11/06/2025
ATTENTION: New posthumous book of bilingual poetry by Tenny Arlen; co-translated with a foreword by Jesse Arlen and afterwords by Hagop Gulludjian and Arthur Ipek. Stay tuned for an online book launch in December.
"To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? is a bilingual (Armenian and English) edition of Tenny Arlen’s poetry, an extraordinary body of work written in a language she began learning only a few years before her passing in 2015. The book brings together the full contents of the 2021 Armenian publication, ԿԻՐՔՈՎ ԸՍԵԼՈՒ՝ ԻՆՉՈ՞Ւ ՀՈՍ ԵՄ, presenting the original poems alongside English translations by Tenny and her brother Dr. Jesse Arlen.
In these poems, the Armenian language itself becomes a living presence, asking why and how it continues to exist in the twenty-first-century Diaspora. With luminous sensitivity, Arlen writes toward that question, turning language into both a home and a mystery. As her brother notes, “The poet courageously faces such questions and is not satisfied by simple or superficial answers, tired clichés. Instead, in her effort to ponder them deeply, she offers meaning to others. This book presents itself as a companion to those readers who seek to think and live life’s most fundamental questions.”
This expanded edition deepens the original collection with three previously unseen writings discovered among Tenny’s papers, facsimiles of early drafts—some marked with her professor Dr. Hagop Gulludjian’s edits—and new critical reflections. Gulludjian’s afterword traces Tenny’s creative journey from eager student to a pioneer of Armenian literature in the Diaspora, while Arthur Ipek’s newly commissioned essay explores her work through the lens of exophony, or creative writing in a non-native tongue, and situates her within a broader Armenian literary continuum.
What emerges is both a work of poetry and a record of artistic becoming, a book about learning to speak, to belong, and to give voice to existence itself."
Book available from National Association for Armenian Studies and Research - NAASR bookstore (https://naasr.org/products/to-say-with-passion) or via Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FY9RPWYQ)
https://armenianliterary.org/to-say-with-passion-why-am-i-here-arlen/
To Say with Passion: Why Am I Here? is a bilingual edition of Tenny Arlen’s poetry—written in a language she mastered shortly before her passing.
