Deanna Cachoian-Schanz’s new translation of A BOOK, UNTITLED (Girq-anvernagir, 2006) makes Shushan Avagyan’s revolutionary Armenian text available to English-speaking audiences.

To read A BOOK, UNTITLED is to experience the erasure of two feminist literary giants of the early twentieth century: Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan. Written as a literary experiment, Book puts an imagined 1926 meeting between Kurghinian and Yesayan in conversation with the contemporary narrator’s efforts to unearth their fragmented stories. Excavating these narratives from the censorship of Stalin’s regime and the patriarchal lens that structures the Armenian literary canon is no easy task; documents have been redacted, authors are uncited, texts have been left unfinished. And yet, through these aporias, Book urges its readers to reimagine the past so that the present might be lived otherwise.