Vahe H. Apelian
"None sought the boy’s sad heart to read,"
The attached is a drawn portrait of the eminent Armenian poet Bedros Tourian. It is reproduced whenever a portrait of the poet is included in a text or in a book.
Bedros Tourian was born on born on May 20, 1851, in Üsküdar, a suburb in Constantinople, the greater capital of the Ottoman Empire, and died on February 2, 1872, at the age of twenty-one. He did not have any picture taken of him during his lifetime. Moushegh Ishkhan quoted the following about fashioning a portrait of Bedros Tourian in his two-volume sequel about modern Armenian literature (Արդի Հայ Գրականութիւն).
In 1892, twenty years after his death, Megerdich Barsamiants (Մկրտիչ Պարսամեանց), started shaping a portrait of him based on the information he gathered from his parental family members, relatives, and friends. However, he passed away before completing his task. Years later Diran Chrakian (Տիրան Չրաքեան) (1875-1921) who was also painter along being a writer who wrote under the penname Indra (Ինտրա), completed the task. However, Arshag Chobanian (Արշատ Չոպանեան), the eminent man of letters and social activist who studied the literary works of Bedros Tourian and wrote about him found the portrait “cold and without a soul” and refused to include a copy of the portrait in the book he wrote about “The Life and Work of Tourian” (Դուրեանի Կեանքն որ Գործը).
In 1957 the Turkish government opened a road that passed through that part of the Armenian cemetery in Üsküdar where Bedros Tourian was buried. His remains were unearthed and re-entered further away in the cemetery. But his skull was sent to Armenia to the eminent surgeon Antranig Jazarian (Անդրանիկ Ճազարեան) who undertook a more plausible rendering of Bedros Tourian portrait based on the features of his skull. It is that portrait that is used to this day.
Bedros Tourian’s family members have described him as follows: “His hair was chesnut or auburn, dense and straight. He combed his hair upward and like a girls’ hair splitting it in the middle. His eyebrows were curviform or arched and were wide under a broad forehead. He had large eyelids, dark colored eyes and long and black eyelashes. His nose was avian (eagle like), with little facial hair, fresh skin, and thin lips. He was the personification of a handsome young man, with an effeminate beauty. His friends would jokingly tell him to shave the few hairs under his nose so they would pass him as a girl!”
Bedros Tourian was also a playwright and had the plays he wrote staged, but he remains the eminent poet. All in all, 39 poems have survived from Bedros Tourian and there is no documentary evidence that he wrote more, and the rest were lost. Of those 39 poems, 26 were written during the last two years of his life. Bedros Tourian remains an immortal in the annals of our tortous history for the 39 poems he wrote.
Anecdotes about Bedros Tourian:
Khrimian Hayrig was elected as the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1869. The eighteen years old Bedros Tourian, who had already established a reputation for himself as a playwright and a poet, moved by the reputation that had preceded the election of the young clergy from the interior of the country, and dedicated a poem to the newly elected patriarch. Three years later, in 1872, the dying poet asked his friends to have him buried in a funeral procession that was accompanied by a musical band. But it was against the customs of the day to have such a procession. Consequently, the church forbade the mourners of the young poet to have him buried having a band in the funeral procession. In desperation Bedros Tourian’s friends, who were determined to carry the young poet’s wishes, appealed to the Patriarch Khrimian Hayrig who, in turn, famously told them that he too would not permit them to have such procession but would forgive them for having it done.
Robert Haddejian, the dean of the Armenian journalists and a literary icon in his own right noted that when Levon Der Bedrossian, as the newly nationally elected first president of Armenia, paid a visit to Istanbul, the only request he had for an unscheduled event was visiting Bedros Tourian's tomb and pay homage to the young poet as his homage to all the Armenians buried in the famous Armenian cemetery in Üsküdar, Istanbul. Robert Haddejian claims that Bedros Tourian's tomb remains the most popular visitation site for Armenians visiting Istanbul.
Bedros Tourian is often remembered for the last quatrain of his poem titled "My Death". it is a mistaken understanding that the same is inscribed on his tombstone. The inscription on his tombstone in classical Armenian depicts his birth and death dates and the anguish it caused.
Alice Stone Blackwell (September 14, 1857 – March 15, 1950) translated Bedros Tourian’s poems into English (http://armenianhouse.org/blackwell/biography-en.html). Two translated poems are attached below.
1. LITTLE LAKE
WHY dost thou lie in hushed surprise,
Thou little lonely mere ?
Did some fair woman wistfully
Gaze in thy mirror clear?
Or are thy waters calm and still
Admiring the blue sky,
Where shining cloudlets, like thy foam,
Are drifting softly by ?
Sad little lake, let us be friends!
I too am desolate ;
I too would fain, beneath the sky,
In silence meditate.
As many thoughts are in my mind
As wavelets o’er thee roam ;
As many wounds are in my heart
As thou hast flakes of foam.
But if heaven’s constellations all
Should drop into thy breast,
Thou still wouldst not be like my soul, —
A flame-sea without rest.
There, when the air and thou are calm,
The clouds let fall no showers ;
The stars that rise there do not set,
And fadeless are the flowers.
Thou art my queen, O little lake !
For e’en when ripples thrill
Thy surface, in thy quivering depths
Thou hold’st me, trembling, still.
Full many have rejected me :
“ What has he but his lyre ? ”
“ He trembles, and his face is pale ;
His life must soon expire ! ”
None said, “ Poor child, why pines he thus ?
If he beloved should be,
Haply he might not die, but live, —
Live, and grow fair to see.”
None sought the boy’s sad heart to read,
Nor in its depths to look.
They would have found it was a fire,
And not a printed book !
Nay, ashes now ! a memory !
Grow stormy, little mere,
For a despairing man has gazed
Into thy waters clear !
MY DEATH
WHEN Death’s pale angel stands before my face?
With smile unfathomable, stern and chill,
And when my sorrows with my soul exhale,
Know yet, my friends, that I am living still.
When at my head a waxen taper slim
With its cold rays the silent room shall fill,
A taper with a face that speaks of death,
Yet know, my friends, that I am living still.
When, with my forehead glittering with tears,
They in a shroud enfold me, cold and chill
As any stone, and lay me on a bier,
Yet know, my friends, that I am living still.
When the sad bell shall toll—that bell, the laugh
Of cruel Death, which wakes an icy thrill—
And when my bier is slowly borne along,
Yet know, my friends, that I am living still.
When the death-chanting priests, dark browed, austere,
With incense and with prayers the air shall fill,
Rising together as they, pass along,
Yet know, my friends, that I am living still.
When they have set my tomb in order fair,
And when, with bitter sobs and wailing shrill,
My dear ones from the grave at length depart,
Yet know, my friends, I shall be living still.
But when my grave forgotten shall remain
In some dim nook, neglected and passed by,—
When from the world my memory fades away,
That is the time when I indeed shall die!
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| Bedros Tourian's Tombstone |
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