Should we build a hospital or buy books?
At the meeting with journalists today Armen Martirosyan, Director of “Antares” publishing house, while touching upon the issue of preservation of the Armenian language, noted that there is nothing in our country except nuances of vote rigging, “Today only translations preserve the language, maintaining those nuances. Today three publishing houses issue one book, Borges. It displays difficulties in book publishing; there are no translators. There are 60 languages, from which we do not have translations in our country, for example- Norwegian. At the beginning there were translators from 7 languages, now there are translators from 18 languages. We have a collapsing, degrading, indecent phenomenon. People don’t read in Armenia, but the reason isn’t the internet, as there are lots of e-books. How to overcome this situation? Books should be sold, yet, annually 48 books are sold, and only one or two libraries have the particular book. No regional or school library has those books.” Armen Martirosyan says that the publishers and writers are going to have a discussion with the National Assembly on the condition of libraries, “About 2000 books are published and hardly 10 of them reach the libraries. The Government leaves the issue on the communities. Even one of the officials said ‘Should we build a hospital or buy books?’ I think mental health is equally important. So that the society can read, those books should be available; annually those 2000 books will cost AMD 6 million. In Germany a person, who reads 16 books in a year, is considered to be a reading person. If in our country one percent read, annually 20 000 books would be sold. We have other values, we aren’t bibliophiles.” The problem with translations is that today we read books translated by Soviet translators, “For example in the book The Catcher in the Rye the word ‘God’ was translated ‘the Devil’. And we know that the Devil is in little things.”
