HOVANESSIAN
Poet • Translator
Diana Der Hovanessian
The poet who carried a millennium of Armenian verse into English — and gave the Armenian-American experience its most beloved poetic voice.
The poet who carried a millennium of Armenian verse into English — and gave the Armenian-American experience its most beloved poetic voice.
Diana Der Hovanessian (1934–2018) was the poet laureate of the Armenian-American experience — a New England poet whose more than 25 books of poetry and translation carried Armenian voices into English with a grace few translators have matched.
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to a father who survived the genocide, she studied at Boston University and Harvard, and served for decades as president of the New England Poetry Club. Her own poems — spare, wry, aching with inherited memory — appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and American poetry anthologies, winning awards on both sides of the ocean.
Her anthologies of Armenian poetry in translation, produced over decades, became the standard bridge between Armenian literature and English readers — the books through which generations of diaspora children first heard Charents, Sayat-Nova, and Nahapet Kuchak in their own tongue.
Which language do you dream in? my grandmother asked... In my dreams the two languages are one.
— After the lines of Diana Der HovanessianDer Hovanessian died in 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Twice a Fulbright professor of American poetry at Yerevan State University, she spent her life proving her own thesis: that the two languages of her dreams were one. Armenian-American letters has no more beloved name.
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