The view from Iran’s northwestern border was supposed to be magical. Instead, a decade ago, I saw desolate grasslands, just as the region’s post-Soviet rulers intended. I had followed in my father’s path. Years earlier, he convinced Soviet guards to let him wander among thousands of intricate khachkars (literally, cross-stones). Their carvings depicted daily life and biblical iconography. Beneath rested men and women whose diasporic legacies include Europe’s first coffeehouses. This was Djulfa. Until 2005, it stood as the world’s largest medieval Armenian cemetery.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Last December marked 20 years since this sacred site’s destruction, which my research—born in my late teens—exposed as the finale of our time’s greatest cultural genocide. While I still draw on this erasure to study heritage and security, in 2025 I prioritized fatherhood over commemorating the anniversary—only to realize I’d done both.
Five years earlier, as a new father in 2020, dreaming of speaking with my son had kept me going. He had heart surgery at birth, only to be readmitted due to a life-threatening virus. Then, amid the pandemic, my research on cultural destruction was suddenly everywhere as Azerbaijan launched a war in our ancestral homeland—fought in the shadow of erasures like Djulfa.
Lost in my 2020s multi-crises, I clung to future conversations with my son—until his speech delays became anxiety. Would I ever reach normalcy? Could I ever explain to him why places like Djulfa mattered?
But the summer before he turned five, I realized we were already communicating. Determined to break his screen fixation, I had been reciting a century-old poem around him. Surprisingly, he memorized every word. What followed became more than a pastime.
When my wife asked if there was an English translation, I couldn’t find one that preserved the poem’s daring wordplay. Its author, Yeghishe Charents, wrote it in his early twenties, shaping Armenia’s post-genocide identity. He died in the Stalinist purges, only to become the first vindicated Soviet intellectual, a new book reveals.
As a non-translator, I turned to those who knew the poem: my mother—who taught it to me as a child—mentors, and my son. He tested new compounds and repeated sounds like “Nairian,” derived from an ancient name for Armenia, as effortlessly as what he learned online. But not everything came easily. When the opening line forced me to choose between the biblical “word” and “bounty”—a single letter difference between two versions—I picked the one that smells like the apricots and mulberries of my childhood. The first verse emerged:
I love my sweet Armenia’s sun-taste bounty,Our ancient lute’s wail-tone, crysome chord I love.Blood-hued flowers’ and roses’ scent of burn,And Nairian girls’ grace-lithe dance I love.
We refined the rest over the weeks. At playgrounds across Denver, my son invented a poem-game: I’d swing him while reciting, first in Armenian, then in English, and eventually in “mixed.” The second verse flowed, partly echoing our adopted state’s landscape:
I love our sky – dim, waters crystal, lake moonlit,Sun of summer and the winter’s dragon-voice gale sublime,Lost-in-darkness huts’ uninviting walls – black,And timeworn cities’ millenary stone I love.
As December neared, I thought again of Djulfa’s 20th anniversary. Some of the worst things are done in the name of heritage, yet heritage is often the first target—hit where it hurts most, a warning of what might come next. Erasing a people never targets bodies alone; remembering is often all that remains. But were my university talks and writing enough to commemorate the loss that had launched my research? I was as anxious on the playground: What would others think of words like “blood-burned”? My son, on the swing, didn’t care:
Be where I may, I shan’t forget our sob-sound songs,Forget I shan’t our prayer-turned, iron-scripted books,However keenly my heart is pierced by our blood-drained wounds,Still – orphan and blood-burned my lover Armenia I love.
He claimed the poem as if it were his, paraphrasing—without knowing—what Charents had once told the playwright William Saroyan: It was quite enough to be Armenian; not everything had to be universal. But wasn’t I confusing my child with a final verse—packed with a theologian saint, a medieval love poet, and a dual-named mountain—that I didn’t fully understand myself? And was I about to burden him, once the time arrives, with Djulfa? Interrupting my thoughts, he recited, with thrill:
For my home-longing heart, there is no other tale.No brow aglow like Narekatsi or Kuchak,Cross the world, no height alight like Ararat.Like reach-less glory’s path – my Masis mount I love.
Communication, I used to think, meant relaying information. Yet I never had long conversations with my own father. Instead, over coffee, he would slip in stories like visiting Djulfa, unaware, ironically, of its café ties. The legacy didn’t fade there. My son carries his name. The poem helped my son bridge generations, and me to show why heritage matters. In a way, we translated Charents, while Charents translated us.
Translating did not just honor the loss that had sparked my research; it helped me understand the poem. Like Djulfa’s khachkars, the poem blends the celestial with the earthly: Ararat becomes Masis, the biblical mountain’s secular name, echoing the pairing of medieval poets of faith and of love. No wonder the poem has lived with two versions for a century. There was never a typo: “word” and “bounty”—the heavenly and the sensory—were meant to be interchangeable. After all, even in mundane moments, we exist on the sacred-everyday spectrum: My son—my co-translator—already knew this, nibbling on a sun-dried apricot as he murmured the poem.
Ultimately, translating with my son brought me some normalcy. Because in the end, we’d done more than translate the most famous Armenian poem. We’d reenacted an ancient ritual: the everyday parent-child interaction that creates a new language of love, one that neither of us can speak alone, or forget.
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