Robert Elsie
Gjergj Fishta. The Highland Lute: the Albanian national
epic
Cantos I-V. The cycle of Oso Kuka.
Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie
Dukagjini Balkan Books
ISBN 9951-05-022-0
Dukagjini, Peja 2003
167 pp.
INTRODUCTION
The Highland Lute
Although Gjergj Fishta is the author
of a total of thirty-seven literary publications, his name is
indelibly linked to one great work, indeed to what is perhaps
the most astounding creation in all of Albanian literature, the
national literary epic "The Highland Lute."
The Highland Lute (Alb. Lahuta e Malcís)
is a 15,613-line historical verse epic, a panorama of northern
Albanian history from 1862 to 1913 which mirrors the long Albanian
struggle for freedom and independence. This literary masterpiece
was composed for the most part between 1902 and 1909, though
it was refined and amended by its author over the following quarter
of a century. The Highland Lute is a work of great significance
to the Albanian people and, at the same time, constitutes the
first Albanian-language contribution to world literature.
In 1902, father Gjergj Fishta had been
sent to a northern Albanian mountain village to replace the local
parish priest for a time. There he met and befriended the aged
peasant Marash Uci (1810-1914) of Hoti, whom he was later to
immortalize in verse. In their evenings together, Marash Uci
told the young priest of the heroic battles between the Albanian
Highlanders and the Montenegrins, in particular of the famed
battle at the Rrzhanica Bridge in which Marash Uci had taken
part himself. The earliest parts of 'The Highland Lute,' subtitled
'At the Bridge of Rrzhanica,' were printed in Zadar in 1905 and
1907, with subsequent and enlarged editions of The Highland Lute
appearing in 1912, 1923, 1931 and 1933. The definitive edition
of The Highland Lute in thirty cantos was published in Shkodra
in 1937 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Albanian independence.
Despite the success of The Highland Lute
and the preeminence of its author, this and all other works by
Gjergj Fishta were banned after the Second World War when the
communists came to power in Albania. The epic was, however, republished
in Rome 1958 and Ljubljana 1990, and exists in German and Italian
translations.
The Highland Lute is certainly the most
powerful and effective epic to have been written in Albanian.
Gjergj Fishta chose as his subject matter what he knew best:
the heroic culture of his native northern Albanian mountains.
It was his intention with this epic, an unprecedented achievement
in Albanian letters, to present the lives of the northern Albanian
tribes and of his people in general in a heroic setting. It was
the author's fortune at the time to have been at the source of
the only intact heroic society in Europe. High Albania in the
north of the country differed radically from the more advanced
and 'civilized' regions of the Tosk south of Albania. What so
fascinated foreign ethnographers and visitors to northern Albania
at the turn of the last century was the tribal and staunchly
patriarchal structure of society in the Highlands, a social system
based on customs handed down for centuries by tribal law, in
particular by the Code of Lekë Dukagjini. All the distinguishing
features of this society are present in The Highland Lute: birth,
marriage and funerary customs, beliefs, the generous hospitality
of the tribes, their endemic blood feuding, an acute perception
of male honour, and the 'besa', absolute fidelity to one's
word, come what may.
The Highland Lute is strongly inspired
by northern Albanian oral verse, both by the cycles of heroic
verse, i.e. the octosyllabic 'Këngë kreshnikësh'
(Songs of the Frontier Warriors), similar to the Serbo-Croatian
'junacke pjesme', and by the equally popular cycles of
historical verse of the eighteenth century, similar to Greek
klephtic verse and to the 'haidutska pesen' of the Bulgarians.
Fishta knew well this oral verse sung by the Gheg mountain tribes
on their one-stringed 'lahuta' and relished its language
and rhythm. The narrative of the epic is therefore replete with
the rich, archaic vocabulary and colourful figures of speech
used by the warring Highland tribes of the north and does not
make for easy reading nowadays, even for the northern Albanians
themselves. The standard meter of The Highland Lute is a trochaic
octameter or heptameter which is more in tune with Albanian oral
verse than is the classical hexameter of Latin and Greek epics.
The influence of the great epics of classical antiquity, Homer's
Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil's Aeneid, is nonetheless ubiquitous
in The Highland Lute as has been pointed out by a number of scholars,
in particular Maximilian Lambertz and Giuseppe Gradilone. Many
parallels in style and content have thus transcended the millennia.
Fishta himself later translated book five of the Iliad into Albanian.
Among the major stylistic features which
characterize The Highland Lute, and no doubt most other epics,
are metaphor, alliteration and assonance, as well as archaic
figures of speech and hyperbole. The predominantly heroic character
of the narrative with its extensive battle scenes is fortunately
counterbalanced with lyric and idyllic descriptions of the natural
beauty of the northern Albanian Alps which give The Highland
Lute a lightness and poetic grace it might otherwise lack.
The Highland Lute relies heavily on Albanian
mythology and legendry. The work is permeated with mythological
figures of oral literature who, like the gods and goddesses of
ancient Greece, observe and, where necessary, intervene in events.
Among them are the 'zanas', dauntless mountain spirits
who dwell near springs and torrents and who bestow their protection
on Albanian warriors; the 'oras', female spirits whose
very name is often taboo; the vampire-like 'lugats', the
witch-like 'shtrigas', and the 'drangues', semi-human
figures born with wings under their arms and with supernatural
powers, whose prime objective in life is to combat and slay the
seven-headed fire-spewing 'kulshedras'.
The fusion of the heroic and the mythological
is equally evident in a number of characters to whom Fishta attributes
major roles in The Highland Lute: Oso Kuka, the fierce and valiant
warrior who prefers death over surrender to his Slavic enemy;
the old shepherd Marash Uci who admonishes the young fighters
to preserve their freedom and not to forget the ancient ways
and customs; and the valiant maiden Tringa, who takes care of
her brother and who is resolved to defend her land.
The heroic aspect of life in the mountains
is one of the many characteristics which the northern Albanian
tribes have in common with their southern Slavic, and in particular
Montenegrin, neighbours. The two peoples, divided as they are
by language and by the bitter course of history, have a largely
common culture. Although the Montenegrins serve as 'bad guys'
in the glorification of the author's native land, Fishta was
not uninfluenced or unmoved by the literary achievements of the
southern Slavs in the second half of the nineteenth century,
in particular by the epic verse of Slavic resistance to the Turks.
The works of the Franciscan pater Grga Martic (1822-1905) served
the young Fishta as a model while the latter was studying in
Bosnia. Fishta was also influenced by the writings of an earlier
Franciscan writer, Andrija Kacic-Mioic (1704-1760), Dalmatian
poet and publicist of the Enlightenment who is remembered in
particular for his 'Razgovor ugodni naroda slovinskoga',
1756 (Pleasant talk of Slavic folk), a collection of prose and
poetry on Serbo-Croatian history, and by the works of Croatian
poet Ivan Mauranic (1814-1890), author of the noted romantic
epic 'Smrt Smail-age Cengica', 1846 (The death of Smail
Aga). A further source of literary inspiration for Fishta may
have been the Montenegrin poet-prince Petar Petrovic Njego
(1813-1851). It is no coincidence that the title The Highland
(or Mountain) Lute is very similar to Njego's 'Gorski
vijenac', 1847 (The Mountain Wreath). This verse rendition
of Montenegro's heroic resistance to the Turkish occupants is
now generally regarded as the national epic of the Montenegrins
and Serbs. Fishta proved that the Albanian language, too, was
capable of a refined literary epic of equally heroic proportions.
Gjergj Fishta
Gjergj Fishta (1871-1940) was by far
the greatest and most influential figure of Albanian literature
in the first half of the twentieth century. It was he more than
any other writer who gave artistic expression to the searching
soul of the now sovereign Albanian nation. Lauded and celebrated
up until the Second World War as the 'national poet of Albania'
and as the 'Albanian Homer,' Fishta was to fall into sudden oblivion
when the communists took power in November 1944. The very mention
of his name became taboo for forty-six years.
Fishta was born on 23 October 1871 in
the Zadrima village of Fishta near Troshan in northern Albania
where he was baptized by Franciscan missionary and poet Leonardo
De Martino (1830-1923). He attended Franciscan schools in Troshan
and Shkodra where as a child he was deeply influenced both by
the talented De Martino and by a Bosnian missionary, pater Lovro
Mihacevic, who instilled in the intelligent lad a love for literature
and for his native language. In 1886, when he was fifteen, Fishta
was sent by the Order of the Friars Minor to Bosnia, as were
many young Albanians destined for the priesthood at the time.
It was at Franciscan seminaries and institutions in Sutjeska,
Livno and Kreevo that the young Fishta studied theology,
philosophy and languages, in particular Latin, Italian and Serbo-Croatian,
to prepare himself for his ecclesiastical and literary career.
During his stay in Bosnia he came into contact with Bosnian writer
Grga Martic and Croatian poet Silvije Strahimir Kranjcevic (1865-1908)
with whom he became friends and who aroused a literary calling
in him. In 1894 Gjergj Fishta was ordained as a priest and admitted
to the Franciscan order. On his return to Albania in February
of that year, he was given a teaching position at the Franciscan
college in Troshan and subsequently a posting as parish priest
in the village of Gomsiqja. In 1899, he collaborated with Preng
Doçi (1846-1917), the influential abbot of Mirdita, with
prose writer and priest Dom Ndoc Nikaj (1864-1951) and with folklorist
Pashko Bardhi (1870-1948) to found the 'Bashkimi' (Unity)
literary society of Shkodra which set out to tackle the thorny
Albanian alphabet question. This society was subsequently instrumental
in the publication of a number of Albanian-language school texts
and of the 'Bashkimi' Albanian-Italian dictionary of 1908,
still the best dictionary of Gheg dialect. By this time Fishta
had become a leading figure of cultural and public life in northern
Albania and in particular in Shkodra.
In 1902, Fishta was appointed director
of Franciscan schools in the district of Shkodra where he is
remembered in particular for having replaced Italian with Albanian
for the first time as the language of instruction there. This
effectively put an end to the Italian cultural domination of
northern Albanian Catholics and gave young Albanians studying
at these schools a sense of national identity. On 14-22 November
1908 he participated in the Congress of Monastir as a representative
of the 'Bashkimi' literary society. This congress, attended
by Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim delegates from Albania and abroad,
was held to decide upon a definitive Albanian alphabet, a problem
to which Fishta had given much thought. Indeed, the congress
had elected Gjergj Fishta to preside over a committee of eleven
delegates who were to make the choice.
In October 1913, almost a year after
the declaration of Albanian independence in Vlora, Fishta founded
and began editing the Franciscan monthly periodical 'Hylli
i Dritës' (The day-star) which was devoted to literature,
politics, folklore and history. With the exception of the turbulent
years of the First World War and its aftermath, 1915-1920, and
the early years of the dictatorship of Ahmet Zogu, 1925-1929,
this influential journal of high literary standing was published
regularly until July 1944 and became as instrumental for the
development of northern Albanian Gheg culture as Faik bey Konitza's
Brussels journal 'Albania' had been for the Tosk culture
of the south. From December 1916 to 1918 Fishta edited the Shkodra
newspaper 'Posta e Shqypniës' (The Albanian post),
a political and cultural newspaper which was subsidized by Austria-Hungary
under the auspices of the 'Kultusprotektorat,' despite
the fact that the occupying forces did not entirely trust Fishta
because of his nationalist aspirations. Also in 1916, together
with writers Luigj Gurakuqi (1879-1925), Ndre Mjeda (1866-1937)
and Mati Logoreci (1867-1941), Fishta played a leading role in
the Albanian Literary Commission ('Komisija Letrare Shqype')
set up by the Austro-Hungarians on the suggestion of consul general
August Ritter von Kral (1859-1918) to decide on questions of
orthography for official use and to encourage the publication
of Albanian school texts. After some deliberation, the Commission
sensibly decided to use the central dialect of Elbasan as a neutral
compromise for a standard literary language. This was much against
the wishes of Gjergj Fishta who regarded the dialect of Shkodra,
in view of its strong contribution to Albanian culture at the
time, as best suited. Fishta hoped that his northern Albanian
'koine' would soon serve as a literary standard for the
whole country, much as Dante's language had served as a guide
for literary Italian. Throughout these years, Fishta continued
teaching and running the Franciscan school in Shkodra, known
from 1921 on as the Collegium Illyricum (Illyrian College),
which had become the leading educational institution of northern
Albania. He was now also an imposing figure of Albanian literature.
In August 1919, Gjergj Fishta served
as secretary-general of the Albanian delegation attending the
Paris Peace Conference and, in this capacity, was asked by the
president of the delegation, Msgr. Luigj Bumçi (1872-1945),
to take part in a special commission to be sent to the United
States to attend to the interests of the young Albanian state.
There he visited Boston, New York and Washington. In 1921, Fishta
represented Shkodra in the Albanian parliament and was chosen
in August of that year as vice-president of this assembly. His
talent as an orator served him well in his functions both as
a political figure and as a man of the cloth. In later years,
he attended Balkan conferences in Athens (1930), Sofia (1931)
and Bucharest (1932) before withdrawing from public life to devote
his remaining years to the Franciscan order and to his writing.
From 1935 to 1938 he held the office of provincial of the Albanian
Franciscans. These most fruitful years of his life were now spent
in the quiet seclusion of the Franciscan monastery of Gjuhadoll
in Shkodra with its cloister, church and rose garden where Fishta
would sit in the shade and reflect on his verse.
As the poet laureate of his generation,
Gjergj Fishta was honoured with various diplomas, awards and
distinctions both at home and abroad. He was awarded the Austro-Hungarian
'Ritterkreuz' in 1911, was decorated by Pope Pius XI with
the 'Al Merito' award in 1925, was given the prestigious
'Phoenix' medal of the Greek government, was honoured with the
title 'Lector jubilatus honoris causae' by the Franciscan
order, and was made a regular member of the Italian Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 1939. He died in Shkodra on 30 December
1940.
At the outbreak of the Second World War,
Gjergj Fishta was universally recognized as the 'national poet
of Albania.' Austrian Albanologist Maximilian Lambertz (1882-1963)
described him as "the most ingenious poet Albania has ever
produced," and Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938)
called him "the great poet of the glorious people of Albania."
For others he was the "Albanian Homer."
After the war, Fishta was nonetheless
attacked and denigrated perhaps more than any other prewar writer,
and fell into prompt oblivion. The national poet became an anathema.
The official Tirana 'History of Albanian Literature' of 1983,
which carried the blessing of the Albanian Party of Labour, restricted
its treatment of the country's 'national poet' to an absolute
minimum:
"The main representative of this clergy, Gjergj Fishta
(1871-1940), poet, publicist, teacher and politician, ran the
press of the Franciscan order and directed the cultural and educational
activities of this order for a long time. For him, the interests
of the church and of religion rose above those of the nation
and the people, something he openly declared and defended with
all his demagogy and cynicism, [a principle] upon which he based
his literary work. His main work, the epic poem, The Highland
Lute, while attacking the chauvinism of our northern neighbours,
propagates anti-Slavic feelings and makes the struggle against
the Ottoman occupants secondary. He raised a hymn to patriarchalism
and feudalism, to religious obscurantism and clericalism, and
played with patriotic sentiments wherever it was a question of
highlighting the events and figures of the national history of
our Rilindja period. His other works, such as the satirical poem
'Gomari i Babatasit' (Babatasi's ass), in which public
schooling and democratic ideas were bitterly attacked, were characteristic
of the savage struggle undertaken by the Catholic church to maintain
and increase its influence in the intellectual life of the country.
With his art, he endeavoured to pay service to a form close to
folklore. This was often accompanied by prolixity, far-fetched
effects, rhetoric, brutality of expression and style to the point
of banality, false arguments which he intentionally endeavours
to impose, and an exceptionally conservative attitude in the
field of language. Fishta ended his days as a member of the academy
of fascist Italy."
The real reason for Fishta's fall
from grace after the 'liberation' in 1944 is to be sought, however,
not in his alleged pro-Italian or clerical proclivities, but
in the origins of the Albanian Communist Party itself. The ACP,
later to be called the Albanian Party of Labour, had been founded
during the Second World War under the auspices of the Yugoslav
envoys Duan Mugoa (1914-1973) and Miladin Popovic
(1910-1945). In July 1946, Albania and Yugoslavia signed a Treaty
of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance and a number
of other agreements which gave Yugoslavia effective control over
all Albanian affairs, including the field of culture. Serbo-Croatian
was introduced as a compulsory subject in all Albanian high schools,
and by the spring of 1948, plans were even under way for a merger
of the two countries. It is no doubt the alleged anti-Slavic
sentiments expressed in The Highland Lute which caused the work
and its author to be proscribed by the Yugoslav authorities,
even though Fishta was educated in Bosnia and inspired by Serbian
and Croatian literature. In actual fact, it is as ridiculous
to describe The Highland Lute as being anti-Slavic as it would
be to describe 'El Cid' and the 'Chanson de Roland'
as being anti-Arab. They are all historical epics with national
heroes and foreign foes. The so-called anti-Slavic element in
Fishta's work was also stressed in the first post-war edition
of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia of Moscow, which reads as follows
(March 1950):
"The literary activities of the Catholic priest Gjergj
Fishta reflect the role played by the Catholic clergy in preparing
for Italian aggression against Albania. As a former agent of
Austro-Hungarian imperialism, Fishta, in the early years of his
literary activity, took a position against the Slavic peoples
who opposed the rapacious plans of Austro-Hungarian imperialism
in Albania. In his chauvinistic, anti-Slavic poem The Highland
Lute, this spy extolled the hostility of the Albanians towards
the Slavic peoples, calling for an open fight against the Slavs."
After relations with Yugoslavia were
broken off in 1948, it is quite likely that expressions of anti-Montenegrin
or anti-Serb sentiment would no longer have been considered a
major sin in Party thinking. However, an official position had
been taken with regard to Fishta and, possibly with deference
to the new Slav allies in Moscow, it could not be renounced without
a scandal. Gjergj Fishta, who but a few years earlier had been
lauded as the national poet of Albania, disappeared from the
literary scene, seemingly without a trace. Such was the fear
of him in later years that his bones were even dug up and secretly
thrown into the river.
Yet despite four decades of unrelenting
Party harping and propaganda attempting to reduce Fishta to the
rank of a minor 'clerical poet,' the people of northern Albania,
and in particular the inhabitants of his native Shkodra, did
not forget him. After almost half a century of silence, Gjergj
Fishta was commemorated openly on 5 January 1991 in Shkodra.
During this first public recital of Fishta's works in Albania
in forty-five years, the actor at one point hesitated in his
lines, and was immediately and spontaneously assisted by members
of the audience - who still knew many parts of The Highland Lute
by heart.
The present translation
The present book offers the reader
an English translation of the first five cantos of The Highland
Lute. These five cantos (of a total of thirty), which centre
around the figure of Oso Kuka, form a cycle of their own and
contain much of the most memorable verse in the whole of the
epic. Set in the year 1862, they are chronologically the earliest
section of The Highland Lute, though they are not the cantos
first to have been written and published by the poet.
Until now, no attempt has ever been made
to translate any part of this grand, Albanian national epic into
English. Indeed, the translation of a work of such 'epic' proportions
presents a daunting challenge, not only because of its scope
and length, but also because of the poet's strong Gheg dialect,
his rich vocabulary, his many archaic forms of expression and
the exotic cultural setting. The heroic culture of High Albania
and of the southern Balkans in general has its own values and
ideals which cannot be easily translated or transposed into those
of the English-speaking world, nor do they have much in common
with the cultures of the well-known European epics of centuries
past. Finding an adequate language and style for the translation
has not been an easy task. The Highland Lute has been translated
and published in German and in Italian. The German translation
by Maximilian Lambertz, which conveys much of the flavour of
German epic verse, is inspiring but not interlinear. Indeed,
Lambertz uses up to seven lines of German to translate and make
clear one line of Albanian. The Italian translation by Ignazio
Parrino, on the other hand, is interlinear, but offers nothing
more than a prose rendition of the narrative, and lacks the imposing
epic flavour. The present translation now attempts the impossible.
It endeavours to provide an English-language version which is
basically interlinear, faithful as far as possible to the original,
and yet one which hopes to mirror both the exalted, majestic,
epic style of the original and the traditional culture of the
'wild' northern Albanians, the last surviving heroic culture
in Europe.
In conclusion, I should like to thank
two contemporary poets: Janice Mathie-Heck of Calgary (Canada)
and Rudolf Marku of London (England) for their ideas and concrete
assistance in the preparation of the translation.
Robert
Elsie
The Hague, Netherlands
May 2002
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