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Shpirti i Shqiperisë
ALBANIAN POEMS OF DISSIDENCE
by Trifon Xhagjika, Namik Mane
and Bilal Xhaferri
3
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TRIFON XHAGJIKA
(1932-1963)
translated by Zana Toskaj and Anthony Weir
I can't,
I saw my fatherland
Help me to be happy.
(1963)
Trifon Xhagjika
(pronounced 'Dzajika')
came from 'humble origins' in the village of Zagoria near Gjirokastër. Under the communist régime he was able to get to university in Tirana, and went on from there to an administrative job in the army. He was arrested in 1963 together with members of a Communist youth group and was executed by firing-squad. Although poetry was his passion, very little of his work was published, and much has been lost. Some were published in 1994 under the title
ATDHEU ESHTË LAKURIQ
(My Fatherland is Naked). Here is the Albanian version of the title-poem:
E mora për dore
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4
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NAMIK MANE
translated by Zana Toskaj and Anthony Weir
Having written these poems during his internment, Namik Mane buried them. Most of his friends (in the Communist Youth Group) were arrested and killed under the Hoxha régime.
Albania was in reality on a war-footing during much of the paranoid Hoxha period, because it was isolated, estranged from post-Stalinist, 'revisionist' Russia and the Soviet Satellites, estranged from even-more-revisionist Yugoslavia which virtually surrounded it (and had tried to gobble it up just after the Second World War), and of course totally apprehensive of the old enemy Greece, a member of NATO, which had already swallowed up and ethnically cleansed half its territory. The borders, especially near Greece, were wired and patrolled, the waters of the Straits of Corfu swept nightly with searchlights to deter or find defectors. Security Alerts (an excellent method of terror) were almost a daily occurrence, and when the dreaded sirens sounded, everyone had to drop everything and assemble in designated spots. The whole society was riven by fear. Albania's old feudal system had been crudely replaced by a dictatorship in which half the people spied on the other half. A repeated, half-heard joke - or even a grudge - was enough to send someone for years to a prison camp - or to oblivion. Because Albania is such a tiny, truncated country, such a dictatorship was utterly devastating - and it will take at least a generation for its people to recover from the trauma. Hoxha was one of a select group of Ultra-dictators whose membership includes the utterly-evil Josip Stalin, Adolf Hitler, 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Georghiu Ceauçescu and Juán Batista of Cuba - plus various South American mass-murdering presidents backed or even put into power by the United States. Namik Mane's poems speak for the victims of all these - and some 'democratic' - régimes where people are held without trial or any recourse to uncorrupt (or any) legal defence.
WAS THERE EVER A CAMP ?
Was there ever a camp without the desire to have wings
Ten thousand square miles fenced in and patrolled
Ideals crushed
People, I'm broken
Step on me!
THE MOMENT
SO YOU WANT THE SONG OF TRIUMPH
So you want the sacred song of triumph -
Waiting for tomorrow to come
Hands bleeding
SOLITUDE
I don't chew people with the jaws of loneliness -
Loneliness changes
ALBANIAN VERSIONS:
NË CILIN KAMP
Në cilin kamp nuk lindi dëshira për të fluturuar
Njëzete e tetë mijë kilometra katëror mbërthyer me tela
Shokët janë mbledhur në grupe:
Me solli tek ti kënga e tyre.
E dashur ta nisa një leter.
Doni këngën e shenjtë të triumfit.
Prisni që nesër të vijë ndonjë tjeter
Më vjen keq!
Plagë kemi duart
Unë nuk pertyp njerëz me nofullat e vetmisë
Ne vetmi trajta reale me merr fantazia
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5
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BILAL XHAFERRI
translated by Zana Toskaj and Anthony Weir
Born near Konispol
(Çamërisë),
close to the Greek border, he was interned in 1968 for criticising one of Ismail Kadare's books
(The Wedding)
, Bilal Xhaferri escaped to Greece in 1969, and then went to the USA.
ALBANIA 1976
Small nation
And throughout the land
COME, SADNESS Come, sadness
Come slowly
Come slowly
Come, sadness
Come like nearing thunder in the night
Come, sadness
O you my beloved who has never abandoned me
Come, sadness
Sadness, come.
ALBANIAN VERSIONS:
SHQIPËRI 1976
Vend i vogël
Errësirë e madhe
Dhe rrugëve të atdheut
EJA TRISHTIM Eja, trishtim
Eja me hapa fletësh qe bien nga degët
Eja, trishtim
Eja me hapa tingujsh qe dridhen në mbrëmje
Eja, trishtim
O preher i embël që nuk më braktise kurrë
Eja, trishtim Trishtim, eja.
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For some idea of the fraught existence of Albanians under Enver Hoxha, see:
LA VIE, JEU ET MORT DE LUL MAZRUK
by
Ismail Kadare
(Fayard, Paris, 2002).
ISBN 2 213 61328 1
Translated from the Albanian by
Tedi Papavrami.
Kadare is very much a stylist and master of a vast vocabulary, who translates very well into French. Unfortunately the books of his that appear in English - apart from one, the excellent Three Elegies for Kosova - are translated from the French translations - which will probably be the fate of this book, too, unless Kadare wins the Nobel Prize. The word Jeu in its French title is pretty well untranslatable into English, because the word can mean sport or s how or execution of a performance as well as game . In Albanian it can also mean interpretation or joke . The rich tapestry of this story concerns a young man whose first name means Flower and who has ambitions to be an actor in the National Theatre in Tirana, but is called up for National Service and sent to Frontier Duties at Saranda, the best posting in Albania. Here, he is caught up by the amorous attentions of his recently-acquired girl-friend from Tirana who has come to Saranda to be near him -and of his Commandant who is attracted by his extremely good looks. The girl-friend in turn is pursued by her immediate boss - a member of a security service - because in order to get to Saranda she had to get herself employed in the tower-block Butrinti Hotel as a kind of prostitute who will sniff out possible defectors to Corfu, little more than a stone's throw across the straits. Overshadowing this story of misdirected love are the Iliad and the Æneid - particularly the story of Hector slain outside the walls of his home-town Troy, and the shameful dragging of his corpse around the city by the loathsome Achilles. For Butrint, just south of Saranda, was reputedly founded by refugees from Troy, was modelled on Troy, and is exactly half-way between Troy and Rome. In antique times people fled to Albania, whereas during the Communist period its doughtier inhabitants were trying to flee from it. Enver Hoxha's régime is obsessed by preventing all escapes, not least because successful escapees are paraded on Greek television. There are more historical references - such as Mussolini's visit to Butrint, the Italian financing of excavations and restoration there to the greater glory of fascist Rome, and the financing of further (and continuing) excavations and restoration during Hoxha's rule by the Rothschild Foundation of London. One of the big problems with escapees who had to evade the searchlights which every night swept over the beaches and water of SW Albania was that the bodies of those who were successfully machine-gunned were rarely found. The régime wanted to display evidence of the impossibility of escape. So Lul Mazrek is caught up in the paranoia of Hoxha (there is a fine set-piece describing the sheer terror of an audience with The Great Leader), the terror of his underlings and the blackmail of his Commandant - and ends up in his only successful acting rôle: as a convincingly blood-spattered corpse displayed to the inhabitants of the south-west coast as evidence of the impossibility of escape to Corfu - though he himself had harboured such ambitions. During the short, chaotic and corrupt Berisha period, one of the Enquiries into the crimes of the Communist era concerned itself with this episode, and most of the characters still living give evidence. Lul is exonerated because he was blackmailed and, as a member of the armed forces, had to obey orders. But shortly afterwards he is shot, Chicago-style, at point-blank range outside his local café - by the Commandant who had given him his only star billing in life, and has had his guilty homosexual secret put on record.
This book comes at a time when the Albanian authorities are trying, in vain, to stop the vile trade in young people of both sexes who are smuggled from the same area of the country to Italy: for prostitution - some of them not even landed, but thrown into the water to swim ashore as illegal immigrants to rich Fortress-Europe: a different, and not a better, kind of Looking-Glass World.
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click here for a non-dissident Albanian poem
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an Albanian archæological web-site
