He was born in 1886 in Armenia, in a remote mountain village called Pingyan above the Aradzani River. It was not the typical Armenian village of the Ottoman Empire, subjugated by Turkish authorities and terrorized by marauding Kurdish tribes in the guise of tax collectors. Pingyan was an unusual place: it was secure and very nearly free, a place where life could be happy. After the Moslem conquest of Anatolia began in the seventh century, Armenians struggled to preserve their liberty in princely states that juggled alliances with larger powers and tried to hold their heads above the flood of invasion by Turkish and Kurdish nomadic groups. After the fall of the Armenian Bagratid capital Ani in the east, the extinction of the Armenian Cilician kingdom in the south in 1375, and with that, the end of national sovereignty, little strongholds of freedom endured to which men might make their way — the mountain fastness of Sasun above Lake Van, Artsakh (today’s Nagorno-Karabagh) in the east, Zeitun in the southwest, and, in the northwest of historical Armenia, the village of Pingyan. (The name derives from the diminutive, Benik, of its founder, a prince named Benjamin.) The houses, churches, schools, mills, and monasteries of the village clustered on the steep mountainside, below a well-defended pass; the villagers went to their fields on the other side of the river across a bridge with a great iron gate that was locked at night. The name of Misak’s family, the large Medzadourian clan — the young poet was to shorten the name to Medzarents — suggests they were descendants of a noble “great house” (medz dun) who had heard of the fortress village and made their way there across Armenia, centuries earlier, from Ani or even farther east. The villagers spoke Armenian, not the Armeno-Turkish of much of the Armenian community in Anatolia. They used metal tokens inscribed in the Armenian alphabet for trade, and maintained a school in which the Modern and Classical forms of Armenian were taught. They were horsemen and marksmen, and in their homes books shared the walls with guns. Some families owned businesses in the distant Ottoman capital, Constantinople, and were prosperous; workingmen sent remittances home. It made for a happy boyhood, for a time. Misak learned Armenian classics and foreign languages at school, read poetry, rode horseback to the fields, heard work songs, dozed and dreamed under trees, listened to his mother’s prayers and to legends about water spirits, and played with his friends. The Armenian massacres that began in 1894 and were to culminate in the Genocide of 1915 affected even Pingyan, and the family moved for safety first to the city of Sepastia (Sivas), then in 1902 to the capital, where Misak’s father had a business. In Sivas, a Moslem butcher’s son stole up from behind and stabbed Misak in the street. He survived the attack, but it traumatized and weakened him. The family chose the comparative safety of Constantinople, with its large Armenian community: Misak went to school, made friends, frequented the offices of literary journals, read widely, and was a prolific writer. When he was twenty-one he published two small volumes. But it was the year before his death, in 1908, of consumption: his life, like that of his precursor Bedros Tourian, was destined to be short. Tourian had invented modern Western Armenian poetry almost singlehandedly, in the short years before his death in early 1872. Armenians closely followed European literary trends, and in the period between the lifetimes of the two poets Symbolism had become the dominant trend in poetry, music, and the arts. Through the use of dream imagery, indistinct allusions, exotic colors, and magical patterns of sound, Symbolists sought to open the doors of perception to an emotional and aesthetic sensibility towards a supernatural reality that, they believed, lay just beyond the everyday. The French poet Stephane Mallarmé and the composer Claude Debussy most famously exemplify the movement; but it can be argued that its beginnings were much earlier, and that William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe were proto-Symbolists. I will have more to say about Poe presently, in the discussion of what I consider to be Medzarents’ greatest poem, which I will give in translation. Medzarents was described by his contemporaries, and sometimes derided, as a Symbolist, and he retorted defensively, in versified satire. The characterization is fair for some of his lyrics, but it is not complete — his work is not confined by narrow categories and definitions. There is evidence, in the form of a few fragments of poems, that Medzarents was developing a new style, sharper, harsher, more vivid, that reflected political events and a revolutionary consciousness. An analogous evolution from early Symbolist verses to a raw and jagged, sharply strident, revolutionary kind of verse typifies the work of the greatest Eastern Armenian poet, Yeghishe Charents, eleven years Misak’s junior, one of the great early non-Russian poets of the Soviet Union. Charents lived longer, but not by much: he was killed in November 1937 in the Stalinist purges. He wrote homoerotic verses that were unpublished in his lifetime and that still arouse controversy among the ultra-nationalist establishment in post-Soviet Armenia. We cannot know with any certainty what Medzarents would have written had he lived on in the turbulent twentieth century: he died on the eve of the Ottoman revolution and just a few years before the Armenian genocide. It is almost certain that he would have been murdered with the other two-hundred-and-fifty-or-so Armenian luminaries of the capital at the start of the Genocide in April 1915. The life was far too short; the future, far too dark. 
Let us consider one poem in detail, with its far-reaching ramifications. It is called Gaydzer, or “Sparks,” and was published September 10, 1905 in the journal Masis with another verse and the heading Yergu sirerk, “Two Love Songs”; and it was reprinted in the poet’s first volume of verses, Dziadzan, “Rainbow,” two years later. The political activist, publisher, and
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