This article explores the thematic and stylistic parallels between contemporary Armenian poetry-particularly the works of Hovhannes Grigoryan and Vardan Hakobyan-and the French surrealist tradition. Through a comparative analysis, it highlights shared motifs such as love, memory, dreams, and linguistic freedom. Grigoryan’s poetry is marked by emotional rawness and the expressive power of silence, while Hakobyan’s texts transform love into a symbolic, dreamlike vision that blends reality with the subconscious. French surrealists like Éluard, Aragon, and Apollinaire treat love as a symbolic and ideological space, often shaped by collective memory and poetic experimentation. Although influenced by surrealism, Armenian poets reinterpret its principles through their own cultural and historical lens. The article concludes that Armenian contemporary poetry represents a unique avant-garde voice-speaking a universal language with distinctly national inflections.

KeywordsArmenian poetry French surrealism Hovhannes Grigoryan Vardan Hakobyan modern Armenian literature love memory dream freedom of language avant-garde poetic fusion

This article explores the thematic and stylistic parallels between contemporary Armenian poetry-particularly the works of Hovhannes Grigoryan and Vardan Hakobyan and the French surrealist tradition. Through a comparative analysis, it highlights shared motifs such as love, memory, dreams, and linguistic freedom. Grigoryan’s poetry is marked by emotional rawness and the expressive power of silence, while Hakobyan’s texts transform love into a symbolic, dreamlike vision that blends reality with the subconscious. French surrealists like Éluard, Aragon, and Apollinaire treat love as a symbolic and ideological space, often shaped by collective memory and poetic experimentation. Although influenced by surrealism, Armenian poets reinterpret its principles through their own cultural and historical lens. The article concludes that Armenian contemporary poetry represents a unique avant-garde voice-speaking a universal language with distinctly national inflections.

KeywordsArmenian poetry French surrealism Hovhannes Grigoryan Vardan Hakobyan symbolism surrealists national accents

This article examines Axel Bakunts’s adaptations of the fables by the medieval Armenian writer Vardan Aygektsi, as well as Bakunts’s perception of the Armenian Middle Ages. Axel Bakunts translated forty of Aygektsi’s fables, and a comparison between the Classical Armenian originals and their vernacular renderings reveals the writer’s exceptionally nuanced and consistent approach to his task.The choice of the fable genre itself also falls within Bakunts’s literary predilections and the broader context of the development of short prose. This was the last work by Axel Bakunts published in 1935, yet until the 1950s his role in the translation of Aygektsi’s fables remained unacknowledged. In 1956, a truncated version of the translations was published.The relevance of this topic stems both from the expressive content of the fables themselves, and from Bakunts’s interpretative strategies as a translator, as well as from his reflections on the developmental patterns of the medieval period. Most significantly, however, is the potential afforded by the vitality of the fable genre in uncovering the lyrical essence of literature—an aspect this article also seeks to explore.

KeywordsVardan Aygektsi fable Middle Ages Book of the Fox Axel Bakunts.