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save the last that happens to be published that
can be considered the author’s last word in
that vein. Like a Balzac or a Dickens, like the
ancient bard that he is, Kadare performs his
material anew each time. Of course, he aspires
to a final, definitive form, and he has devoted
much of his energy since taking up residence in
Paris in 1990 to the publication of his Complete
Works, in parallel Albanian and French texts,
intended to provide the final, stable versions
of his works, which now run to sixteen thick
volumes of print. But he can’t help himself. The
English translation of The Siege, previously
titled Les Tambours de la pluie (The Rain
Drums) in French and Kështjella (The Castle)
in Albanian, includes a couple of paragraphs
(translated by Elidor Mehilli directly from
Kadare’s Albanian manuscript additions) that
have never been part of the novel before. This
does not produce in the translator a sense of
frustration but, on the contrary, the confidence
that his version is but another performance of
material that has no definitively fixed and final
form and, in a sense, no original save for the
living mind that conceived it.
All Kadare’s stories and novels are explicitly
located in an identifiable historical frame —
Ancient Egypt, Mao’s China, Ottoman Istambul
in the Tanzimat period, Zog’s Albania, and
so on. But Kadare does not write historical
novels; indeed, he has often asserted that
he does not know what a “historical novel”
would be. Equally characteristic of Kadare’s
universe is the co-presence of historically
incompatible material — that is to say, of
various kinds of material, intellectual and
emotional anachronisms. Postmodern it is not;
rather, the reflections of a modern bureaucrat
in a world of medieval legend (Doruntine),
the interruption of political negotiations in
Beijing by a revised version of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth (The Concert), or the resurgence of
Homer on a ferryboat leaving Durrës for Bari
in the 1930s (The File on H.) create the sense
of a universal, human time unrelated to the
passing of centuries, political creeds, clothing
styles, or street furniture. Kadare’s manipulation
of chronological time provides the backbone
and the whole point of his often quite peculiar
sentence structures, which simultaneously assert
and deny the monodirectional flow of time.
This is a real problem in French, a language
with extensive, elaborate, and extremely rigid
rules about verbal tense and mood. Because of
this, Vrioni and Papavrami have to “smuggle”
Kadare’s timewarps in ways that a translator
into English has to confront, for English has
different ways of structuring time.
Here is an example from the early pages
of Kadare’s recent novel, The Successor
(Pasardhësi, Le Successeur).
Le lendemain matin, depuis longtemps
déshabitués du glas des cloches, les gens
avaient cherché les signes de deuil là où
ils pouvaient: aux façades des bâtiments
officiels, dans les airs de musique diffusés
à la radio, ou sur le visage de leur voisin
dans la file d’attente qui s’étirait chez le
laitier. L’absence de drapeaux en berne et
de marches funèbres avait fini par ôter leurs
ultimes illusions à ceux qui avaient préféré
croire que ce retard n’avait été que fortuit.
Les agences de presse internationales
continuaient à répandre l’information en
exposant les deux hypothèses: suicide ou
meurtre.
The main verb of the first sentence is in the
pluperfect tense. This “remote past” in French
implies the existence of a point in past time in
respect of which the action is doubly past. But
where can that narrative zero-point in the past
be It’s as if the speaking voice of this passage
is re-telling a story told in the past — save that
nowhere in the text is such a position established
explicitly. This is an example, at microtextual
level, of that double articulation of time in
Translation Review 19