Vahe Oshagan (Armenian: Վահէ Օշական, 1922 – June 30, 2000) was an Armenian poet, writer, literary critic.
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Vahe Oshagan was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1922. His father, Hagop Oshagan, was a prominent writer and critic. Raised in Jerusalem and Cyprus, he studied in France and received a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Sorbonne, in Paris.
He lived in Beirut for many years and taught philosophy and psychology, as well as Armenian, French and English literature.
At the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, he moved to Philadelphia, PA (U.S.), where he taught at the University of Pennsylvania. It was there that he published his volume of poetry entitled "Ahazank", which mentions many streets and landmarks of Philadelphia.
Like many Armenians, whose villages and homes were destroyed by the Turks in 1915, Vahe Oshagan drifted throughout the Middle East, Europe and the United States, never finding a permanent home.
Vahe Oshagan, who also taught and wrote short stories and literary criticism, reformed Armenian poetry by rejecting its imposed formality, which shunned the concerns of daily life and themes of alienation and loss. He often wrote in colloquial language and was for many the voice of the Armenian diaspora. His first volume of poetry, Kaghak (The City), was published in Beirut in 1963.
He was heavily influenced by French existentialists and had little time for those who dismissed modernity as a corruption of traditional values.
Many leading critics considered Oshagan the most important Armenian-language poet in exile.
Marc Nichanian, a former professor of Armenian studies at Columbia University, has called Vahe Oshagan "the most important poet of his generation". According to Nichanian, "for a long time his work was not even accepted as poetry. He had a hard time imposing himself as poet". He adds that The City was "the most radical book of Armenian poetry in the 20th century".
None of Vahe Oshagan's work has been published in English. The British poet Peter Reading recently translated one of his best-known works, a book of poems written in 1980 called Ahazank or "Alarm", but it still awaits publication.
In his stark and desperate poem Alert, published in 1980, Vahe Oshagan wrote:
Each passing minute is my first and last
I must grab the last human
And wrench some utterance from his mouth.
He was also the editor in chief of the literary journal RAFT: an Annual of Poetry and Criticism, for eleven years. The journal publishes English translations of Armenian poetry.