Mike Nalbandyan

Grigor Narekatsi and his writing "The Book of Sadness"



Posted: Tuesday, December 23, 2008

by
Armenian Books Club

St. Grigor Narekatsi was born in 951 to a family of scholarly churchmen, St. Gregory entered Narek Monastery on the south-east shore of Lake Van at a young age. Shortly before the first millennium of Christianity, Narek Monastery was a thriving center of learning. These were the relatively quiet, creative times before the Turkic and Mongol invasions that changed Armenian life forever. Armenia was experiencing a renaissance in literature, painting, architecture and theology, of which St. Gregory was a leading figure.

Being a masterpiece of Medieval Christian writing, The Book of Sadness has been largely unknown to the Christian world because it is written in Old Armenian which is presently familiar only to a restricted number of scholars. Consisting of eleven thousand poetic lines arranged in 95 chapters, the book is an appeal to God by a mortal asking for forgiveness to his sins. St. Grigor Narekatsi assumes upon himself all the sins committed by men king. There is hardly another text enumerating the human sins in more detail. Throughout the centuries, this book as been revered as sanctity.

Grigor Narekatsi and his writingThe Book of Sadnessby Annie et Jean-Pierre Mahe was translated from french ("Gregoire de Narek et le Livre de Lamentation" by Annie et Jean-Pierre Mahe) into Armenian by Shushanik Tamrazian.

Jean-Pierre Mahe is the author of The Way of Hermes: New Translations of The Corpus Hermeticum and The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius, ...

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