Ismail KADARE - Poetry

Ismail KADARE

 

Poetry

Poetry,

How did you find your way to me?

My mother does not know Albanian well,

She writes letters like Aragon, without commas and periods,

My father roamed the seas in his youth,

But you have come,

Walking down the pavement of my quiet city of stone,

And knocked timidly at the door of my three-storey house,

At Number 16.

There are many things I have loved and hated in life,

For many a problem I have been an 'open city',

But anyway...

Like a young man returning home late at night,

Exhausted and broken by his nocturnal wanderings,

Here too am I, returning to you,

Worn out after another escapade.

And you,

Not holding my infidelity against me,

Stroke my hair tenderly,

My last stop,

Poetry.

(Yalta 1959)

[Poezia, from the volume Vjersha dhe poema zë zgjedhura, Tirana: Naim Frashëri 1966, p. 27, 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. 76]

Childhood

My childhood - ink-stained fingers,

Bells in the morning,

The muezzin at dusk,

Collections of cigar boxes and old stamps,

Trading one Ceylon

For two Luxembourg.

Thus they passed,

Childhood days,

Chasing after a rag ball, raising dust and cries,

A rag ball,

Made of grey Albanian rags.

(1958)

[Fëminia, 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. 77]

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]

Longing for Albania

I was filled with longing for Albania

Tonight as I returned home on the trolley,

The smoke of a Partizani cigarette in the hand of a Russian

Curled bluish, twirled upwards

As if whispering to me, its compatriot,

In the language of the Albanians.

I long to stroll through the streets of Tiranë in the evening,

Where I used to get into mischief,

And through the streets where I never got into mischief.

Those old wooden doorways know me,

They will still hold a grudge against me

And will snub their noses at me,

But I won't mind

Because I am filled with longing.

I long to stroll through the lanes full of dry leaves,

Dry leaves, autumn leaves,

For which comparisons can so easily be found.

I was filled with longing for Albania,

For that great, wide and deep sky,

For the azure course of the Adriatic waves,

For clouds at sunset ablaze like castles,

For the Albanian Alps with their white hair and green beards,

For the nylon nights fluttering in the breeze,

For the mists, like red Indians, on the prowl at dawn,

For the locomotives and the horses

That huff and puff, dripping in sweat,

For the cypresses, the herds and graves

I was filled with longing.

I was filled with longing

For the Albanians.

I was filled with longing and swiftly journey there,

Flying over the mists, as over desires.

How far and how beloved you are, my country.

The airport will tremble with the droning,

The mists will hang in suspense over the chasms.

Surely those who invented the jet engine

Must have been far from their country once.

(Moscow 1960)

[Malli i Shqipërisë, 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. 79]

The cataracts

The cataracts cascade downwards

Like spirited white horses,

Their manes full of foam and a rainbow of hues.

But suddenly, at the edge of the gorge,

They fall on their forelegs,

They break, oh, their white legs,

And die at the foot of the rocks.

Now in their lifeless eyes

The frozen sky reflects.

[Kataraktet, from the volume Vjersha dhe poema zë zgjedhura, Tirana: Naim Frashëri 1966, p. 30, 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. 81]

The old cinema

Old cinema,

Abandoned cinema

Where no films, not even reruns, have been shown for a long time,

Where the audiences no longer make a clatter with their seats,

Where peanuts are no longer sold

At intermission.

The stained screen,

The broken speakers,

The empty seats like lines unwritten.

Pensive and full of nostalgia

I stare from the doorway

At this poem of seats, long and abandoned.

Childhood cinema,

Tumbledown cinema,

I've seen so many countries,

I've seen so many auditoriums,

But none of them have I entered with such joy

As you,

Shabby old cinema,

Wonderful and precious to me!

Nowhere have I felt better,

Not in luxurious halls of shining velvet,

With a couple of blondes at my side.

To you I come

In the company of a gypsy or two.

Coins, coins,

Money collected with difficulty,

Jingling merrily at the ticket-booth,

The posters by the mosque

And by the Bazaar Cafe

Drawn by Qani the doorman himself.

One poster said:

'Soviet film',

Another for the same film said:

'Czech film',

But no one really cared,

We forgave you everything,

Dear old

Cinema.

On that bit of screen

We saw a bit of the whole world,

For the first time.

On six square metres

The world had no limits,

The world was splendid

Even though the screen was patched up.

We too were patched up,

Patched up was the Republic,

Time, elbows, States were patched up,

But the glossiest of screens

Had never seen

A sparkle like the one

In our eyes.

Old cinema,

Abandoned cinema,

Seats where childhood days

Sat in rows.

Childhood days,

Always chattering,

Like a row of birds

On a telephone wire.

Old cinema,

Abandoned cinema,

Heavy, long and sunken seats.

As old as I get,

Wherever I go,

Like a porter I'll carry them

With me, those seats.

[Kinemaja e vjetër, from the volume Vjersha dhe poema zë zgjedhura, Tirana: Naim Frashëri 1966, p. 35, 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. 82]

Train timetables

I love those train timetables at little railway stations,

Standing on the wet platform and contemplating the infinity of the tracks.

The distant howl of a locomotive. What, what?

(No one understands the nebulous language of steam engines)

Passenger trains. Tank cars. Freight cars full of ore

Endlessly pass by.

Thus pass the days of your life through the station of your being,

Filled with voices, noise, signals

And the heavy ore of memory.

[Këto orare trenash, from the volume Përse mendohen këto male, Tirana: Naim Frashëri 1964, 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. 84]

Requiem for Mayakovski

I ate at the same table with his assassins

At the writers' vacation house

             in Dubulti, in Yalta.

They smiled and talked of socialist realism,

While his blood

             spattered their car windows,

Their jackets, armchairs, salaries

And the ruddy face of the critic Yermilov.

They thumped their chests and talked of socialist realism

In the presidium chamber of red velvet

             under the emblem with a star,

While the Russian winter

             froze him,

Stretched out upon the black earth,

             only to be thawed out in April.

Obscure forces dressed in socialist garb,

A pack of lousy critics, speculators, careerists,

Took up the attack with the age-old refrain of the mediocre:

"You were great, but we got you."

There stands his bronze statue in Mayakovski Square,

It rose and glumly observed the years to come.

Behind the crowd of his assassins, whom he knew,

He saw the first clouds of the counter-revolution darken the sky.

[Rekuiem për Majakovskin, from the volume Koha, Tirana: Naim Frashëri 1976, 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. 85]

What are these mountains thinking about

1

What are these lofty mountains thinking about

As the sun sets in the distance beyond the highway?

A mountaineer sets out at the fall of night,

His long rifle

Casting a hundred-mile-long shadow on the ground.

The shadow of the rifle hurries

Over mountains, plains, villages;

The shadow of its barrels hastens through the dusk.

I too set forth along the hillside

With a thought in my mind

Somewhere.

The shadow of the thought and the shadow of the rifle

Cross and collide in the twilight.

2

This is how you have always set out, Albania,

On your long legs

And with a long rifle.

You wandered without knowing where to go,

Onwards toward the morning full of clouds and mist,

Grey and ponderous, as though born of night.

3

Cloudbursts ate away at the land

And bared the bases of the cliffs.

Thus, the centuries have gnawed away at your body

Until your very sinew and ribs were exposed.

Sinew, sinew and ribs,

Only boulders, rocks and mountains,

Little flat land,

Oh, how very little flat land

The centuries left you!

The centuries gnawed at you like hounds

Wherever they could get at you.

When you met them

They attacked you,

The teeth of time

Dug into your thighs,

But you did not turn back,

You did not yield.

4

You never removed the long rifle

From your shoulders,

From shoulders covered in wounds,

From shoulders of skin and bone.

You ate bread in brine,

Brine and maize every night,

And you saved a little fat,

Oh, that little bit of fat

For friends and for the long rifle,

To grease the long rifle.

Women give birth to babies,

But a rifle gives birth to bullets,

And the two have been equally sacred

To the Albanian:

The bullets and the babies.

The child will tomorrow take to the plough

And the rifle will protect him at night.

Time fired bullets over the shoulders of Albania

Like rice thrown over the shoulders of a bride.

5

The pealing of bells

Rung by night

Resounded over the mountain slopes.

What were the bells saying,

What were the priests murmuring

To their high churches

In their foreign tongues?

Latin logic, in long sentences,

Strove to bend the long rifle.

6

And there were poets

Poised on hand-carved furniture

From your forests

Who, inspired by you,

Wrote of varnished wood

And of nightingales

In the trees, ancestors of furniture,

Who had once sung.

They forgot

That in your forests,

From whence the furniture came,

There were many wolves

And few nightingales.

7

Storms, fever, malaria ravaged your body,

The priests and the mullahs

Deafened you.

Like Saturn,

You devoured your children in blood feuds,

And on these feuds the minarets and bell towers

Bestowed their blessings.

8

And fierce enemies nipped at the borders,

Nipped at the pale, bare shoulders of our native land.

The land arose, tottering,

Its eyes glowing with hunger and fever

And, forgetting its hunger,

Set forth in the night to measure the borders,

With a foot rule?

With a yard stick?

No,

With the long rifle.

9

Your first contact with inventions,

With the new technology of civilization

Was with types and calibres of new weapons,

Which were tested against your withered, bullet-riddled breast.

After the fighting

There remained but the solitary graves of mountaineers,

Mounds of melancholy,

Monosyllabic names,

For a long time

Nothing but a heap of stone

And, instead of flowers at the head,

A monotonous song

Chanted by the tribe,

A monotonous song.

And beside the long limbs

The rifle fell away, the long rifle.

And after the long limbs

The short name fell away,

The letters dropping off

Like pine cones in the rain,

And after everything else

At last the song ceased,

The monotonous song of the tribe.

10

And once again Albania cowered in a hut

In her dark mythological nights

And on the strings of a lute strove to express something

Of her incomprehensible soul,

Of the inner voices

That echoed mutely from the depths of the epic earth.

She strove to express something

But what could three strings

Beneath five fingers trembling with hunger express?

It would have taken hundreds of miles of strings

And millions of fingers

To express the soul of Albania!

11

If one was slain on a hillside,

Another arose elsewhere,

As if out of the earth -

The gaunt Albanian,

And above his body,

Like an iron limb,

The long rifle

Rose black.

With the rifle in his hand,

He wandered through these regions,

Over mountains and plains.

The rifle made him taller,

Though it often made his life shorter.

12

Chewing on legends in the freezing night,

Famished, you ate your own songs,

Albania.

You were overcome by sleep,

Bent over the plough at twilight

Under the dark heavens

And you dreamt of so little joy

As no one had ever dreamt of before.

You dreamt

Of one more slice of bread,

Of one more spoonful of brine.

You dreamt of brine and bread

And of a little, so very little fat

To share with the rifle.

Your wedding was

Lightning in the midst of your misery,

Full of nerves, drums, quarrelling

And a little joy,

The little joy you dreamt of behind the plough

13

The nights gave birth to mornings,

Ponderous and grey;

The days cursed the nights,

The nights cursed the days.

Albania in her ruggedness

Gave birth to beautiful children,

Implanting in each child

A dream, a hope.

Tending her withered breasts,

Albania gave life,

She gave birth to soldiers,

Who later died in the sands of the Sahara,

Singing of the Bridge to the Kaaba.

14

The sons you sent to the cities of Europe,

Who knew foreign pleasures,

Returned

One by one,

To find a sorrowful land,

Clouds laden with yellow rain.

The monarchy, like a quarryman, smashed their dreams.

They arrived

With suitcases full of illusions

Under the shadow of minarets, of monasteries,

And rambled in autumnal delusions

Until the earth returned them to her bosom

And they rotted under the monotonous song of the rain.

15

Early fruits are expensive in price,

But early fruits are often destroyed by frost.

Albania placed them back into her bosom

"It is still too early," she said,

Observing the gloomy light of dawn.

16

And once again she bent over the plough

And sowed her bitter tears in long furrows.

Under a sombre sky of endless ignorance

She sowed her tears

For rainstorms and tempests to come.

17

Amen!

The priests and a few drowsy poets came forth

To declaim abstract genealogical glories,

But you trampled on traditional laws

With your bare feet and scratched their poetic figures.

As if you were some insane beauty,

The traitors spun you around to take advantage of you,

Shouting,

"No worry,

No matter if you have no food.

We are God's chosen people,"

While you scratched out an embossment under the stars,

Your embossment of scabby, filthy sores.

18

The poets wrote hymns to the fairies and nymphs,

Who were delousing themselves by the streams.

You could count the very ribs of the fairies, the nymphs,

Who, for a few coins, would proffer themselves in the bushes.

On occasion, the fairies and the nymphs managed

To abandon their epic alpine meadows

And descend one by one

Into the villages.

And, one by one, they ended up

In the brothels,

In the brothels that dotted

The weary mountain ridges,

Like wounds,

Like derision.

19

The nymphs departed,

Abandoning the myths,

And the myths began to empty.

The myths,

The last granary of the nation,

Returned to the abandoned churches.

For the myths, like people, were hungry,

And lived in great poverty,

Greater than any other,

In an age when the winds of boredom whistled

Over deserted mythical plains.

20

In the palace, King Zog gave nightly balls,

The princesses smiled,

The dancers waltzed.

In the quiet cells of frigid monasteries

The priests studied suffixes.

The orchestra played on

In Café Kursaal,

The elderly matrons powdered their noses,

While pregnant Albania

Miscarried the days

On bloodstained napkins of clouds.

21

And the mountain ranges were silent like horse caravans,

Oh, what caravans they were,

These mountain ranges!

They waited for hours,

For days,

For months,

For someone to lead them into the great battle,

For someone to lead them to a new world,

The mountain ranges waited with their heads in the clouds.

22

There were those who tried to tug at the mountains,

Like at the halters of horses

And led them a little way down the road,

But in the dark, they lost their way.

The formidable mountain ranges wandered in circles

Through the night and the fog,

Blind,

Terrified.

As if frightened by a tragic shrieking of old,

The heroic mountains neighed in their dreams.

23

And thus they turned in circles like a caravan in the desert,

Until they settled down, were calm once again,

Until twilight, the fortresses, hunger, the epic legends

Jumped on their backs again,

And with them

The brothels too.

But the calm was deceptive,

The long mountain caravans were waiting,

Waiting for a leader,

Albania was waiting

For the Communist Party.

24

What are these lofty mountains thinking about,

These enigmas of ridges stretching north and south?

I continue on my way

In the shadow of the long rifle,

That long rifle:

Your Archimedes' lever, Albania.

Through the sight of his rifle

The Albanian observed the horizons and the times,

The solitary whistling of his musket

Forced the centuries to duck.

This rifle barrel

On the Albanian's back

Has grown there like a long sharp bone

Transplanted to his spine by a difficult destiny,

An extension of his backbone,

This awesome iron limb,

A proud atavism of ancient times.

The fearless Albanian has crossed the centuries,

With destiny on his back,

Trudging in his ancient sandals

Across the ageless land holding the graves of our forefathers.

This land which has brought forth

More heroism than grain through the ages,

This land...

That is what these lofty mountains are thinking about,

As evening falls in the distance beyond the highway.

(1962-1964)

[Përse mendohen këto male, from the volume Përse mendohen këto male, Tirana: Naim Frashëri 1964, 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. 88-96]

The Red Pashas

1.

At midnight did the Politburo gather,

What's new at the northern border?

What's up at the southern border?

The sky is clouded, snowy winter.

Is the old ruling class on the move,

Is disaster in the making?

Have the heads of foreign missions

Been sending telegrams of alarm?

No, it's quiet at the borders,

No alarm comes from the missions,

Under the dictatorship of the proletariat

The once great castes will spend winter with bowed heads.

And production is normal, and the days

Pass routinely in December...

Why then unexpectedly

At midnight did the Politburo gather?

2.

States are not destroyed from the rooftops

Though the water seeps in somewhere,

They're destroyed from their foundations,

Socialist states are subject

To this principle, too.

Everything may seem fine at the top,

Socialist competition, song-singing,

Posters and our heroes of socialist labour,

On the First of May in the local paper.

Telegrams of congratulation, sunshine

At public meetings and in the verse of young writers,

But, down below,

Yes, in the foundations,

A black tumour grows slowly.

For our foes we have cannons, hymns and dances,

Let the foreign missions send the message,

With what do we fight bureaucracy?

Cannons are of no use,

And there are no consuls for spreading such news.

3.

Midst notes and phone calls, correspondence,

The scenes are always filled

To the hilt with those friendly smiles,

Bureaucrats are a different matter.

Not with Pelican ink they're covered,

That fine, eccentric bunch, ha, ha,

No, they are evil,

I see them with their hands

Bathed in blood up to the elbows.

I see them digging deeply

At the foundations of the revolution.

What are they doing?

Why are they overturning, throwing left and right,

The bodies of our socialist martyrs?

But take a look,

It appears they are washing the bodies,

They are trying swiftly to efface the bloodstains from the foundations,

And with the blood, efface what they have left behind themselves:

All our ideals and principles.

How are they to efface these traces of blood?

Oh, they know how easy it then is

To alter the course of the revolution, the dictatorship

Of the proletariat

In its essence.

Thus, they have fallen to their knees,

Ever scrubbing, washing the blood away,

But what has happened now?

Why have they halted

At that barren garden, at that empty yard?

Here is where the overthrown caste was buried,

The pashas, beys, and noble families,

They attack, turn the bodies over and begin

Without delay to strip them bare.

The bloodstained robes of the former rulers

They don quickly, with orders and medals.

Sporting these on their shoulders, in the night,

They set off towards morning like a cloudburst.

4.

And morning came,

Pale and frozen,

Under their cloaks with the orders and crowns,

They go off to work, to their ministries and offices,

Indeed, even to the Central Committee.

The Red Pashas, beys with party membership cards,

Baron-secretaries, petroleum mafia, all lined up,

A sombre procession, to the chanting of liturgy,

They bear the revolution's coffin to the grave...

5.

But externally, the scene looked different,

Smiles and the clenching of fists at public meetings,

Things went easily with Uncle Kamberi and the old men,

With words like "Enver," "the Party," "Self-criticism."

So it was during the daytime,

But at night

They returned to the foundations,

But the revolution was not like Rozafa's Castle,

Which rose in the daytime and crumbled at night.

6.

Enver Hoxha with his eagle eye

Was the first to have doubts about them.

He then descended to the foundations

Of the state, as in the great ballads of old.

He bore a red torch in his hand,

The very earth quivered,

The light of the fire fell upon them,

And he saw them effacing the blood of our martyrs

As they were dividing up the cloaks.

"What, you are here?"

They rose to their feet.

"Oh, Comrade Enver, hmm, long may you live!"

But he looked askance

With pain in each strand of his hair,

And roared like a mountain in winter.

He was not Christ, to drive them from power

With a whip and a club.

He raised the working class

To make Communism thrive.

7.

Just as once partisan patrols,

Teams of worker-supervisors now spread out:

"Let the ministries not be seized by cannon fire

Tomorrow,

Today we will take them under our control."

The dictatorship of the working class is not found simply in poetry

Or on the birthday of a veteran lathe worker.

Are you for socialism?

Then run and queue up,

Proclaim everywhere and above all

The control of the working class.

Fight bureaucracy day and night,

Keep the old ruling class underfoot

If you do not want the firing squad

To line them up against the wall tomorrow

On the Main Boulevard.

8.

Days passed.

The storm of events

Continued furiously for years and seasons,

Plenary sessions of the Party gathered, like

The revolution's soldiers

In a storm.

The working class marches with the party on epoch-making days

The people swarm behind the working class,

And should the Politburo again

Gather at noon or at midnight

They are at the ready.

[Pashallarët e Kuq, translated by Robert Elsie. This poem, modest from a literary point of view, was written ca. January 1974, half a year after the Fourth Plenary Session of the Central Committee (June 1973), which had caused considerable panic in intellectual circles in Albania. It was originally to have been published in the literary newspaper Drita (The Light) in 1975, but was banned at the last moment, and Kadare was severely taken to task for having written it. Long regarded as lost, "The Red Pashas," also known as "Meeting of the Politburo at Noon," has been the subject of much controversy and interpretation. Indeed a whole book was written about it, Zhdukja e Pashallarëve të kuq të Kadaresë: anketim për një krim letrar (The Disappearance of Kadare's The Red Pashas: Inquiry into a Literary Crime), Tirana 2002, by Maks Velo. In March 2002, the poem was finally discovered in a Tirana archive and is translated here for the first time]