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wake of a bad breakup: “You are Ephemera,
/ you are Ephemera, / Ephemera, Ephemera,
Ephemera. / More fleeting than everything
fleeting, less / significant than all that’s
significant / [. . . ] / you, my Ephemera. (Mine,
indeed . . . .)” (85). Yet, the more Zeqo pushes
forward into the poem, the more he asks us to
seek a more complex reading. When he writes,
“You’re like those insects born in a certain
hour, / only to die within the day” (85), it seems
possible that he’s pulling into focus the general
brevity of human life. And when he asserts that
“[t]hey don’t exist — they who leave behind no
memories. / Ephemera, your epitaph is silence”
(85), his tone sharpens, offering two more
potential readings: (1) he’s cursing Hoxha and
his underlings, predicting that they ultimately
will be relegated to the dustbin of history; or (2)
he’s addressing the Albanian people as a group,
warning them that the position they’ve been
reduced to by Hoxha’s policy of isolation is that
of living outside the collective memory of the
world — that their very lives have been rendered
utterly ephemeral by Hoxha’s choice.
In another poem, “Gjeli i remë” (“The
Weathercock”), Zeqo’s strategy is slightly
different, though akin to one used by fellow
Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. In his novel
The Palace of Dreams, Kadare tells the story
of a government agency charged with the task
of monitoring citizens’ dreams for subversive
thoughts. The novel is set in a magical-realist,
ahistorical Albania still under Ottoman rule, and
thus the protagonist hired to work in the agency
is forced to do the work of Albania’s long-time
Ottoman oppressors. Despite the fact that on
the surface The Palace of Dreams is critical
of a central enemy of Albanian nationalism,
something that seems to have helped the book
get through the censors, in fact, it’s difficult
to read the book as addressing anything other
than the oppressiveness of Hoxha’s Albania.
Similarly, in “The Weathercock,” Zeqo describes
a “tin rooster on the roof” (119) observed by
birds pecking around on the shingles far beneath
him. This weathercock “knows only how to spin
around himself” and “won’t wake anyone” (119),
because of his artificial existence. In comparison
to him, Zeqo exalts the “[b]irds who are living, /
birds who are small,” and praises them for “how
many dimensions / [they] uncover / through
[their] living” (119). Here, it’s quite possible
to interpret the weathercock as representing
a classic enemy of communist ideology, the
bourgeois capitalist, though the poem can just
as easily be read as a scathing critique of Hoxha
himself.
Though so many of Zeqo’s poems work
well on both personal and political levels, it’s
important to note that simply addressing the
personal itself could be seen as politically
subversive in Hoxha’s Albania, as could Zeqo’s
sweeping, wild, and sometimes indulgent
metaphors that combine the surreal with
complicated conceits. Thus, a poem such as “Cili
je ti” (“Who Are You”), which depicts grazing
horses “laughing: ha ha” and asks “[y]ou graze
on the heart, / who are you” (115), risked being
accused of purposelessness and extravagance. A
poem of inward reflection such as “Pusi i vjetër”
(“The Old Well”), in which Zeqo imagines myths
pouring “from the mossy bucket” and asserts
that the well itself is “my stone telescope / for
looking / into the depths” (89) — the depths
of history, presumably, but also into his own
depths — risked being read as self-indulgent and
problematically individualistic.
Despite the relative aesthetic isolation of
Albanian poets under Hoxha, Zeqo is — and to
a lesser degree was — quite erudite in a broad
range of European and American literatures
(in fact, Zeqo has translated a number of
Shakespeare’s sonnets into Albanian), and at
the time that he wrote Meduza he was aware
of, and to a certain extent, influenced by, the
Metaphysical poets, with their complex conceits.
Perhaps more importantly, Zeqo has a great
affection for Shelley, his favorite of the British
36 Translation Review