Albanian Love Poems

Albania, anciently known as Illyria, and occupying a large part of the Western Balkans, lost its independence in 169 BC, when Gent, king of the Illyrians, was defeated and captured by the Romans at Shkodra.

But in the two thousand years that their land was ruled by foreigners, Albanians lost neither their identity nor their ancient language - more ancient than Latin, and related both to Greek and Etruscan.

The Albanian state which came into being in 1912 was really the remnants of Shqipërisë (Eagle-Realm in Albanian) that the Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians had by some miracle been unable to lay claim to. It was considered by Western nations to be first a ruritanian, then a totalitarian joke. But Albanian has survived in its truncated form the Italian, Greek and German occupations and incursions of the Second World War - and the rule of its last paranoid war-lord, Enver Hoxha.

Albanians swallowed up by the neighbouring countries - especially Greece - were considered rather as the Slavs were considered by the Nazis. Before the First World War, Albanian was spoken as far south as Athens - but a policy of linguistic cleansing more successful than that of Britain or France soon fixed that. Janina, the chief Albanian city under Turkish rule, became the entirely Greek-speaking and Greek-thinking capital of Southern Epirus.

Having seized Southern Epirus, the Greeks (whose national costume is actually Albanian) laid claim, and still lay claim, to "Northern Epirus", which is more or less the southern half of modern Albania.

Given this history, and the collapse both moral and economic of the 'Communist Bloc' after the destruction by East Germans of the notorious Wall in 1990, it is not surprising that Albania has exported a quarter of its population and is in thrall to the insidiously destructive values of American capitalism. Television can in a decade destroy a culture which has survived two thousand years of satrapy, for television has become both God and the manifestation of the sordid culture of capitalism which has choked the planet with its foulness.

THREE ALBANIAN LOVE-POEMS

Near Butrint, South-western Albania

WHAT LOVE IS
by Nexhat Hakiu

translated by Zana Toskaj and 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 every one.

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

That's what love is.
And it is less than happiness.

Percillni këtë nyje për versionin shqip.
Click here for Albanian version.

BREATH
by Ylli Jasa
an Albanian living in Italy
and son-in-law of Nexhat Hakiu

translated by Zana Toskaj and Anthony Weir

I.

I breathe in my life.
I hear with closed eyes the music of your voice
Vibration of breeze
Under the slender wings of a drowsy bird
Dreaming of flight.
And I am waiting
For that gust of light air
That only your arms
Only your arms can make
Only in flight

Who is it ? who is it ?
It's me
Who are you ?
It's meme
Immortal love from Cosmic Dust
Wave, Universe...infinite, infinitesimal
I am a note in the music of Spirit's
Vast, unwritten symphony
I come from chaos with goal and direction
Oh God, O Great God are you there ?
I am, and God as you are
But I can die
Without love

II.

I hear a sweet and surly voice
Flame in spirit
Fire in blood
Sun in heart

Before my eyes
The love-wounded moon falls
And I live my frenzied dream

In my sleep I am looking for the Great Sleep's path
I am afraid of waking
I am afraid of dreaming
I am afraid of fear
I am afraid of love
I am afraid even if I am not afraid
I want only to go
To go, to fly
On deep blue dreaming
Let me dive into the ocean of spirit
Into mysterious waves of your dreams
Drown tenderly
Purposefully
In earthseasky

In light and in darkness
in the midst of your depth
last bubbles of air
come out from my lips
at the bottom of your ocean

Wordless
under water
immersed in dreams
magic words stammered
unheard...
energy forever unremarked.

O sea-swell of woman
Pour your strength out to me
Into my mouth and into the cave of my spirit
I am waiting to drink of your energy
Explore your vastness.

III.

'Love'
Is such a meagre word
That says nothing of spirit to spirit
Within spirit and flesh

And after...
After...after...after..
O what does 'after' mean ?

A thousand years, a day, a moment

In which the moon is another home
And the stars are small, brilliant poems.

A door will open
Then quick and light steps
From memory towards
The nebula of unmemory

Percillni këtë nyje për versionin shqip.
Click here for Albanian version.

The rooves of Gjirokastra, birthplace of Kadare - and Hoxha.

CRYSTAL
by Ismail Kadare
world-famous novelist and poet from the Hoxha period
still living in France

translated by Zana Toskaj and 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?

A NOTE ON ALBANIAN EMIGRATION
AND THE ALBANIAN DIASPORA

Ever since Roman times (at least) Albania has exported its inhabitants. The ports of Bari and Brindisi are nearer to modern Albania and Greece than to Rome, and the Appian way - Rome's principal Euro-route - went to both. Greeks colonised Sicily and Puglia (Apulia), and only a proportion of them would have come from Athens, Corinth or Sparta. Most colonisers would have moved from the barren islands and the coast of Epirus to the richer lands just across the Adriatic.

But the first recorded exodus occurred when the Turks in the 16th century arrived in a sweep up the Balkans which took them to the very gates of Vienna. Thousands of Albanians fled to Southern Italy, where their descendants are still known as Arbëresh and still speak an Italian peppered with Albanian and Greek words. Albanian was one of the languages which the Romans failed to extinguish - unlike its linguistic cousin, Etruscan, and many other tongues, such as Ligurian, between the Alps and Sicily.

Albania was favourably treated under the Ottoman Empire, and supplied engineers, bridge-builders and administrators to the Sublime Porte, thus making emigration through the centuries of Turkish rule largely eastward. When a mauled Albania, truncated by Greece and Serbia in 1912-13, and occupied by them during the First World War miraculously became a nation-state recognised by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the gaze shifted westward again. Before the USA closed its doors on unlimited immigration, many thousands of Albanians had gone there to be boot-blacks or waiters. But the cold Northern work-ethic did not appeal, and many returned to Albania after it was recognised as one of the new nations of Europe.

The idea of the Nation State was, however, completely foreign to most of the inhabitants of the new Republic (see below), and the first government - of enlightened Bishop Fan Noli - did not last long. The country could be held together only by autocracy - the rule of Ahmed Zogu who staged a coup d'état with Serbian help (and, apparently a regiment of Russians. He, admiring Mussolini's destruction of the Mafia and wishing to destroy the power of the land-owning bejs , decided to become a dictator himself. Very many Albanians moved to Italy at this time. Unfortunately, however, Mussolini had his eye on Albania as an ideal Italian 'Protectorate', and the little country was quickly swallowed up by the Second World War, invaded by Italy, Greece and Germany in turn.

Once Enver Hoxha came to power in 1945, emigration came to a halt. He knew of the talent-drain away from the little country, and so he sealed its borders. They remained sealed until 1990. Since then, waves of Albanians have fled West - to Italy, to France, to Australia and the USA. Since 1990 especially, the USA has been a kind of vast vacuum-cleaner sucking up all the talent of the world and wasting it by turning it into cheap labour. A quarter of the 1990 population now live outside Albania and show no signs of ever returning to help the fledgling democracy stand on its feet. (The same is true for truncated Armenia, squashed between Turkey and Azerbaijan.)

There is an old saying that the only religion of Albanians is Albania. How wrong that was! Nowadays the only religion of the whole world is that of the American church of Mammon: the religion of greed - and Albania may remain the Ruritanian basket-case of Europe.