Tributes to Ismail Kadare, 28 January 1936 - 1 July 2024
Robert Wilton is a regular contributor to the Anglo-Albanian Gazette. He is a novelist and translator who has lived in Kosovo and Albania for much of the last two decades. This is his personal tribute to Ismail Kadare:
In company there were at least two Ismail Kadares. He could play the don, authoritative, assured and forthright in his pronouncements. And, behind the thick old-fashioned Eric Morecambe rims, he could twinkle mischievous. By his survival as much as his achievements, he had earned the right to both modes. In both modes, he gave a sense of depths of wisdom one would struggle to fathom.
He represented Albania: he depicted and explored the culture, the customs, the troubled history. And he represented Albania: he was the Albanian writer that foreigners had heard of; a badge of global credibility for a marginalized and repressed literary society. His public distinction in his native land must be measured accordingly. He was pre-eminent in his time, as no British, American or French author has ever been in theirs - the only man of letters with such total recognition; the only Albanian cultural figure known internationally. It took a Churchill or a Queen Mother to attract the kind of national ceremony he was afforded, the newspaper supplements and lying-in-state.
He was not uncontroversial. He was accused by some of not being controversial enough in his dissidence: of conforming; of collaborating. The charges smacked of jealousy, muck-raking, irrelevance. Under Hoxha’s regime everyone conformed and collaborated in some way because - as a stimulating National Museum exhibition of the censorship of Kadare’s and other work a few years ago made clear - the alternative was disappearance and death. Kadare’s brilliance was to find a way to write works of craft and power and meaning while surviving. His prose relies so heavily on allegory, because it was both his greatest defence and the boldest he was able to be. There’s an argument that his poetry is finer than his prose because it was more personal; even more human. With its combination of simplicity and power, its density of imagery and its deft play with rhyme and near-rhyme, it’s certainly a stimulating challenge to the translator.
To Anglo-Albanian enthusiasts, Kadare was both the keystone of a distinctive Albanian culture and the bridge spanning a European culture. He was the product of a uniquely Albanian context, and its interpreter, everything from blood feud to bureaucracy. At the same time he recognized no boundaries between ancient tales and modern, between one European tradition and another: a hundred generations of literature were to him only echoes repeating all the way back to Homer; he was fascinating and passionate about the relationship between Shakespeare and Albanian story. Not only those interested in Albanian culture, but all who care about the endless tides of cultural interchange, flowing back and forth over Europe, blending and stimulating and invigorating, should remember him.
Our second tribute has been written by Dr Jordan Lancaster. Jordan is a historian, author and translator who holds a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of Toronto. When she moved to Albania almost two years ago, reading Kadare’s works became a key to a deeper understanding of her new home.
Celebrated as the winner of the Man Booker prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a member of the Legion d’Honneur, Ismail Kadare is the undisputed greatest Albanian writer of modern times. For the international public, his works constitute a roadmap or palimpsest to understanding one of the world’s least known and most enigmatic cultures. By bringing Albanian identity to the attention of readers worldwide, Kadare has fundamentally shaped perception of his country at a global level, not only through his poems, novels and novellas, but also as a playwright and screenwriter. Despite living in a time of extreme censorship in his home country, Kadare used the prism of genres such as folk tales, legends and fables to fashion richly layered and deeply nuanced stories. Nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, he is universally admired for using his voice to speak out against totalitarianism, more so in the last thirty years when it was safer for him to express himself freely.
Born during the reign of King Zog, young Ismail spent most of his youth and adult life under the claustrophobic regime of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. Kadare was from Gjirokastër and lived only a short walk from the family home of Enver Hoxha, who was a generation older. Although from a Muslim family, Kadare remained a lifelong atheist. As a boy, he immersed himself in Greek classics and the works of Shakespeare and began writing stories from the age of 12. After studying languages at the University of Tirana, he won a scholarship to the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, where he had the opportunity to read contemporary Western literature that had been unavailable in Albania.
Following the rupture of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Enver Hoxha’s increasingly paranoid Albania, Kadare’s studies in Moscow were truncated. He returned to Tirana, where he began life as a popular poet, journalist and writer. A fan letter from a schoolgirl led to him meeting and later marrying his wife Helena in 1963. In this year, he published the novel which brought him to international attention, The General of the Dead Army. The story of an Italian general and priest sent to Albania to locate the bodies of fallen comrades from the Italian invasion was the inspiration for three cinematic versions produced in Albania, France and most famously Italy, starring Marcello Mastroianni. The French translation of The General of the Dead Army by Isuf Vrioni was published in Paris in 1970 and cemented Kadare’s international reputation. It was later translated into many languages and the global recognition and associated lustre for little known Albania placed the writer in an unparalleled position.
Kadare spent the next twenty years of his life treading a fine line between the risk of accusations of collaboration with the West and not allowing his voice to be dimmed by the canons of socialist realism. During this time, Kadare and his family lived in an apartment just behind the opera house in central Tirana, which today has been preserved as a study centre and museum. Visitors can see Kadare’s office and peruse the volumes in his library. During these difficult years of censorship, Kadare explored the rich world of Albanian myths and legends, almost like an archaeologist digging through the past to understand and obliquely express the present. Kadare was no dissident, but then again, he had little choice: “I have never claimed to be a ‘dissident’ in the proper meaning of the term. Open opposition to Hoxha’s regime…was simply impossible. Dissidence was a position no-one could occupy, even for a few days, without facing the firing squad. On the other hand, my books themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance to the regime”.
Kadare finally defected to France in 1990. In Paris, he maintained his Albanian daily routine, frequenting a favourite coffee shop, Café Le Rostand, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, where he did most of his writing longhand in his ubiquitous notebooks, sustained by caffeine. He famously boasted that he worked no more than two hours a day. Perhaps he wrote no more than two hours a day, but he clearly spent much of his time and energy as an observer of the human condition. He remained an avid reader and followed the situation in his homeland closely. At his apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, he and his wife and daughters would entertain guests in the evenings with traditional Albanian cuisine. One of his daughters, Besiana, would become a UN ambassador and later Vice-President of the UN General Assembly.
In past times, Albanian readers would comb his texts for multiple layers of meaning and coded messages. On a national level, Kadare’s books are admired also for their superb use of language. He described his mother tongue as: “simply an extraordinary means of expression - rich, malleable, adaptable”. Most Albanians have their favourite Kadare novel. Kosovan-British singer Dua Lipa spoke at the 2022 Booker Prize ceremony, acknowledging the author’s influence in her life: “When I was 11, my family decided to return to Kosovo. Reading books such as Ismail Kadare’s Keshtjella, (The Castle), tested my language skills while also helping me connect with my family’s heritage and identity as Kosovan Albanians. Through Kadare, I learned about the Albanian spirit of resistance, that same stubborn determination that keeps Kosovans fighting for international recognition of our independence today. I often wonder if authors realise just how many gifts they give us”.
When I first moved to Albania, I began reading Kadare’s works, starting with Broken April, an intertwined tale of two characters, from the Accursed Mountains and from Tirana, exploring the theme of blood feuds and besa. It was an excellent introduction to the nuances of Albanian culture and society and I was particularly struck by the ability of the author to enter the mind of his female character with such insight. Kadare’s female characters continue to fascinate me, especially Doruntine in The Ghost Rider (which offered insights into Albanian family structure), Suzana in Agamemnon’s Daughter (a disturbing tale of a young woman served up as victim to tyranny) and Linda, the Girl in Exile (a tragic portrait of the victims of the dictatorship’s cruel bureaucratic machinery).
Beyond the debate over his legacy as a voice from a totalitarian land, I believe that Kadare should be remembered as a master of the Albanian language, with unparalleled ability to express profound love for his small country:
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!
A verse from Përse mendohen këto male / What are these mountains thinking about (1964)
translated by Robert Elsie
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