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Robert Elsie
Migjeni (Millosh Gjergj Nikolla). Free Verse
A bilingual edition translated from the Albanian
and introduced by Robert Elsie
Dukagjini Balkan Books
Dukagjini, Peja 2001
143 pp.
 Migjeni, the harbinger
of modernity
in Albanian literature
AN INTRODUCTION
Albanian literature was late in evolving.
Indeed it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century
that a national literature consolidated in this Balkan nation
struggling for freedom from a decaying Ottoman Empire. The spirit
of romantic nationalism characteristic of nineteenth-century
Albanian literature lingered on in the country even after it
achieved independence in 1912. Indeed the genre survived unscathed
up until the 1930s, at a time when the rest of Europe had forgotten
its existence. It was a young teacher from the northern Albanian
town of Shkodra who finally cast the lofty traditions of national
culture aside and altered the course of Albanian literature.
With Migjeni, contemporary Albanian poetry begins its course.
Migjeni was born in Shkodra on 13 October
1911. His father, Gjergj Nikolla (1872-1924), came from an Orthodox
family of Dibran origin and owned a bar there. In 1900, Gjergj
Nikolla married Sofia Anastas Kokoshi (1881-1916) who bore him
four daughters, Jelena (Lenka), Jovanka, Cvetka and Ollga, and
two sons, Nikolla (1901-1925) and Millosh (Mirko).
The young Mirko attended a Serbian Orthodox
elementary school in Shkodra and from 1923 to 1925 a secondary
school in Bar (Tivar) on the Montenegrin coast, where his eldest
sister, Lenka, had moved. In the autumn of 1925, when he was
fourteen, he obtained a scholarship to attend a secondary school
in Monastir (Bitola) in southern Macedonia. This ethnically diverse
town, not far from the Greek border, must have held a certain
fascination for the young lad from distant Shkodra, since he
came into contact there not only with Albanians from different
parts of the Balkans, but also with Macedonian, Serb, Aromunian,
Turkish and Greek students. Being of Slavic origin himself, he
was not confined by narrow-minded nationalist perspectives and
was to become one of the very few Albanian authors to bridge
the cultural chasm separating the Albanians and Serbs. In Monastir
he studied Old Church Slavonic, Russian, Greek, Latin and French.
Graduating from school in 1927, he entered the Orthodox Seminary
of St John the Theologian, also in Monastir, where, despite incipient
health problems, he continued his training and studies until
June 1932. Mirko read as many books as he could get his hands
on: Russian, Serbian and French literature in particular, which
were more to his tastes than theology. His years in Monastir
confronted him with the dichotomy of East and West, with the
Slavic soul of Holy Mother Russia and of the southern Slavs,
which he encountered in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan
Turgenev, Lev Tolstoy, Nikolay Gogol' and Maksim Gor'ky, and
with socially critical authors of the West from Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Friedrich Schiller, Stendhal and Emile Zola to Upton
Sinclair, Jack London and Ben Traven.
On his return to Shkodra in 1932, after
failing to win a scholarship to study in the 'wonderful West,'
Mirko decided to take up a teaching career rather than join the
priesthood for which he had been trained. On 23 April 1933, he
was appointed teacher of Albanian at a school in the Serb village
of Vraka, seven kilometres from Shkodra. It was during this period
that he also began writing prose sketches and verse which reflect
the life and anguish of an intellectual in what certainly was
and has remained the most backward region of Europe. In May 1934
his first short prose piece, Sokrat i vuejtun a po derr i
kënaqun (Suffering Socrates or the satisfied pig), was
published in the periodical Illyria, under his new pen
name Migjeni, an acronym of Millosh Gjergj Nikolla.
Soon though, in the summer of 1935, the twenty-three-year-old
Migjeni fell seriously ill with tuberculosis, which he had contracted
earlier. He journeyed to Athens in July of that year in hope
of obtaining treatment for the disease which was endemic on the
marshy coastal plains of Albania at the time, but returned to
Shkodra a month later with no improvement in his condition. In
the autumn of 1935, he transferred for a year to a school in
Shkodra itself and, again in the periodical Illyria, began
publishing his first epoch-making poems.
In a letter of 12 January 1936 written
to translator Skënder Luarasi (1900-1982) in Tirana, Migjeni
announced, "I am about to send my songs to press. Since,
while you were here, you promised that you would take charge
of speaking to some publisher, 'Gutemberg' for instance, I would
now like to remind you of this promise, informing you that I
am ready." Two days later, Migjeni received the transfer
he had earlier requested to the mountain village of Puka and
on 18 April 1936 began his activities as the headmaster of the
run-down school there.
The clear mountain air did him some good,
but the poverty and misery of the mountain tribes in and around
Puka were even more overwhelming than that which he had experienced
among the inhabitants of the coastal plain. Many of the children
came to school barefoot and hungry, and teaching was interrupted
for long periods of time because of outbreaks of contagious diseases,
such as measles and mumps. After eighteen hard months in the
mountains, the consumptive poet was obliged to put an end to
his career as a teacher and as a writer, and to seek medical
treatment in Turin in northern Italy where his sister Ollga was
studying mathematics. He set out from Shkodra on 20 December
1937 and arrived in Turin before Christmas day. There he had
hoped, after recovery, to register and study at the Faculty of
Arts. The breakthrough in the treatment of tuberculosis, however,
was to come a decade too late for Migjeni. After five months
at San Luigi sanatorium near Turin, Migjeni was transferred to
the Waldensian hospital in Torre Pellice where he died on 26
August 1938. His demise at the age of twenty-six was a tragic
loss for modern Albanian letters.
Migjeni made a promising start as a prose
writer. He is the author of about twenty-four short prose sketches
which he published in periodicals for the most part between the
spring of 1933 and the spring of 1938. Ranging from one to five
pages in length, these pieces are too short to constitute tales
or short stories. Although he approached new themes with unprecedented
cynicism and force, his sketches cannot all be considered great
works of art from a literary point of view.
It is thus far more as a poet that Migjeni
made his mark on Albanian literature and culture, though he did
so posthumously. He possessed all the prerequisites for being
a great poet. He had an inquisitive mind, a depressive pessimistic
nature and a repressed sexuality. Though his verse production
was no more voluminous than his prose, his success in the field
of poetry was no less than spectacular in Albania at the time.
Migjeni's only volume of verse, Vargjet
e lira, Tirana 1944 (Free verse), was composed over a three-year
period from 1933 to 1935. A first edition of this slender and
yet revolutionary collection, a total of thirty-five poems, was
printed by the Gutemberg Press in Tirana in 1936 but was immediately
banned by the authorities and never circulated. The second edition
of 1944, undertaken by scholar Kostaç Cipo (1892-1952)
and the poet's sister Ollga, was more successful. It nonetheless
omitted two poems, Parathanja e parathanjeve (Preface
of prefaces) and Blasfemi (Blasphemy), which the publisher,
Ismail Mal'Osmani felt might offend the Church. The 1944 edition
did, however, include eight other poems composed after the first
edition had already gone to press.
The main theme of 'Free verse,' as with
Migjeni's prose, is misery and suffering. It is a poetry of acute
social awareness and despair. Previous generations of poets had
sung the beauties of the Albanian mountains and the sacred traditions
of the nation, whereas Migjeni now opened his eyes to the harsh
realities of life, to the appalling level of misery, disease
and poverty he discovered all around him. He was a poet of despair
who saw no way out, who cherished no hope that anything but death
could put an end to suffering. "I suffer with the child
whose father cannot buy him a toy. I suffer with the young man
who burns with unslaked sexual desire. I suffer with the middle-aged
man drowning in the apathy of life. I suffer with the old man
who trembles at the prospect of death. I suffer with the peasant
struggling with the soil. I suffer with the worker crushed by
iron. I suffer with the sick suffering from all the diseases
of the world... I suffer with man" (Pipa 1978, p. 148).
Typical of the suffering and of the futility of human endeavour
for Migjeni is Rezignata (Resignation), a poem in the
longest cycle of the collection, Kangët e mjerimit
(Songs of poverty). Here the poet paints a grim portrait of our
earthly existence: sombre nights, tears, smoke, thorns and mud.
Rarely does a breath of fresh air or a vision of nature seep
through the gloom. When nature does occur in the verse of Migjeni,
then of course it is autumn.
If there is no hope, there are at least
suffocated desires and wishes. Some poems, such as Të
birtë e shekullit të ri (The sons of the new age),
Zgjimi (Awakening), Kanga e rinis (Song of youth)
and Kanga e të burgosunit (The prisoner's song),
are assertively declamatory in a left-wing revolutionary manner.
Here we discover Migjeni as a precursor of socialist verse or
rather, in fact, as the zenith of genuine socialist verse in
Albanian letters, long before the so-called liberation and socialist
period from 1944 to 1990. Migjeni was, nonetheless, not a socialist
or revolutionary poet in the political sense, despite the indignation
and the occasional clenched fist he shows us. For this, he lacked
the optimism as well as any sense of political commitment and
activity. He was a product of the thirties, an age in which Albanian
intellectuals, including Migjeni, were particularly fascinated
by the West and in which, in Western Europe itself, the rival
ideologies of communism and fascism were colliding for the first
time in the Spanish Civil War. Migjeni was not entirely uninfluenced
by the nascent philosophy of the right either. In Të
lindet njeriu (May the man be born) and particularly, in
the Nietzschean dithyramb Trajtat e Mbinjeriut (The shape
of the Superman), a strangled, crushed will transforms itself
into "ardent desire for a new genius," for the Superman
to come. To a Trotskyite friend, André Stefi , who had
warned him that the communists would not forgive for such poems,
Migjeni replied, "My work has a combative character, but
for practical reasons, and taking into account our particular
conditions, I must manoeuvre in disguise. I cannot explain these
things to the [communist] groups, they must understand them for
themselves. The publication of my works is dictated by the necessities
of the social situation through which we are passing. As for
myself, I consider my work to be a contribution to the union
of the groups. André, my work will be achieved if I manage
to live a little longer" (Pipa 1978, p. 150n.).
Part of the 'establishment' which he
felt was oblivious to and indeed responsible for the sufferings
of humanity was the Church. Migjeni's religious education and
his training for the Orthodox priesthood seem to have been entirely
counterproductive, for he cherished neither an attachment to
religion nor any particularly fond sentiments for the organized
Church. God for Migjeni was a giant with granite fists crushing
the will of man. Evidence of the repulsion he felt towards god
and the Church are to be found in the two poems missing from
the 1944 edition, Parathania e parathanieve (Preface of
prefaces) with its cry of desperation "God! Where are you?",
and Blasfemi (Blasphemy).
In Kanga skandaloze (Scandalous
song), Migjeni expresses a morbid attraction to a pale nun and
at the same time his defiance and rejection of her world. This
poem is one which helps throw some light not only on Migjeni's
attitude to religion but also on one of the more fascinating
and least studied aspects in the life of the poet, his repressed
heterosexuality.
Eroticism has certainly never been a
prominent feature of Albanian literature at any period and one
would be hard pressed to name any Albanian author who has expressed
his intimate impulses and desires in verse or prose. Migjeni
comes closest, though in an unwitting manner. It is generally
assumed that the poet remained a virgin until his untimely death
at the age of twenty-six. His verse and his prose abound with
the figures of women, many of them unhappy prostitutes, for whom
Migjeni betrays both pity and an open sexual interest. It is
the tearful eyes and the red lips which catch his attention;
the rest of the body is rarely described. For Migjeni, sex too
means suffering. Passion and rapturous desire are ubiquitous
in his verse, but equally present is the spectre of physical
intimacy portrayed in terms of disgust and sorrow. It is but
one of the many bestial faces of misery described in the 105-line
Poema e mjerimit (Poem of poverty).
Though he did not publish a single book
during his lifetime, Migjeni's works, which circulated privately
and in the press of the period, were an immediate success. Migjeni
paved the way for a modern literature in Albania. This literature
was, however, soon to be nipped in the bud. Indeed the very year
of the publication of 'Free Verse' saw the victory of Stalinism
in Albania and the proclamation of the People's Republic.
Many have speculated as to what contribution
Migjeni might have made to Albanian letters had he managed to
live longer. The question remains highly hypothetical, for this
individualist voice of genuine social protest would no doubt
have suffered the same fate as most Albanian writers of talent
in the late forties, i.e. internment, imprisonment or execution.
His early demise has at least preserved the writer for us undefiled.
The fact that Migjeni did perish so young
makes it difficult to provide a critical assessment of his work.
Though generally admired, Migjeni is not without critics. Some
have been disappointed by his prose, nor is the range of his
verse sufficient to allow us to acclaim him as a universal poet.
Albanian-American scholar Arshi Pipa (1920-1997) has questioned
his very mastery of the Albanian language, asserting: "Born
Albanian to a family of Slavic origin, then educated in a Slavic
cultural milieu, he made contact again with Albania and the Albanian
language and culture as an adult. The language he spoke at home
was Serbo-Croatian, and at the seminary he learned Russian. He
did not know Albanian well. His texts swarm with spelling mistakes,
even elementary ones, and his syntax is far from being typically
Albanian. What is true of Italo Svevo's Italian is even truer
of Migjeni's Albanian" (Pipa 1978, p. 134).
Post-war Stalinist critics in Albania
rather superficially proclaimed Migjeni as the precursor of socialist
realism though they were unable to deal with many aspects of
his life and work, in particular his Schopenhauerian pessimism,
his sympathies with the West, his repressed sexuality, and the
Nietzschean element in Trajtat e Mbinjeriut (The shape
of the Superman), a poem conveniently left out of some post-war
editions of his verse. While such critics have delighted in viewing
Migjeni as a product of 'pre-liberation' Zogist Albania, it has
become painfully evident that the poet's 'songs unsung,' after
half a century of communist dictatorship in Albania, are now
more compelling than ever.
The present translation of the poetic
works of Migjeni, the harbinger of modernity in Albanian literature,
endeavours to provide the interested reader not only with a distinct
poetic vision, but also with a glimpse into the culture of northern
Albania in the 1930s, at a time when literary and cultural contacts
with the outside world were all but unknown. The Albanian-language
versions of the poems, composed in the Gheg (northern Albanian)
dialect of Shkodra, are given here in their original, often erratic,
orthography, that of the 1944 edition.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Preface of prefaces
- Songs of resurrection
The sons of a new age
May the man be born...
Awakening
The spark
Song of youth
Songs unsung
- Songs of poverty
Poem of poverty
Urban ballad
The highlander's recital
The slums
Blasphemy
Broken melody
The prisoner's song
Songs of noble grief
The shape of the Superman
The lost rhyme
Autumn on parade
Scandalous song
Resignation
Fragment
New spirit
The themes
The weight of destiny
- Songs of the West
Song of the West
Wandering souls
- A song on its own
A song on its own
- Songs of youth
Springtime ecstasy
Two lips
Spring sonnet
Z. B.
The encounter
One night
Prayer
Around the table
On the swing of fate
The yearning of youth
- Final songs
A sleepless night
Suffering
Luckless inspiration
Incomprehensible song
Solitude
Under the banners of melancholy
- Notes
- Bibliography
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