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ON TRANSLATING ISMAIL KADARE
By David Bellos
first encountered Kadare in the early 1990s.
I A publisher sent me The File on H. and asked
me if I would like to translate it — from French.
I was very struck by Kadare’s reworking of the
story of Parry and Lord, which I had learned
about a long time before in connection with
quite other interests. I was deeply impressed
by the blending of past and present, of history
and poetry, of comedy and political insight
in this superficially page-turning narrative. It
seemed like a work well worth translating, but
when I began to read other novels by Kadare
already available in English — Broken April,
Palace of Dreams, The Concert — I became
aware of having stumbled onto a writer of huge
importance. But I was puzzled as to why the
book should not be translated directly from
Albanian, or, at worst, by someone familiar (as
I was not) with the literatures of one or more of
the Balkan languages. And so my education in
the darker side of the world republic of letters
began.
Albania withdrew from the Universal
Copyright Convention when it abolished most
aspects of private property following the seizure
of power by the PLA under Enver Hoxha. As a
result, no book published in Albania could be
sold on the international market, since there was
nothing to buy; and conversely, no sanctions
were available against Albanian publishers
if they published works copyrighted abroad
without purchasing rights, because Albania
did not recognize the existence of intellectual
property. This made Western publishers,
and particularly British and American ones,
extremely wary of publishing anything from
Albania, since the possible riposte — pirate
editions of English-language bestsellers for
resale in third countries — would be far more
painful than the hypothetical loss of a good
novel or two. In the absence of a market for
Albanian literature in English, there were no
literary translators working from Albanian into
English.
At least, not in the West. Inside Albania,
and in imitation of the Foreign Languages
Publishing House set up in Moscow in the
1930s alongside Gorky’s huge “translation
factory” for bringing world literature into
Russian, a few brave and stubborn individuals
were translating Albanian literature into foreign
languages, primarily French, but also into
English. Kadare’s most politically orthodox
novel, The Wedding, had been produced as an
English-language pamphlet and distributed in
the United States by Gamma Publishing, which
shared its mailing address with the Albanian
Legation to the United Nations. The General
of the Dead Army, Chronicle in Stone, and The
Rain Drums had all been translated into French
by Jusuf Vrioni and published in Tirana, and
it was these Albanian editions in French that
first Albin Michel, then Hachette, picked up for
free and republished in Paris. But as France is a
member of UCC, the French editions, unlike the
Albanian ones, were copyrighted, and so their
translation into English required the purchase of
rights from the French. The publisher who asked
me to translate The File on H. had purchased
the English-language rights to a text in French,
which was why he was asking me to translate it.
That is how it all began. I still haven’t
learned Albanian, though I have now visited
the country more than once and have gotten to
know some of its strange history and culture. I
have also had the immense privilege of getting
to know Ismail Kadare, and, as his command
of French has improved over the last ten years,
we have been able to communicate over the
many issues and problems that arise in the re-
Translation Review 17