Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy is
one of the jewels of world literature, and as such, it is not
surprising that it attracted the attention of Armenian modern writers
and translators. We owe its first complete translation to the efforts of
an accomplished master of the language, Arpoun Dayan.
Arpoun
Dayan was born on January 6, 1912, in Bardizag, near Ismit, in Turkey.
He first studied at the elementary school of Makirkeuy, in
Constantinople, and then at the Mekhitarist orphanage of Kadikeuy, where
his uncle, Rev. Fr. Yesayi Dayetsi (Dayan), a congregation member and a
scholar, was the principal.
The
Dayan family moved to Italy in 1922, where another relative, Rev. Fr.
Ghevont Dayan (1884-1968), a noted scholar of Armenian religious music,
lived at the monastery of St. Lazzaro. Arpoun studied from 1923-1927 at
the Mourad-Raphaelian College of the congregation, in Venice. After
graduation, he moved to Milan.
A
new period of his life would start in 1929, when he moved to Soviet
Armenia at the age of seventeen. He studied at the one-year pedagogical
courses of Yerevan in 1931, and at Yerevan State University from
1932-1933. Afterwards, he went to work for fourteen years as a
copyeditor in the newspapers Sovetakan Hayastan, Grakan Tert, Banvorakan Yerevan, and in the literary monthly Sovetakan Grakanutiun, until 1948.
For
the next two decades, Arpoun Dayan worked as a professional translator.
At the age of thirty-five, in 1947, he published his first translated
book, “Hell,” the first part of The Divine Comedy, which
would be followed by the next two parts in 1952 and 1959. A full
edition of Dante’s masterpiece would come out in 1969. Well-versed in
Italian and French, he would also produce translations from Guy de
Maupassant (1951, 1961), Honoré de Balzac (1956, 1964), Anatole France
(1959), Prosper Merimée (1964), Francois Mauriac (1964), and the memoirs
of Benvenuto Cellini (1974).
Dayan
returned to editing as a member of the editorial board of the Academy
of Sciences of Armenia from 1967-1970. He then entered the academic
world, first at the Institute of Art of the Academy from 1973-1977 and
then as a junior researcher at the Institute of Literature “Manuk
Abeghian.” He published a revised edition of his translation of Dante in
1975 and his study The Poetic Art and the Translation Issues of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” in
1982. His third revised edition of Dante came out at the beginning of
1983. Three months later, on April 6, this prolific translator passed
away in Yerevan.
