SUNG ACROSS THE SHOULDER

HEROIC POETRY OF ILLYRIA

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This book is an anthology of Albanian oral poetry in translation, in the tradition of Francis James Child's collection of British oral poetry in the 19th century and Alan Lomax's collection of American folk ballads in the 20th. It was recorded live, mostly in the presence of the co-translator Gjekė Marinaj, and mostly in the traditional mountain villages of Malėsia e Madhe in Northern Albania. It was then translated directly from the acoustic recording by Marinaj and co-translator Frederick Turner. Turner rendered the verses in the same metrical forms as the originals. The poems are arranged under the following headings: patriotic songs; pastorals; heroic tales; the epic matter of Muji; courtship, flirtation, and love; marriage songs; spells, charms, and games; hymns and rituals; and philosophy. The anthology includes an introductory essay by Turner and a scholarly background essay by Marinaj, with brief biographical sketches of the performers, including photographs.

OCCURRENCE ON EARTH

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Occurrence on Earth, a collection of works by Albanian poet-statesman Preē Zogaj (translated into English by Gjekė Marinaj) speaks to the collective experience of his people during the period leading up to and immediately following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Zogaj's verses, composed between 1989 and 2008, present the haunting introspection of a people just emerging from decades of life under one of the world's most isolated and repressive dictatorships. The works achieve a distinctively national character with sprinkled references to Albania's cities, mountains, and coastline on the Adriatic Sea. Regional references include the cultural symbols of neighboring Greece, Zogaj's religious heritage in Christian Northern Albania, and Islam (Albania's predominant religion since the days of the Ottoman Empire). While mentioning the influence of the Soviet era with a reference to Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, these poems reveal Albania's strong identity with the West, incorporating such places as Florence in Italy and California in America, and such icons of European literature as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Balzac. Many of the poems written in the earlier part of the period evoke sad images of a traumatized people, who were living in a countryside littered with arms and ammunition, including chemical weapons from the communist era and land mines left over from the Kosovo conflict.

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

(VENDI I PAZBULUAR)

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F. Turner's The Undiscovered Country (translated into Albanian by Gjekė Marinaj) deals in poetic and narrative terms with perhaps the largest question in human life: What if we survive our own death? Would an afterlife rectify the tragic injustices of life, or render all of the moral, aesthetic and intellectual content of our lives meaningless? Composed in the form of a sequence of 60 sonnets, the poem begins with an extended, slightly troubled idyll of a man who has apparently died, left himself a trust fund, still lives, but cannot remember his previous life. The poem then turns into a story in which he seeks to recover his memory and find his lost wife. Elements of science fiction and future politics combine with evocative landscapes, passionate action, and searching character study. Biomedical, supernatural, psychological, and allegorical explanations hang in suspension. The poem avoids any distracting religious or theological doctrines, but grapples with the ethical and spiritual issues of saying farewell to the world.