Diana der hovanessian biography of donald

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Three volumes of her poetry have been translated into Armenian and published in Yerevan. But our house was on a highway, a busy highway. She leaves two daughters, Maro Dalley and husband James Johnson of Hanna, Wyoming; Sonia Dalley and husband Mark Tisserand of Cambridge; three grandchildren, Maggie Johnson and Daniel and Helen Tisserand of Cambridge; sister, Helen Pahigian of West Newton; nieces, Melanie and Shushan Pahigian, Diana Madden, Mara and Nita Der Hovanesian of New York and Florida; nephew Anthony Pahigian in Washington, D.C.

Funeral details

Funeral services were held at Holy Trinity Church Armenian Church, 145 Brattle St., Cambridge on Tuesday, March 6th at 11 a.m. Her poems have also been translated into Greek, French and Romanian. She married, moved back to the Boston area and was selected to participate in the last poetry class taught by Robert Lowell at Harvard.

When her father needed English versions of some poems by Daniel Varoujan for a lecture he was preparing, Diana provided them—and thus began her career as a translator.

Even though she was raised in a family that was steeped in Armenian culture, Diana says, “I didn’t become Armenian until I went to New York and sang in a chorus, and joined a dance group.”

As an adult—living away from her kin—Diana gravitated towards a group of young, politicized Armenians and began to feel consciously Armenian, an identity that increasingly informed her poetry.

Diana’s poems are filled with family stories, as well as references to Armenian history, proverbs and folk tales.

Her poems appeared in Agni, American Poetry Review, Ararat, CSM, Poetry, Partisan, Prairie Schooner, Nation, etc., and in anthologies such as Against Forgetting, Women on War, On Prejudice, Finding Home, Leading Contemporary Poets, Orpheus and Company, Identity Lessons, Voices of Conscience, Two Worlds Walking, etc. She has twice been the recipient of Fulbright Fellowships to teach at Yerevan State University in Armenia.

I kept waiting and waiting for her to come back.”

This traumatic experience is memorialized in the poem “white lamb, blue mulberry” as the poet stands before her sister’s grave in the Armenian section of the Hope Cemetery. Her parents and sister were in an apartment a few streets away. And we were expected to give each other poems for our birthdays.”

As an undergraduate at Boston University, Diana majored in English.

In “angel in somerville” a bag lady is transformed into the poet and the poet herself is “a mother/feeding her children, dispensing grace” – a perfect example of how Diana transforms the impersonal public space of contemporary America and revisions it, through intensely personal imagining, into an almost Whitmanesque emotional vista. Her parents and sister were in an apartment a few streets away.

She worked at the student paper and after graduating took at job at the Medford Mercury, a local daily in a Boston suburb. To bring people into the art.

Diana served as President of the New England Poetry Club for over three decades. She worked as a visiting poet and guest lecturer on American poetry, Armenian poetry in translation, and the literature of human rights at various universities here and abroad.

There were no other Armenians in either of these communities. When Armenia was annexed by the Soviet Union, Hovaness stayed in the United States and became a part of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s “government in exile,” which entailed frequent traveling. The Armenian Weekly will publish Der Hovanessian’s full obituary when it becomes available.

In lieu of flowers, donations were asked to be made in her memory to the Armenian EyeCare Project, The Armenian Missionary Association of America (AMMA), or the Armenian Tree Project

External links

http://www.dianaderhovanessian.com/

http://armenianpoetry.com/arm/Dayana_Ter_Hovhanisyan/