of English and physical education at the local Armenian school. The first symptoms of tuberculosis, a strong chest pain, appeared at that time. In 1914 he interrupted his work and went to Lebanon, hoping that the mountainous air would help cure him. At the beginning of World War I, he was drafted into the Ottoman army. While studying at the school of non-commissioned officers, his unruly behavior landed him before a military tribunal, which sentenced him to exile. However, some influential interventions helped commute this sentence to long-term prison. Some months later, he was freed and started serving at the military hospital as a male nurse. 

After the armistice of Mudros (1918), Zarifian went to the interior as a translator for the British army to participate in the task of gathering Armenian survivors. Between 1919 and 1921 he worked at his alma mater, the Berberian School, as a teacher of English and physical education. His illness prompted him to pour his life experience into literature. In 1919 he started publishing poems in the daily Jagadamard. His poetry reflected a hopeful approach to life and death, and his love poems disclosed the melancholic overtones of his soul, “Ah! The superb poem of my soul, Of my ruined, destroyed soul…”

He published two volumes of poetry, Songs of Grief and Peace (1921) and Songs of Life and Death (1922), which were critically acclaimed. His long battle with tuberculosis came to a critical point after 1922. Zarifian, the last representative of Western Armenian poetry, passed away on April 9, 1924, at the age of thirty. “

The Armenian Wikipedia notes that the eminent man of letters Vahe Vahian compiled Mateos Zarifian’s published and unpublished poems, prose, and correspondences in 1956 in Beirut in a voluminous book. A selection of his poems was published in Yerevan, Armenia in 1963 and republished in 1981 assuring this young Western Armenian eminent poet’s rightful place in the Armenian literature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4I4HNHj8T4