From 1936 to 1952, Bardan lived with his mother and father in a small cottage tucked in the hills an hour west of Ijivan, in Northern Armenia. The cottage was inaccessible by road and disconnected from both water and power. The only access to his home was a cattle trail that snaked up steep hills in broad switchbacks, upon which mountain goats and wild dogs roamed at all hours. It is said that Bardan befriended the wild dogs; they were large Kavkazi Ovcharki, Caucasian Shepherds, bred for protecting cattle from bears and most residents of the mountains avoided them at all costs. They were known to be, while invaluable and loyal when tame, incredibly dangerous, especially when they banded together—having been abandoned by careless owners—and terrorized the countryside with impunity.

It is believed that Bardan did not have any children acquaintances in those years, that he spent all of his time with his parents—reading tomes of philosophy with his father, helping his mother with household chores like churning butter or sheering the sheep who grazed outside—and that this accounted for his early maturity. Lore goes that the first time Bardan met anyone other than his mother or father was on his tenth birthday—when a Soviet census-taker trudged up the mountain. Bardan and his parents, Sergey and Luda, were sitting at the kitchen table, rolling dough for baklava, while Luda hummed a tune about the crumbling of mountain stone and then another about a woman who carries buckets of water up the hillside. When a knock came at the door, Bardan ducked under the table, thinking the noise an eruption of the many oil wells that dotted the hills.

Though he had had no formal poetic training in those years, a recently uncovered trove of his early works reveals that Bardan was always destined to become a poet. Two years ago, historian Andrey Gorkskiy, visited the home, which was abandoned—Bardan’s parents died decades ago and the cottage’s isolation ensured that it remained untouched by vandals. In a box under the floorboards, Andrey found over fifty stacks of notebooks meticulously filled with seemingly nonsensical prose; in today’s canon, we would refer to it as prose poetry, for it carries in it the unmistakable tenor of fables, such as Aesop’s. However, having had no real life experience from which to draw, Bardan instead imbued his stories with his gifted, if morbid, imagination. The work is decidedly childlike but surprising in its maturity.

The work remains unpublished, but Gorskiy has given permission to translate two short prose poems here.

Translated from the original Russian by Alex Simand

The Gray Dog

Under the porch, dog growls at passing feet, mistaking them for the rumps of rabbits. Dog is gray. Dog is brown. Dog is brown and thinks he is gray. Dogs have not discovered looking glass. A river runs under the house. A river runs through the house. A river continues running through the house. Dog does not know how a river runs without feet, or rabbits. Boy crawls under the house, having been carried there by dog growl. Boy gnaws on dried fish. What are you, dog? asks the boy. Dog eyes boy, eyes fish, maw dripping, poised to devour both. Feet, rabbits, bound overhead. Mother pounds kitchen floor. Flour falls like snow on dog snout, making dog sneeze, shaking the house, eroding foundation. When dog stops sneezing, boy is already outside, bounding for the front door. Dog growls, because this is the only language dog knows. Boy pokes his head down and laughs at dog, who is covered in flour mother had poured through the thin floor. There, he says, now you are white.

Numbers man

A man in a hat came to our door yesterday. He wanted to know our number. I bit his leg and said we are not number we are animal. He creased his face like a monkey though I had not said a joke. Father made tea. Mother warmed a roll in the oven. Mother shifted her hips in his direction. The cat scurried under the oven. The man sat as stout as a marmot, watching for ticks in our words. I watched him like a bear watches the flow of water. I asked him how many butters he has churned, how many chickens’ blood stained his thumbs. He coughed as if this was response. The sun hid behind our shed so the man left, full of tea and smug with baking. He is the mockingbird who sings without knowing. He is the ferret who slinks without question. I asked for his number but he could only muster a three. When he left, his hat was on backwards.