|
Robert Elsie
Tales from old Shkodra
Early Albanian short stories
Edited by Robert Elsie
ISBN 9951-04-043-3
Dukagjini, Peja 2004
178 pp.
 PREFACE
SHKODRA AND THE CULTURE OF THE NORTH
Although creative writing in Albania
goes back to the 1600s, it was only in the early decades of the
twentieth century, after the declaration of Albanian independence,
that a certain tradition was established in literary prose. The
focus of this writing, and the centre of Albanian literature
and culture at the time, was the town of Shkodra, the capital
of northern Albania.
Set on the banks of a sparkling lake
at the foot of the wild and rugged mountains of High Albania,
Shkodra, formerly Scutari, was once the largest and most flourishing
town in the country. Even today, though it has suffered much
destruction and decay from years of neglect and isolation, including
half a century of Stalinist dictatorship and a severe earthquake
in April 1979, it remains the cradle of northern Albanian culture.
Its mighty fortress, Rozafa, still rises proudly over the Drin
and Buna Rivers as a symbol of Shkodra's will to survive.
Albania is a small country and yet its
traditional culture is very diverse. There are numerous cradles
of urban civilization in this country: Vlora, where Albanian
independence was declared in November 1912; Elbasan, the centre
of learning and education at the heart of Albania; Korça,
which provided the nation with many an intellectual leader; Janina,
now in Greece, which in the early 19th century was the home of
the formidable tyrant Ali Pasha Tepelena; the ancient Adriatic
port of Durrës, which has been inhabited for over two thousand
years; Tirana, the bustling, present-day capital and largest
city in the country; venerable Prizren, a jewel of Balkan architecture
at the foot of the Sharr mountains in Kosova; and Muslim Gjakova
with its splendid oriental bazaar, which, alas, was razed to
the ground by Serb forces in the spring of 1999.
The southern Albanians, also called Tosks,
were more advanced and were always regarded as somewhat more
"civilized." They were able to progress and enjoy a
certain degree of prosperity - in relative Albanian terms - because
the terrain in the south was more favourable to herding and farming,
and because of emigration, trade, and contacts with the outside
world. The rugged northern part of the country around Shkodra
was different. The northern Albanians, also called Ghegs, were
much poorer and, in the highlands, lived in virtual isolation
from the rest of the world. Their barren homeland, snowbound
in the winter and parched and arid in the summer, hardly offered
them enough on which to survive. Yet, survive they did. It was
in the northern Albanian Alps that these "wild" highland
tribes developed their own way of life and a uniquely structured
society which they strove over the centuries to preserve from
outside influence. Few Albanians in the mountains had received
any formal education, and only a very small minority could even
read and write. Indeed, no region of Europe was more destitute
and underdeveloped than the highlands of northern Albania, on
Shkodra's very doorstep.
Shkodra itself was a hybrid town. The
half-Catholic, half-Muslim population was western-oriented and
had close ties with Italy. In the nineteenth century, the Catholic
Church had opened the first schools here in which the Albanian
language was used as a medium of instruction, and cultural associations
were founded under the aegis of the Austro-Hungarian Kultusprotektorat.
No town in Albania was more influential for early twentieth-century
literature and culture. It was from the nearby mountains in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the earliest Albanian
writers stemmed and, after five centuries of Ottoman rule, it
was in Shkodra itself that the major Albanian prose writers of
the early twentieth century put their imagination and creative
impulses to paper.
The writers of Shkodra were profoundly
aware of the misery around them, and it is perhaps the extreme
diversity of their social environment which furthered their talents.
They looked to the West and longed for a new, European Albania,
yet they found themselves in an archaic society, one so bound
by the force of tradition and custom that progress was impossible.
For most people, any sort of change was quite inconceivable.
They were out of place in their own country and reacted to their
situation in various ways, some with an outpouring of sentimental
attachment to popular traditions, and others with strong feelings
of revolt at the poverty and backwardness which they saw. Their
writings reflected and gave full expression to this dilemma.
The present collection brings together
a number of well-known short stories and prose sketches by two
of the finest Albanian writers of the first half of the twentieth
century: Ernest Koliqi and Migjeni. These two men of Shkodra,
one raised as a Catholic and the other as Orthodox, could scarcely
have been more different.
ERNEST KOLIQI
Prose writer, scholar, and public
figure Ernest Koliqi (1903-1975) was the most imposing and influential
Albanian prose writer of the period before World War II. He was
born in Shkodra but was educated at the Jesuit college of Arice
in the Lombardian town of Brescia. After his schooling in Italy,
he arrived back in Shkodra to rediscover and indeed to relearn
his mother tongue and the culture of his childhood in a newly
independent country.
Koliqi was forced to escape to Yugoslavia
when conservative landowner Ahmet Zogu (1895-1961) took power
in a coup d'état in December 1924. He lived there for
five years, three of them in Tuzla. These years were to have
a profound impact on his academic and literary career. From 1930
to 1933, Koliqi taught at a commercial school in Vlora and at
the state secondary school in Shkodra until he was obliged, once
again by political circumstances, to depart for Italy.
Ernest Koliqi's solid Jesuit education
enabled him from the start to serve as a cultural intermediary
between Italy and Albania. In later decades, he was to play a
key role in transmitting Albanian culture to the Italian public
by publishing, in addition to numerous scholarly articles on
literary and historical subjects, the monographs: Poesia popolare
albanese (Albanian Folk Verse), Florence 1957; Antologia
della lirica albanese (Anthology of Albanian Poetry), Milan
1963; and Saggi di letteratura albanese (Essays on Albanian
Literature), Florence 1972. For the Albanians, he brought out
a large two-volume Albanian-language anthology of Italian verse
entitled Poetët e mëdhej t'Italis (The Great
Poets of Italy), Tirana 1932, 1936, to introduce Italian literature
to the new generation of intellectuals eager to discover the
world around them.
Koliqi registered at the University of
Padua in 1933. After five years of study under linguist Carlo
Tagliavini (1903-1982), and of teaching Albanian there, he graduated
in 1937 with a thesis on the Epica popolare albanese (Albanian
Folk Epic). He was then a recognized Albanologist, perhaps the
leading specialist in Albanian studies in Italy. In 1939, as
the clouds of war gathered over Europe, he was appointed to the
chair of Albanian language and literature at the University of
Rome, at the heart of Mussolini's new Mediterranean empire.
Now the country's éminence
grise, Koliqi chose to make the best of the reality with
which he was faced and did what he could to further the culture
of his homeland, now under Italian rule. He accepted the post
of Albanian minister of education from 1939 to 1941, much to
the consternation of large sections of the population, and founded
and subsequently ran the much-read literary and artistic monthly
Shkëndija (The Spark) in Tirana. Under Koliqi's ministerial
direction, Albanian-language schools, which had been outlawed
under Serbian rule, were opened in Kosova, which was reunited
with Albania during the war years. Koliqi also assisted in the
opening of a secondary school in Prishtina and arranged for scholarships
to be distributed to Kosova students for training abroad in Italy
and Austria. He also made an attempt to save Norbert Jokl (1877-1942),
the renowned Austrian Albanologist of Jewish origin, from the
hands of the Nazis by offering him a teaching position in Albania.
From 1942 to 1943, Koliqi was president of the newly formed Institute
of Albanian Studies (Istituti i Studimevet Shqiptare)
in Tirana, a forerunner of the Academy of Sciences. In 1943,
on the eve of the collapse of Mussolini's empire, he succeeded
Terenc Toçi as president of the Fascist Grand Council
in Tirana, a post which did not endear him to the victorious
communist forces which "liberated" Tirana in November
1944. With the defeat of fascism, Koliqi fled to Italy again,
where he lived, no less active in the field of literature and
culture, until his death in 1975.
It was in Rome that he published the
noted literary periodical Shêjzat / Le Plèiadi
(The Pleiades) from 1957 to 1973. Shêjzat was the
leading Albanian-language cultural periodical of its time. Ernest
Koliqi thus served as a distant voice of opposition to the cultural
destruction of Albania under Stalinist rule. Because of his activities
and at least passive support of the Italian occupation of his
homeland, Koliqi was virulently attacked by the post-war Albanian
authorities - even more so than the Shkodra poet Gjergj Fishta
(1871-1940), who had the good fortune of being dead - as the
main proponent of bourgeois, reactionary, and fascist literature.
The official Party "History of Albanian Literature,"
published in 1983, refers to him in passing only as "Koliqi
the traitor."
Ernest Koliqi first made a name for himself
as a prose writer with the short story collection Hija e maleve
(The Spirit of the Mountains), Zadar 1929, which gathered 12
tales of contemporary life in Shkodra and in the northern Albanian
mountains. Tregtar flamujsh (Flag Merchant), Tirana 1935,
his second collection of tales, is considered by many to rank
among the best Albanian prose of the period before World War
II. A quarter of a century later, Koliqi also published a short
novel, Shija e bukës së mbrûme (The Taste
of Sourdough Bread), Rome 1960. This 173-page work revives the
theme of nostalgia for the homeland felt by Albanian emigrants
in the United States.
As a literary and cultural figure, Ernest
Koliqi was and remains a giant, in particular for his role in
the development of northern Albanian prose. Literary production
in Gheg dialect reached a high point in the early 1940s from
every point of view - style, range, content, and volume - and
much credit for this development goes to this eminent publisher,
prose writer, and scholar.
MIGJENI
Migjeni (1911-1938), an acronym of
Millosh Gjergj Nikolla, was born in Shkodra.
As a young lad, he attended a Serbian Orthodox elementary school
there, and from 1923 to 1925 he began studying at a secondary
school in Bar (Tivar) on the Montenegrin coast, where his eldest
sister, Lenka, was living. In the autumn of 1925, when he was
14, he obtained a scholarship to attend a secondary school in
Monastir (Bitola) in southern Macedonia and 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. On his return to Shkodra in 1932,
after failing to win a scholarship to study in the West, he decided
to take up a teaching career rather than join the priesthood
for which he had been trained. In April 1933, he was appointed
to teach Albanian at a school in the Serb village of Vraka, seven
km. north of Shkodra. It was during this period that he also
began writing prose sketches and verse which reflected the life
and anguish of an intellectual in what was then the most backward
region of Europe.
Soon though, in the summer of 1935, the
23-year-old Migjeni fell seriously ill with tuberculosis. In
January 1936, he was transferred to the mountain town of Puka
and in April 1936 began his activities as the headmaster of a
rundown school there. After 18 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 arrived in Turin just before Christmas 1937, where he 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 the
San Luigi sanatorium near Turin, he was transferred to a Waldensian
hospital at Torre Pellice and died there on 26 August 1938. His
demise at the age of 26 was a tragic loss for modern Albanian
letters.
Migjeni made a promising start as a prose
writer. He is the author of short stories and prose sketches
which he published in periodicals, for the most part between
the spring of 1933 and the spring of 1938. He approached new
themes with unprecedented cynicism and force. He also made his
mark on Albanian literature and culture as a poet, though posthumously.
His verse production was no more voluminous than his prose, yet
his success was no less than spectacular in Albania at the time.
The main theme of Migjeni's only volume
of verse, Vargjet e lira (Free Verse), Tirana 1944, and
of his biting prose, was misery and suffering. It is writing
of acute social awareness and despair. Previous generations of
writers 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
hardship, disease, and poverty which he discovered all around
him. Though he did not publish a single book during his lifetime,
his writing, which circulated privately and in the press of the
period, was an immediate success. Migjeni paved the way for modern
literature in Albania.
THE TRANSLATION
In addition to the translations made
by the present author, which are appearing here for the first
time, this collection also contains a number of stories translated
into English by Stuart E. Mann (1905-1986). Born in Nottingham,
England, Mann was a scholar with remarkable interests and was
a linguist with a talent for rather obscure languages. In 1929,
he set off for Albania in order to learn the Albanian language
and got a job in Tirana teaching English at the American Vocational
School. He stayed in the country until 1931. Later in the 1930s,
he taught English at the Mazaryk University of Brno in Czechoslovakia.
Mann returned to England during World War II and worked for the
Information Ministry and subsequently for the Foreign Office.
In 1947 he became reader in Czech and Albanian at the School
of Slavonic and East European Studies of the University of London
where he worked until his retirement in 1972. It is there that
a number of his manuscripts are preserved, among which are the
present translations from the Albanian, made in 1942. As a tribute
to his memory, the delightful tale of his impressions and early
adventures in Albania is being included as an appendix to this
volume.
The present author wishes, in conclusion,
to thank the keepers of the Stuart Mann Archives at the School
of Slavonic and East European Studies in London for permission
to publish his works, and Janice-Mathie-Heck, of Calgary, Alberta,
for her kind assistance in the preparation of this book.
Robert Elsie
Eifel Mountains, Germany
June 2003
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Ernest Koliqi
- The Blood feud
- The Dukagjini dancer
- The Garden
- The Golden cradle
Migjeni
- The Story of one of them
- The Student back home
- Prose sketches:
Tragedy or comedy?
Refrain of my town
Forbidden fruit
Do you need any coal, sir?
The Suicide of the sparrow
Little Luli
In the fly season
The Platform of a magazine
The Headless idols
The Legend of corn
Lethal beauty
The Harvest
Zenel
The Robber's kiss
Appendix
Albania then and now by Stuart Mann
Bibliography
About the editor
|
