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- Poetic Path (Rruga Poetike) (http://www.forumihorizont.com/forumdisplay.php3?forumid=191)
-- Albanian Literature in English (http://www.forumihorizont.com/showthread.php3?threadid=7367)

Some poems in English

From Ali Podrimja

It is the Albanian's fault

It is the Albanian's fault
That he breathes
And walks on two legs

That I take tranquillizers
And swat flies all day
In the Toilet

It is the Albanian's fault
That he besmirches your wife
And frightens my family

That my hand cannot reach the apple
On the highest branch
That he has filled the Well with dead words

It is the Albanian's fault
That not more of Turkey exists,
More of America of Norway

That the Gulag is so far away

That they chose me and sent me
To sniff him out
Does death smell

It is all the more the Albanian's fault
That he does not eat
Or close his eyes and sleep

That our sewers are broken
And the Catacombs of the Balkans
Have fallen into ruins

It is the Albanian's fault
That he whiles away the time under the moon
And breaks windows and stirs up muddy water

That he speaks Albanian that he eats Albanian
that he shits Albanian

It is the Albanian's fault
The Albanian is the one at fault
For all my undoings

Both for my broken tooth
And for my frozen smile
So therefore: BULLET

Ha ha ha
Ha ha
Ha

May God have mercy!

---------


Who will slay the wolf

(for F. Altimari)

And the gentleman said

Should you happen to come upon
An Albanian and a wolf
Slay the Albanian

When the Albanian heard the saying
He smiled
And rolled himself a cigarette

If you slay me
my poor friend
Who will slay
The wolf

Poor herds

(Cosenza)

------


Now lets go to some of the best Kadare's poems. (it looses some of its flavour when translated in english)

CRYSTAL
by Ismail Kadare
world-famous novelist and poet from the Hoxha period
still living in France

(translated by Zana Banci and Anthony Weir)

It's a long time since we saw each other and I feel
I am forgetting you. The memory of you
Dies in me day by day,
The memory of your hair
And everything about you.
Now I'm looking everywhere
For a place to drop you
A line, a verse, or crystal kiss -
And so depart.

If no grave will receive you,
No marble nor crystal sepulchre -
Will I have to keep you always with me
Half-dead and half-alive ?

If I can't find a chasm to drop you into
I'll look for a lawn or field
Where I will scatter you softly
Like pollen.

Perhaps I'll trick you into an embrace -
And go away irrevocably
And neither of us will know the other.
This is forgetting isn't it?