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TRANSLATING MOIKOM ZEQO’S MEDUZA
By Wayne Miller
The period 1966 to 1974 was a strange
and complicated period in the history of
Communist Albania, the most isolated and
repressive country in Eastern Europe for much
of the 20th century. In 1961, the Stalinist dictator
Enver Hoxha had severed his nation’s ties to the
Soviet Union because, as he saw it, Khrushchev
had abandoned Stalin’s legacy. Hoxha then
realigned his country with Maoist China. This
put Albanian writers on uncertain ground,
because now not only Western cultural and
artistic influences were considered ideologically
unacceptable, but potentially so was traditional,
Gorky Institute–style socialist realism (Logoreci
159). In the prevailing literary anomie, several
young poets, among them Ismail Kadare, Dritëro
Agolli, and Fatos Arapi, published books that
introduced new poetic techniques, including free
verse. When these writers were subsequently
attacked by senior members of the Albanian
Writers Union, Hoxha surprisingly sided with the
younger innovators (Elsie xv). This tentatively
broadened the aesthetic palette available to
Albanian poets, but it also meant that there
were no hard and fast rules as to what would be
deemed acceptable by the Albanian government.
Then, in 1967, Hoxha officially prohibited all
religions and religious practices; he soon began
to fill the resulting void with cultural offerings.
Albanians, whose modern cultural history up
until the 20th century had been severely limited
by several hundred years of Ottoman occupation,
suddenly found themselves in the midst of
a palpable cultural blooming. In 1972, the
Philharmonic Society gave its opening concert,
the Albanian Institute of Folklore published four
enormous collections (of fables, proverbs, folk
dances, and love songs, respectively), and the
Academy of Sciences was founded. In 1973, the
Congress of Albanian Orthography published
a volume establishing an
official written Albanian
(balancing the two dialect
groups, Geg and Tosk),
potentially unifying
the nation’s literature. Albania’s cities also
experienced a collateral flourishing of “youth
culture”: rock and roll, tight jeans, miniskirts,
absenteeism, disinterest in indoctrination courses,
petty crime and vandalism, men wearing long
hair, etc. In one instance, the Tirana-Durrës train
was forcibly stopped by its passengers so they
could pick fruit from a trackside orchard (Jacques
494).
Meanwhile, inspired by Mao, Hoxha invited
Albanians to voice “criticism from below.”
Thus, the political climate seemed to be thawing,
though no one knew how much, and various
organizations began pushing for reform. For
instance, in 1969, the head of the Albanian
Writers Union, Dhimiter Shuteriqi, asserted
that “greater repression had bred indifference
and mediocrity” in too much of Albania’s
literature (Logoreci 162). Also in that year,
thirty university students were expelled from
the University of Tirana for demanding more
open discussion in the classroom (Logoreci
162). In 1973, the Labor Youth Union of Albania
criticized the educational system’s emphasis
on nationalism, asked for an increase in the
availability of books by foreign authors, and
urged the central government to remember that
Albania was part of Europe, not China (Jacques
494).
This was the confusing period during which
Moikom Zeqo began to write Meduza, the book
from which the poems in I Don’t Believe in
Ghosts were selected. At the time, Zeqo had
published two books (Vegime të vendlindjes
[Visions of my Native Land] in 1968 and Qyteti
Translation Review 33