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weeks later in Washington, D.C., working with
Zeqo on getting down “trots” for a much larger
project: the translation of Meduza.
It took me a number of years of substantial
reworking to finally put together a translated
manuscript that, at least to my ear, is composed
of effective poems in English. Along the way,
I gratefully received help from three Albanians
living in the U.S.: Petrit Rragami, an Albanian
émigré then living in New York, and Silvana Faja
and Adriatik Likcani, a professor and counselor,
respectively, who live in Warrensburg, Missouri.
Although the majority of the poems in I Don’t
Believe in Ghosts were co-translated primarily by
Zeqo and myself (with important contributions
from Aaron and Arnisa), a number of others,
which we didn’t get to before Zeqo’s return
to Albania, were first co-translated with these
other Albanian-speaking colleagues. In addition,
many of the poems in this book are the product
of several re-workings over time and thus
developed through multiple collaborations.
Of course, the most ideal situation for
translating poetry generally involves an Englishlanguage
poet translating from a language in
which he is entirely fluent. Nonetheless, much
has been written about collaborative translating,
and many strong translations have emerged over
the years through collaborative efforts. For the
translation of Meduza, I took my initial cues from
Robert Bly’s Eight Stages of Translation. To
the best of my knowledge, only a few of Zeqo’s
poems had appeared in one small anthology in
English, and because none of the poems in I
Don’t Believe in Ghosts had previously appeared
in an English-language volume, I tried in my
translations to be as straightforward as possible
while still incorporating effective tonal and
prosodic choices. Thus, the poems in I Don’t
Believe in Ghosts are generally not intended to be
“imitations” (à la Robert Lowell) or “versions”
(as Don Paterson calls his wonderfully loose
translations of Antonio Machado in The Eyes).
They are intentionally and self-consciously
“translations.”
That said, if the poems in English are actually
to be poems, the process of poetic translation, as
noted translator Jascha Kessler has pointed out,
must finally be one of “re-creation” (103) rather
than direct, literal translation. Albanian, like any
language, has its peculiarities that complicate
the translation process, and Zeqo, like any poet,
has his own particular idiosyncrasies that outside
of the context of Albanian literature and culture
might not be conveyed effectively. Thus, when
confronted with such difficulties, I resorted to
moments of what I would call “approximation.”
The first, most obvious problem I
confronted in Meduza was Zeqo’s frequent
and exuberant use of exclamation points. From
my conversations with Zeqo, it seemed to me
that this choice was a product of two things:
(1) Zeqo’s overall demeanor and personality is
prone to grand gestures, and thus his exclamation
points should be read, generally, as earnest; and
(2) Zeqo’s use of exclamation points is largely
informed by a Romantic ethos, à la Shelley
(“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”),
which for an Albanian audience, especially
one in the politically and culturally isolated
Albania of the 1970s, would mean something
very different than it does to a 21st-century
American audience. To us, a poet stylistically
imitating Shelley — or the other Romantics, for
that matter — would seem naïve, as if he had
little awareness of the influence of Modernism.
What’s more, a peppering of exclamation points
in American poetry, the poetic idiom into which
I was translating Zeqo’s poems, would come
off as either amateurish or ironic, with little
room for landing in between. In contrast, for
Zeqo’s intended audience in 1970s Albania,
paying homage to Shelley would potentially
indicate a kind of internationalism and Romantic
individualism that would feel politically loaded
— edgy, even. Given the gap between these
potential effects, I quickly decided to drop the
majority of Zeqo’s exclamation points. The last
38 Translation Review