Nexhat Hakiu

Albanian version:


C'ËSHTË DASHURIA
Nexhat Hakiu

Ti nga gazi, nga mërzia
Pyet ç'është dashuria
Por ajo nuk fytyrë,
Nuk ka tingull, nuk ka ngjyrë!

Ajo s'sndihet as me fjalë,
Vjen e fshehur dhe ngadalë,
Vjen një herë'e prap s'enjeh
Brenda zemrës ti se sheh!

Po t' ish lule, fshehur barit,
Do këputesh, do të thahesh,
Po t'ish përl, fij e arit
Do rrëmbehesh, do të ndahesh;

Po t'ish zog, do të vajtonte
Brenda zemrës në kuvli,
Ta liroje, do këndonte
Larg nga ty, nga çdo njeri!

S'është lule për në fushë,
S' është përl për në gushë,
S'është as zog për në kuvli:
Ajo zemrën ka shtëpi....

Ja se ç'është dashuria!
Ësht' a s'është nuk e di,
Por un' di se lumturia:
Nuk është vetëm dashuri!
______________________________

English version:

WHAT LOVE IS
by Nexhat Hakiu

translated by Anthony Weir

The happy or the bored
may ask what love is -
but it doesn't have descriptiveness.
Its qualities are wordless.

You feel it secretly and slowly.
It's there and you don't realise
it's living in your heart.

A flower may be plucked,
a pearl or cloth of gold
be snatched and fought over.

The caged bird sings its heart out
and if you freed it, it would also sing
far from you and everyone.

Love is not flower
nor pearl
nor caged bird
but a formless dweller in the heart.

That's what love is:
less than happiness.

Albanian language

Albanian language (Gjuha shqipe pronounced [ˈɟuha ˈʃcipɛ]) is an Indo-European language spoken by nearly 6 million people, primarily in Albania and Kosovo, but also in other areas of the Balkans in which there is an Albanian population, including the west of Macedonia, Montenegro, and southern Serbia. Albanian is also spoken by communities in Greece, along the eastern coast of southern Italy, and on the island of Sicily. Additionally, speakers of Albanian can be found elsewhere throughout the latter two countries resulting from a modern diaspora, originating from the Balkans, that also includes Scandinavia, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Low Countries, Turkey and the United States.

Classification

Albanian was proved to be an Indo-European language in 1854 by the German philologist Franz Bopp. The Albanian language constitutes its own branch of the Indo-European language family.

Some scholars believe that Albanian derives from Illyrian while others, claim that it derives from Daco-Thracian. (Illyrian and Daco-Thracian, however, may have formed a sprachbund, see Thraco-Illyrian.)

Establishing longer relations, Albanian is often compared to Balto-Slavic on the one hand and Germanic on the other, both of which share a number of isoglosses with Albanian. Moreover, Albanian has undergone a vowel shift in which stressed, long o has fallen to a, much like in the former and opposite the latter. Likewise, Albanian has taken the old relative jos and innovatively used it exclusively to qualify adjectives, much in the way Balto-Slavic has used this word to provide the definite ending of adjectives.

Dialects

Albanian can be divided into two main dialects, Gheg and Tosk.

The Shkumbin river is roughly the dividing line, with Gheg spoken north of the Shkumbin and Tosk south of it. The Gheg literary language has been documented since 1462. Until the Communists took power in Albania, the standard was based on Gheg. Although the literary versions of Tosk and Gheg are mutually intelligible, many of the regional dialects are not. Tosk is divided into many sub-dialects. The main groups are Northern Tosk (Berat, Pojan, Vlorë, Struga) and Labërisht (Labëria). In Greece, the Çam and the Arvanites speak different Tosk sub-dialects. The sub-dialect of the Arvanites is only partially intelligible with other Tosk sub-dialects, such that it can be regarded as a separate language, Arvanitika. A distinct Tosk sub-dialect has been preserved in the Albanian-founded village of Mandritsa in southern Bulgaria. Tosk sub-dialects related to Arvanitika and called Arbërisht are spoken by the Arbëreshë, descendants of 15th and 16th century immigrants in southeastern Italy, in small communities in the regions of Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata, Campania, Molise, Abruzzi, and Puglia. Tosk sub-dialects are spoken by most members of the large Albanian immigrant communities of Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, and the United States.

Gheg is spoken in Northern Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, and in parts of Montenegro. Each area of Northern Albania has its own sub-dialect: Tiranë, Durrës, Elbasan and Kavaja; Kruja and Laçi; Mati, Dibra and Mirdita; Lezhë, Shkodër, Krajë, Ulqin; etc. Malësia e Madhe, Rugova, and villages scattered alongside the Adriatic Coast form the northmost sub-dialect of Albania today. There are many other sub-dialects in the region of Kosovo and in parts of southern Montenegro, and in Republic of Macedonia. The sub-dialects of Malsia e Madhe and Dukagjini near Shkodra are being lost because the younger generations prefer to speak the sub-dialect of Shkodra.

Arshi PIPA

BIOGRAPHY

Writer and scholar, Arshi Pipa (1920-1997) was born in Shkodra where he attended school until 1938. His first poetry, composed in the late 1930s in Shkodra, was collected in the volume Lundërtarë, Tirana 1944 (Sailors). Pipa studied philosophy at the University of Florence, where he received the degree of "dottore in filosofia" in 1942 with a dissertation on Henri Bergson (1859-1941). He thereafter worked as a teacher in Shkodra and Tirana. In 1944, he was editor of the short-lived Tirana literary monthly Kritika (Criticism). Unwilling to conform after the radical transition of power at the end of the war, he was arrested in April 1946 and imprisoned for ten years. After his release in 1956, he escaped to Yugoslavia and emigrated to the United States two years later. He held teaching posts at various American universities and until his retirement was professor of Italian at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Pipa digested his ten years of horror in the prisons and labor camps of Durrës, Vloçisht, Gjirokastra and Burrel in Libri i burgut, Rome 1959 (The Prison Book), a 246-page collection of verse. He has published two other volumes of poetry in Gheg dialect: Rusha, Munich 1968 (Rusha), and Meridiana, Munich 1969 (Meridiana), the latter being a collection in the romantic and nostalgic vein of Giacomo Leopardi.
Of greater impact were Pipa's scholarly publications, in particular his literary criticism. Among such works are the three-volume literary study Trilogia albanica, Munich 1978, and a monograph on Montale and Dante, Minneapolis 1968. He also published a controversial sociolinguistic study on the formation of standard Albanian (gjuha letrare) as the official language of Albania, entitled The Politics of Language in Socialist Albania, New York 1989; a collection of fifteen political essays entitled Albanian Stalinism: Ideo-political Aspects, New York 1990; and a study on the Albanian literature of the socialist realist period, Contemporary Albanian literature, New York 1991. In later years, he edited the short-lived periodical Albanica in Washington, D.C., where he lived with his sister in retirement.

POETRY

The First Night

A kitchen, not in use for ages,
Over the sink with its porcelain tiles,
An oil lamp coughs black smoke,
The door locked, the windows sealed.

A cluster of shadows low along the wall,
A chamber pot behind the door, near it some old
Onion skins, a rat gnawing on crumbs of bread,
Someone gulping from a flask.

The shadows shift, curious eyes and faces
Emerge from cloaks and shawls,
A heavy step shakes the stairs. Silence.

A clank of deadbolts, a scream near the office,
Another howl, frightening and long, followed
By demeaning curses. Then the bolts again... and steps...

[Natë e parë, from the volume Libri i burgut, Rome: Apice, 1959, p. 27. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]



Dawn

The dawns cannot be seen,
Can only be heard.
Slumber, anguish, waking
In horror... a jumble

Of snoring guards, sweat
And fumes of gas,
With cries, with clamour,
And the stench of decay.

And now from the other side,
A beckoning voice,
A long whisper.

Whistling, chirping,
The birds in the pines
Bid goodbye to the night.

[Agim, from the volume Libri i burgut, Rome: Apice, 1959, p. 28. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]



The Lamp

I entreat you, do not close the window,
Oh, unknown woman,
I dream of your movements,
Of your voice evoking spring!

I beg you, do not snuff out the lamp,
I crave it tonight,
My hope in the gloom,
Like a sail untouched by the wind.

[Llampa, from the volume Libri i burgut, Rome: Apice, 1959, p. 28. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]



The Canal

Thunder near Korça. The rain courses
Down tarpaulins onto heads, upon the hay,
The prisoners huddle, cower in their covers,
A heap of putrid flesh and rags.

Evening has come. Blood streams from a mouth,
A gypsy lad sings oblivious his song,
Some scuffle over a water drop drunk by a comrade,
Others curse for a bit of stolen bread. A guard enters,

Kicking and thrashing, cries, a whistle blows.
Then calm. All are exhausted,
Try to catch some sleep if they can.

Groans and sighs from the first-aid barracks.
In the morn, the canal and the marsh will be biding,
Except for those awaited by a barren grave.

[Kanali, from the volume Libri i burgut, Rome: Apice, 1959, p. 63. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]



Farewell

Come and say farewell, my sisters,
Smile and give no sign of grief,
At the doorway in high spirits
Come and wave a handkerchief.

With a head scarf dry your eyes now,
Wipe them near a burning tallow,
Fling it to the wind, my sisters,
Watch as it becomes a swallow.

'mongst the thousands on their way to
Foreign lands beyond the sea
I'll behold it when you cast it
There wherever I may be.

(1939)

[Lamtumirë, from the volume Poezi, vepra poetike, Peja: Dukagjini 1998, p. 104. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]



The Pine Tree

Dawns that cannot be seen
Must be conjured by the senses.
When direful dreams take flight
To the snoring of guards,
To the stench of urine mixed
With sweat and kerosene.

And then, from beyond,
A bustling beckons,
A rustling echoes,
A twittering and chirping.
The birds in the pine tree
Proclaim the coming day.

(1946)

[Lamtumirë, from the volume Poezi, vepra poetike, Peja: Dukagjini 1998, p. 131. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]

Ervin HATIBI

BIOGRAPHY

Ervin Hatibi (b. 1974) was born in Tirana and studied French at the Foreign Language Institute there. He managed to publish a first volume of poetry during the dictatorship, but it was during the 1990s that his unconventional verse became popular, in particular with students in Tirana and elsewhere.
Among his verse collections are: Përditë shoh qiellin (I watch the sky every day), Tirana 1989; Poezi (Poetry), Tirana 1995; Pasqyra e lëndës (Table of contents), Tirana 2004. He is also the author of essays, notably Republick of Albanania, Tirana 2005. Hatibi is also a figurative artist who has exhibited his works both in Albania and abroad.

POETRY

They'll Invent a Substance or a Machine

Soon they'll invent a substance
Or a machine, who knows, women will succeed,
And men will, too,
In slimming magically, "butterflies of some tragic drink
That go blind inside the chalice of youth,"
In losing weight, their exact dimensions will scorn us.
The sweat of the architect physician will drip, like a compass,
On that boiled rose,
That bourgeois French revolution
Which divides the bum from the back - the panting of the girl
Whom I loved for eleven years.
In short, the erotic erosion of fat will appear in the headlines
The tests, the reactions,
Extremely precise, no trauma, the slimming machines
In clinics will exorcize all that fellow's culinary excesses,
His belly filled with savings for a subscription or a yoga course,
And the lady, sighing, will melt her rigid breasts
And will yet return with regret to the machine,
Perhaps to put on or to lose a few more pounds,
At the same time, she will firm the calves of her weary legs.
The world will be filled with the delicate creations of Rodin,
Which do it quickly, their copulating cocks like the talons of sparrows
On the high-voltage wires.
Then, they say that other machine will be invented,
That other substances which, buried in bright-coloured phials
From the slimming labs,
Will carry off the daily
Surplus
Of fat,
Cart it down to the Third World,
To the Somalis with ribs protruding from deep beneath the earth,
And inject it into their black skins, to the arid beating of drums
Under the palm trees,
All the bums and thighs and protein-filled throats,
Bequeathed on boring Swedish afternoons in Europe,
And thus all races will become brothers and equals
And all men will be happy tattoos.

(1994)

[Do të shpiket një lëngë ose makinë, from the volume Poezi, Tirana 1995, p. 40-41. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]



Dedicated

It looks like they're all turning around
To stare at me as I live
And feel and blush.
I know
I reek of olives,
They are stars,
Scribbled vertically
In a parish roster,
Sewn into my lungs
With the threads I once bit off
My grandmother's black scarf
(in which I often found her grey hairs).
On wretched nights I extract them, thorns
From my ankles, these Gothic olives, these daytime stars.
With them I adorn my room,
The commonplace Christmas trees
Of my lonely existence.
I also like to write poems.

(February 1992)

[Kushtuar, from the volume Poezi, Tirana 1995, p. 51. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]



Especially in August

At the beach: the sea!
Since we did not have a revolution,
Let's swim full of anger, deeper and deeper,
The farther from land, the closer to heaven,
Sea gulls paid on postcards, estranged from us,
Remain
On our backs,
Or rarely even unpaid remain,
Especially now in August,
We are all a deeply tanned people,
Made of native colonists,
Half nude, wrapped in rags of portentous colours,
We run down the beach, buying up baubles and watches,
We flirt and do crazy things,
Then in the shade we pray prostrated to the sun
And baptize ourselves in the faecal sea water
(the hairy faeces of women like dark-coloured crabs,
Millipede priests, bind us to these pagan rites).
Day after day come trains and wagons filled with young
Internees.
Those who wanted to have a Revolution
Or make some grimace in public,
Beaten by the traffic police all year round,
Their journey ends at the sea.
Here they are brought to chill out, correct their ways.
(a calming full of ardour, full of shouting thighs, motor boots
Of pumice, icy like quotations),
Only the sand is limp, wears you down, reminds us
Of the expulsion
From our homes
Or from the promised land,
But we chose the beach ourselves,
Jews disrobed, in underwear
Under a crematorium sun
Which capital freed from the ozone chains,
We rape one another reciprocally for nothing
As soon as we remove our textile masks, which as I said,
Enclose other humanities beneath.
As soon as summer comes,
The temperatures rise,
Democracy will reign over the abandoned city
Under the weary coups d'état of tourism.

(1994)

[Sidomos në gusht, from the volume Poezi, Tirana 1995, p. 58. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]



On the Revolution

My cigarettes gave out at the bus station,
Here I stay
Waiting for the next revolution,
A bent and blackened nail
In the church's charred remains.

As if in the barrel of a pistol
All have vanished, cowering
In their homes.
Revolutions are penultimate
But my life is always ultimate, the last one,
You bought my tears cheaply,
My whole body ached in longing
For the people and the barricades.
I want to die and forget, just
Spit it out, I want to die for no good reason,
Or not to die at all if I must do so
For a cause.
I will find some little beggar, a mulatto,
Warm him and raise him in filth.
I invite you all back to my pad
To spit in my face,
But let none of you provoke me with his wounds.

Long live, hail to our new flag
And every old love!
When the day comes, we'll be back on the streets,
Out there hurling stones
At all those who come in groups
And all those who come alone.

(1991)

[Përmbi revolucionin, from the volume Poezi, Tirana 1995, p. 70-71. Translated from the Albania by Robert Elsie]



Once Again on the Price of Bananas

Bananas from Rome once grew menacingly
Behind the Berlin Wall,
The year nineteen eighty something,
Jungles of concrete and steel and panic,
Men were wolves or monks for one another, surrounded
By bananas
On an island encircled
By sparkling red water,
Ich bin ein Berliner,
But in fact, I'm an American Czech who...
Post-Marxism still evolutionist reproduced
Black bananas made of rubber
For post-
Stalinists, the grandsons of dervishes, to beat
Our people with (end of quotation),
Bananaland stuffed with fried sweet potatoes,
The potato is still food, underground sustenance
Sown on the museum fields of Mauthausen, Treblinka.
With potatoes we make chips, with the other hand
In the dark we caress
The tepid belly of the television set, full of Coca Cola,
Chips, not potatoes, are related to bananas,
Chips and bananas and the Coca Cola, too,
All related by marriage
And dowry to Madonna
And first gave birth to dead
Bananas from Rome
Now manufactured together
In the same clump
With black rubber cudgels.

(2002)

[Edhe një herë mbi çmimin de bananeve, from the volume Pasqyra e lëndës, Tirana 2004, p. 37. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]

Ismail KADARE

BIOGRAPHY

Ismail Kadare (b. 1936) is at present the only Albanian writer to enjoy a broad international reputation. His talents both as a poet and as a prose writer have lost none of their innovative force over the last three decades. Born and raised in the museum-city of Gjirokastra, Kadare studied in the Faculty of History and Philology at the University of Tirana and subsequently at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow until 1960 when relations between Albania and the Soviet Union soured. He had begun his literary career in the 1950s as a poet with verse collections such as the modest Frymëzimet djaloshare, Tirana 1954 (Youthful inspiration) and Ëndërrimet, Tirana 1957 (Dreams) which gave proof not only of his 'youthful inspiration' but also of talent and poetic originality. His influential Shekulli im, Tirana 1961 (My century), helped set the pace for renewal in Albanian verse. Përse mendohen këto male, Tirana 1964 (What are these mountains thinking about), is one of the clearest expressions of Albanian self-image under the gruesome years of the Hoxha dictatorship. Kadare’s poetry was less bombastic than previous verse and gained direct access to the hearts of the readers who saw in him the spirit of the times and who appreciated the diversity of his themes. He soon became widely admired among the youth of Albania for his verse. With candidness and sincerity, Kadare contributed in particular to the evolution of love lyrics, a genre traditionally neglected in Albanian literature.
In the sixties, Kadare turned his creative energies increasingly to prose, of which he soon became the undisputed master and by far the most popular writer of the whole of Albanian literature. He was thus the most prominent representative of Albanian literature under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha and, at the same time, its most talented adversary. His works were extremely influential throughout the seventies and eighties and, for many readers, he was the only ray of hope in the cold, grey prison that was communist Albania.
At the end of October 1990, a mere two months before the final collapse of the dictatorship, Ismail Kadare left Tirana and applied for political asylum in France, a move which, for the first time, gave him an opportunity to exercise his profession with complete freedom. His years of Parisian exile have been productive and have accorded him further success and recognition, both as a writer in Albanian and in French. He has published his collected works in ten thick volumes, each in an Albanian-language and a French-language edition, and has been honoured with membership in the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.

And when my memory
And when my fading memory,
Like the after-midnight trams,
Stops only at the main stations,
I will not forget you.
I will remember
That quiet evening, endless in your eyes,
The stifled sob upon my shoulder,
Like snow that cannot be brushed off.

The separation came
And I departed, far from you.
Nothing unusual,
But some night
Someone's fingers will weave themselves into your hair,
My distant fingers, stretching across the miles

[Edhe kur kujtesa, from the volume Shekulli im, Tirana: Naim Frashëri 1961, translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie, and first published in English in An elusive eagle soars, anthology of modern Albanian poetry, London: Forest Books 1993, p. 78]



CRYSTAL

by Ismail Kadare

world-famous novelist and poet from the Hoxha period,
winner of the first (2005) Man-Booker International Literature Prize
still living in France

translated by Anthony Weir


It's a long time since we saw each other and I feel
I am forgetting you. The memory of you
Dies in me day by day,
The memory of your hair
And everything about you.
Now I'm looking everywhere
For a place to drop you
A line, a verse, or crystal kiss -
And so depart.

If no grave will receive you,
No marble nor crystal sepulchre -
Will I have to keep you always with me
Half-dead and half-alive ?

If I can't find a chasm to drop you into
I'll look for a lawn or field
Where I will scatter you softly
Like pollen.

Perhaps I'll trick you into an embrace -
And go away irrevocably
And neither of us will know the other.
This is forgetting isn't it?