ABSTRACT
In the poem “The Complaint” excerpted above, the early fourteenth-century Anatolian Armenian poet Frik enumerates the injustices of the world and, in a bold move, outright questions God for making the world so unfair. He is perplexed by the number of “nations” inhabiting his world, and he seems frustrated that some are more fertile than others. It should not go unnoticed that one of the most prolific and popular Anatolian Armenian poets of the late medieval period includes in his poem an enumeration of the “nations,” religions, and languages of those people surrounding him. In addition to the four nations mentioned in the beginning-Armenian, Georgian, Muslim, and Assyrian-he also brings up Russian, Arab, Jewish, Alan, Kurdish, Tatar, Mongol, Chaghatai, Frank, Venetian, Genoese, Roman, and Greek communities in later stanzas. That “so many nations were born to the world” (as he puts it), and all seemed to be living in his general area, was cause enough for him to write a poem entitled “The Complaint.”
