Dear compatriots, our distant kinsfolk Armenians deprived of your homeland, whose feet have crossed all the meridians and parallels of this globe. The New Year is coming.
It is coming also for us – who are a people,[1] but one that is not gathered in one place. So, let it come first to gird us all, wherever we are in this world. If patience is a thread, ours should be called a rope, for it is woven not from threads, but from our sinews, our muscles and nerves.
May the New Year renew your sinews, strengthen your muscles, and rejuvenate your nerves. The eyes are for seeing, not for just having our eyes on the road in expectations. We all have our eyes on the roads — we here, on the road for you and you there, for your and our Homeland. May all our eyes shine in the New Year and the roads be shortened, and our expectations come closer.
The good has been guiding us for thousands of years. And should the thing called fate return to us at least a small portion of what we have given, regardless of how slowly or slothfully it moves. May the coming year hasten its step and bring good to all of you and all of us.
Let many Armenian children be born in the New Year and let them be born with a different destiny written on their forehead. Wherever their christening may be, may their wedding take place in the homeland, by the slopes of those mountains and on the shores of those rivers and lakes, the uttering of whose names causes us to tremble . . .
Paruyr Sevak’s New Year radio address,
December 31, 1963, Yerevan.
[1] The original has a word play on the root zhoghov ‘gather’; the root of the Armenian word for people is zhoghovurd (lit. gathering), but are not gathered zhoghovvats – paradoxically, a gathering/collective that is not gathered/collected.
