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Robert Elsie
Who will slay the wolf
Selected poetry by Ali Podrimja
Translated from the Albanian with an introduction by Robert Elsie
ISBN 0-9622141-6-7
Gjonlekaj
Publishing Company, New York 2000
268 pp.
 INTRODUCTION
Ali Podrimja
and the Poetry of Kosovo
Kosovo, the dust-swept Plain of the
Blackbirds in the southern Balkans, is many things to many people.
For the majority of its inhabitants, it is now the self-declared
Republic of Kosovo under foreign military occupation, a country
longing for democracy and freedom from the brutal Serbian yoke,
an ethnically Albanian territory since the beginning of time.
For the small Serbian minority, Kosovo is a nostalgic reverie
of Old Serbia, the very cradle of Serbian Orthodox civilization
now overrun by the Moslem hordes. For all of its inhabitants,
it is the powder-keg of the Balkans, a land of passions.
Disconsolate at the eternal border conflicts
between the northern Albanian tribes and the Slavs of neighbouring
Montenegro during the nineteenth century, an Albanian poet, Father
Gjergj Fishta (1871-1940) of Shkodër, noted wistfully in
his immortal epic Lahuta e malcisë (The highland
lute):
Si gjithmonë Shqyptár e Shkjá
Janë lá n'gjak, q'se fati i zí
Flakë e agzot vûni per brî,
Vû per brî Shqypní e Mal t'Zí!
(Albanian and Slav as always
Were at blood, ever since a tragic fate
Placed fire and gunpowder side by side,
Placed side by side Albania and Montenegro)
Albanians and Serbs have been living
together in Kosovo for centuries now. Though never completely
at ease with one another, they have, during some happier eras
of their common history, managed to co-exist in friendship and
harmony. In many periods, though, relations between the two peoples
have been tense. Since the Serbian military took direct control
of Kosovo in 1990 against the will of the Albanians who now make
up about 90% of the population, the situation has once again
become tragically explosive.
The roots of culture and history in Kosovo
Whether ancient Dardania was the home
of the Illyrians, the Thracians, or the Daco-Moesians, or of
all of them, is an issue which historians, archeologists and
linguists have been discussing for decades, and the question
will no doubt remain unanswered. The scant writings left by Latin
and Greek chroniclers give little indication of how the ancestors
of the Albanians once lived in this region at the crossroads
between the Roman West and the Byzantine East.
The mists of Balkan history cleared briefly
during the Slavic invasions of the peninsula from the sixth to
eighth centuries. These nomadic tribes swept southwards from
the Carpathians to occupy much of the central and southern Balkans
and pushed the indigenous (proto-Albanian) and Romanic inhabitants
of the peninsula back into the inaccessible mountains of northern
Albania, an area which not even the Romans had succeeded in subduing.
In the centuries to come, the Serbs settled in large numbers
in Rascia and Kosovo, by then formally part of the Byzantine
Empire. It was here that an independent Serbian empire flourished
from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. At its zenith, the
empire of Stephan Dushan (1331-1355) extended from the Danube
right down to the Aegean Sea.
The mediaeval Serbian empire bequeathed
to the region many a monument of culture. Among the jewels of
Kosovo architecture are the Serbian Orthodox patriarchate in
Peja (Pec) (1230), the resplendent church of Bogorodica Ljevishka
in Prizren (1307), the monastery of Grachanica (1321) near Prishtina
(Pristina), and the monastery church of Dechan (1327) near Peja.
A turning point in the history of Kosovo,
and indeed in the history of the Balkans and of Europe as a whole,
came on St. Vitus day, 28 June 1389, when a coalition of Balkan
forces under Serbian leadership met a new foe: the troops of
the Ottoman Turks under the banners of Islam. The now legendary
Battle of Kosovo Polje marked an unprecedented catastrophe for
Serbia and for Christian forces in general.
Over the next five centuries, Kosovo
played its role as an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. The
refined Islamic culture of the Orient, though somewhat pallid
in the provincial atmosphere of the Balkans, left many traces
in Kosovo, too: the tomb of Sultan Murath (1389), the Imperial
Mosque in Prishtina (1461), and the Mosque of Sinan Pasha in
Prizren (1615). It was during these centuries that the Albanians,
both Moslem and Catholic, descended in increasing numbers from
their secluded mountain valleys and returned to the flatland
of Kosovo to resettle and farm one of the most fertile regions
of 'Turkey in Europe'. Although Ottoman rule in Kosovo was by
no means conducive to freedom and development, the Albanians
did manage, against all odds, to preserve and consolidate their
national identity, and thus survive as a people.
After the final collapse of the Ottoman
Empire during the First World War, Kosovo was awarded to Serbia
which had coveted the province for centuries. The inclusion of
Kosovo into the new 'Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes'
left almost half the Albanian population in the Balkans outside
of their Albanian homeland. For the people of Kosovo, in their
majority, it was a tragic mistake which has haunted European
politics ever since.
The Kosovo Albanians did not fare any
better under their Serbian rulers than they had under the Sultans.
Denied all linguistic, cultural and educational rights, the Albanians
were now to play the role of simple peasant farmers in a country
which the Slavs considered their exclusive property. Albanian-language
schools remained as unlawful as they had been under the Turks,
and even the possession of Albanian-language books was dangerous
for the few people in Kosovo who could read.
Ethnic cleansing was a keystone of Serbian
policy towards Kosovo from the very start. In the twenties and
thirties, indeed up to 1960, hundreds of thousands of Albanians
were forcibly expelled from their homeland, mostly to Turkey
under the absurd pretext that they were Turks, and Serbian colonists
were more than willing to occupy and settle the newly vacated
farmlands. Characteristic of the attitude taken by Serbian intellectuals
before the Second World War was a Memorandum presented to the
Belgrade government on 7 March 1937 by noted Serbian historian
Vaso Cubrilovic (1897-1990) on the 'Expulsion of the Albanians'.
This programme, which reads like a watered-down version of the
minutes of the Nazi Wannsee Conference of 1942, foresaw an active
campaign to 'depopulate' Kosovo of its Albanian inhabitants and
replace them with Serbian colonists. As a result, Albanian loyalties
to the royalist Yugoslav state were divided when Axis powers
occupied Kosovo in 1941 and reunited the province with Albania,
giving Kosovo Albanians schools and cultural facilities in their
own language for the first time.
The end of the Second World War witnessed
a mass slaughter of Kosovo Albanians. Kosovo was formally returned
to Yugoslavia in early 1945 after Tito had persuaded communist
leaders in Albania to give up the principle of self-determination,
a 'Marxist solution', for the region, realizing he would never
receive Serbian support for a referendum. On its reincorporation
into Tito's Yugoslavia, Kosovo was nonetheless declared an Autonomous
Region within the Republic of Serbia, not as an integral part
of Serbia.
The extreme political divergence between
Yugoslavia and Albania which had erupted in 1948 made it evident
to Kosovo Albanians that they could not look to Tirana for anything
more than moral support in the field of culture and education.
The Albanian language had finally been proclaimed 'one of the
official languages of Kosovo', but the linguistic and educational
rights which were theoretically enjoyed by the Albanian population
in Kosovo long remained more abstract than concrete. Tito's would-be
successor, vice-president Aleksandar Rankovic (1909-1983), made
active use of the secret police to repress and terrorize the
Albanian population, whom he despised, in favour of a 'Greater
Serbia', until his fall from grace at the Brioni Plenum in July
1966.
The improvement of Yugoslav-Albanian
relations in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
in 1968 and the establishment of full diplomatic ties between
the two countries in February 1971 brought about a political
thaw for the Kosovo Albanians. In 1968, they won the right to
fly their national flag and in November 1969 the bilingual University
of Prishtina was opened, facilitating higher education in Albanian
for the first time. Full cultural autonomy was first achieved
after much delay under the Yugoslav constitution of 1974, though
only in Kosovo itself, not for the large Albanian community in
Macedonia.
With access to Albanian-language education
and cultural facilities having been granted, Albanian literature
and culture in Kosovo flourished as never before. It was a brief
blossoming in which tremendous progress was made within a short
period of time, in education and culture, and in particular in
Albanian literature.
The semblance of autonomy and freedom
which the Albanians enjoyed throughout the seventies was brought
to an abrupt end in 1981 when the popular demand for republic
status and equality with the other peoples of the Yugoslav federation,
a demand supported by over ninety percent of the population of
Kosovo, was met with tanks and automatic rifles.
The suppression of the uprising of March/April
1981 signalled the end of peaceful co-existence in Kosovo and,
at the same time, the beginning of the demise of Yugoslavia.
Throughout the eighties, the political and economic situation
in the province deteriorated and as a result, inter-communal
relations took a drastic turn for the worse, a harbinger of what
was to come for all of Yugoslavia in the early nineties. The
Serbian military invasion of Kosovo in the summer of 1990 brought
the province to the verge of civil war. The elected parliament
and government of Kosovo were deposed, the only Albanian-language
daily newspaper, Rilindja, banned, and all Albanian-language
radio and television broadcasting shut down. Since then, 'emergency
legislation' has facilitated the direct takeover of all Kosovo
industry and the firing not only of Albanian management but of
all employees of the 'inferior race', literally hundreds of thousands
of workers. In the autumn of 1991 teaching at the University
of Prishtina was suspended, with the exception of courses reserved
for the Serbian minority, and all Albanian professors were expelled.
Albanian-language elementary and secondary schools have been
closed down, too. Nowhere in Europe have human rights been so
flagrantly and so systematically violated as in Kosovo.
The situation has been particularly dire
for Albanian writers and intellectuals in Kosovo. They constitute
the greatest threat to Serbian hegemony over the region by the
populist leader Slobodan Milosevic who, like Rankovic before
him, has shown nothing but contempt for demands of equality and
human rights for the Albanian majority. With no jobs, no source
of income, no right to education, and no hope of change for the
moment, the situation looks particularly sombre on the Plain
of the Blackbirds.
Albanian verse in Kosovo
Poetry has always been the vanguard
of literature in Kosovo and has enjoyed much greater popularity
among writers and the reading public there than prose. This poetic
imagination has solid roots in the soil, in the land and its
people, their aspirations, sufferings and dreams. The poetry
of Kosovo has thus never lost touch with the people. It is a
living organism.
Initial literary activity in Kosovo appeared
in the periodical Jeta e re (New life) which was founded
in 1949 by poet Esad Mekuli (1916-1993). An embryonic Kosovo-Albanian
literature began to make its presence felt in the 1950s and in
particular in the 1960s. It arose under often hostile conditions,
at times tolerated and at times repressed by the Belgrade authorities.
By the mid-sixties, Albanian and Kosovo-Albanian literature was
beginning to appear in print in Yugoslavia on a significant scale,
concomitant with a flourishing of education and culture in Kosovo.
After generations of enforced silence,
Albanian poets began to write and channel their creative energies
in Kosovo as never before. With opportunities for publication
and an intensely interested public at their disposal, a robust
generation of talented poets came to the fore and gave proof
that Kosovo was no longer a cultural wasteland but a dynamic
element of modern European culture.
Representative of this generation of
young and dynamic poets were: the hermetic Martin Camaj (1925-1992),
later to become professor of Albanian studies at the University
of Munich, the elegiac Enver Gjerqeku (b. 1928) of Gjakova (Djakovica),
the figurative Din Mehmeti (b. 1932) and the pensive Besim Bokshi
(b. 1934), also from Gjakova, the lyric Adem Gajtani (1935-1982)
of Podujeva (Podujevo), the enthusiastic Fahredin Gunga (b. 1936)
from Mitrovica, the profound Azem Shkreli (b. 1938) of the Rugova
valley, and the emotive Rrahman Dedaj (b. 1939) of Podujeva.
Of all these poets, none has had a more profound influence on
the course of contemporary Albanian verse in Kosovo than Ali
Podrimja.
Podrimja the poet
Ali Podrimja was born in 1942 and
raised in Gjakova at the foot of the so-called 'Mountains of
the Damned.' After a difficult childhood, he studied Albanian
language and literature in Prishtina. Author of over a dozen
volumes of cogent and assertive verse since 1961, he is recognized
both in Kosovo and in Albania itself as a leading and innovative
poet. Indeed, he is considered by many to be the most typical
representative of modern Albanian verse in Kosovo and is certainly
the Kosovo poet with the widest international reputation.
Ali Podrimja's first collection of elegiac
verse, Thirrje, Prishtina 1961 (The calls), was published
while he was still at secondary school in Gjakova. His second
volume, Shamijat e përshëndetjeve, Prishtina
1963 (The handkerchiefs of greeting), followed in more or less
the same pensive vein. Dhimbë e bukur, Prishtina
1967 (Sweet pain), title reminiscent of Migjeni's 'proud pain',
introduced new elements of the poet's repertoire, a proclivity
for symbols and allegory. Six more volumes of compelling verse
appeared over the following fifteen years: Sampo, Prishtina
1969 (Sampo), Torzo, Prishtina 1971 (Torso), Folja,
Prishtina 1973 (The verb) Credo, Prishtina 1976 (Credo),
Sampo 2, Prishtina 1980 (Sampo 2), and Drejtpeshimi,
Prishtina 1981 (Balance), collections which revealed him as a
mature symbolist at ease in a wide variety of rhymes and metres.
In the early eighties, Ali Podrimja published
the masterful collection Lum Lumi, Prishtina 1982 (Lum
Lumi), which marked a turning point not only in his own work
but also in contemporary Kosovo verse as a whole. This immortal
tribute to the poet's young son Lumi, who died of cancer, introduced
an existentialist preoccupation with the dilemma of being, with
elements of solitude, fear, death and fate.
Podrimja's more recent volumes, such
as Fund i gëzuar, Prishtina 1988 (Happy ending),
and Zari, Prishtina 1990 (The die), are further evidence
of his Sisyphean obsession with the destiny of mankind, his unceasing
and ironic attempt to grasp the needle of existence in a haystack
of allegorical dichotomies - the past versus the present, the
peripheral versus the nuclear, myth versus reality, the specific
versus the general.
Ali Podrimja is nonetheless a laconic
poet. His verse is compact in structure, and his imagery is direct,
terse and devoid of any artificial verbosity. Every word counts.
What fascinates the Albanian reader is his compelling ability
to adorn this elliptical rocky landscape, reminiscent of Albanian
folk verse, with unusual metaphors, unexpected syntactic structures
and subtle rhymes.
The poet's work has been marked more
than anything by the suffering and distress of his youth. A deprived
childhood in Kosovo and the early death of his parents gave the
young Ali Podrimja little opportunity to relish in the joys of
life and little time to take flight into the spheres of the sublime.
Profoundly shaken in later years by the death of his son Lumi,
Ali Podrimja is now faced with the possibility of yet another
tragic loss, that of his country. The poet must come to terms
with the cruel and overwhelming reality that his whole people
are falling victim to the cancer of Serbian nationalist expansion.
The present selection of verse is designed
to provide the reader with an overview of the poetic evolution
of Ali Podrimja. It touches upon the early years of dynamic optimism
in the sixties, visits the haunts of anguish and personal solitude
in the seventies and eighties, and brings the reader inevitably
to the looming apocalypse of the early nineties during which
the recusant voice of poet Ali Podrimja is more indispensable
than ever.
Robert
Elsie
Eifel Mountains, Germany, spring 1994
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- From the early volumes (1967-1973)
And night covered the traces and cries
You belong to the saints to the gods
Between two ages
Song
The age that did not exist for us
Ghazal
Alone or Hamlet sick
The black cat
Rozafat Castle
Our names
Go back to Homer's verse
The poem of silence (1-10)
1. It forgot names
2. In the jaws of an era
3. The metaphor of my life
4. I go my way it follows me
5. When I make love in the power of lightning
6. How did we forget man on the white
field
7. Rain in a legend
8. A poppy takes on form
9. One day
10. After the fall after the triumph
Ballad of man
I shall saddle the horse, death
I told you one day
The death of a dream (1-4)
1. The illness of my family
2. It did not see my father's rifle
3. The death of a dream
4. The times
Verbless
The man with a head wound
- Credo (1976)
The stump (1-5)
1. Form changes, landscape
2. In been and unbeen times
3. On the other bank
4. White
5. Falling is not loosing
Your weight pulls me down to earth
That it be you
Take this stone
The unknown
The tower (1-5)
1. I open the door close the landscape
2. My shadow goes walking without me
3. But what is the matter with my stone
4. It flows and is no river
5. Every day more every day less
- Lum Lumi (1982)
The dead clock
Will there be time
The moss, the name
The great water
That sea
The heat
My dead king Diocletian
The monster
Somewhere, down deep
Ujkani
The beginning, the repetition
I took to the road to meet man
Song of freedom
Living
My pain
Hotel 'Moskva', Room 512
Sorrow
I am not the one
Paris, native land
Under the window Paris was burning
You could have gone to Beirut
And you dead
All alone
Death was quicker
Fragment
Naked
The serpent, the beauty
Love, the words
The leviathan
The separation
Disentanglement
In-existence
You are still on the road
- Happy Ending (1988)
How we discovered the sea
Kruja
Scanderbeg
Arbëresh villages
Does oblivion hear you
Ithaca
Look for the star
The Arta Bridge
Agony
Untitled
The meadow
Our text
Cleaning house
Walt Disney
It is the Albanian's fault
If
The mirror
- The Die (1990)
The roads
The swimming pool
Mother's apple
Who will slay the wolf
Piana degli Albanesi
Intermezzo
A child is dying in the cellar
The container
The wise man from the Drin
The difference
Do they hunt doves
Photograph on the front page
When will you speak out, Ali Podrimja
Somewhere on earth
The die
- The Smile in a Cage (1993)
The Albanians
The black angel of Sarajevo
Or, or
The fates
Meeting with a long-forgotten god
The fatherland sealed in a chest
Testament
Wandering with wolves
I shall say the same words
- Bibliography
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