Karen’s second poetry collection, Antashat, published in 2009, soon raised a lot of discussions. Antashat radically differs from his first book – After the End, Before the Beginning and generally from underlined and identified streams of contemporary Armenian poetry. The book brought a wave of freshness and innovation with its linguistic and experimental structures, new reflections of old subjects and with self-ironic and light-raffling style.
The main concept of the book is the detailed mapping of the abstract city Antashat, a city that is an inner-spiritual territory. The metaphor “Antashat” is built on reference to the poet’s surname that symbolizes irresistible perimeter of a lonely person that is alone in around himself, in himself and with himself in the globalizing world, the effort of digging it, re-establishing and re-inhabiting. Generally “Antashat” is a bend from nowadays to the past opening phase by phase, history of a helix that wanders from the present to its depth through its spiral sheath. In the book as an environment of communication between different levels of identity is Water. The metaphor of water as main bio-birth substance is the axis in all works of the author.
After publication of Antashat Karen Antashyan’s main aesthetic concentration is the Armenian language. In the environment of real communication he tries to overcome alchemic poetic mixtures of conflict between contemporary oral Armenian and dying language of classical Armenian literature intertwining them with the initial root forms and the mythic metaphors of the Armenian language that sometimes cannot be translated into other languages. Karen believes that the most important challenge for the modern Armenian poetry is the language itself, especially considering rather small number of readers in Armenian.
Hasmik Hakobyan
Literary critic
Yerevan 2011
