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thing I wanted was to portray Zeqo as naïve or
amateurish, or else ironic, since that would not
have been the effect of his poems on an Albanian
audience.
A particular problem I encountered comes
from how adjectives and possessives are formed
in Albanian. Without going into too much
detail, I’ll say briefly that adjectives in Albanian
most typically follow nouns and are joined to
them by short connecting words called clitics.
Interestingly, the genitive case works more or
less the same way, meaning that possessives
modify nouns more or less as adjectives do. In
practice, this adjectival/genitive construction,
in combination with other possible adjectival
constructions, allows nouns to accumulate
modifiers in Albanian more seamlessly than
nouns do in English. Often, Zeqo groups several
modifiers around a noun, and the word-for-word
equivalent in English feels excessively tangled,
something that demanded various strategies to
smooth it out.
For example, in the poem “Burotinoja” (“The
Marionette”), the first stanza reads in Albanian,
“Burotino, Burotino, / Hamlet i drunjtë dhe i
vogël / në teatrin intim, përrallor të feminisë”
(76) and translates word-for-word: “Marionette,
Marionette, / Hamlet wooden and little / in the
theater private, mythical of childhood.” In this
case, I decided to add a line to the stanza, since,
in my mind, “in the theater private, mythical”
provides more than enough material for a line
on its own. It was my sense that a line break
before “of childhood” would add an extra “twist”
to the stanza since, once the word order was
reversed in the English, “theater” would feel like
an expected place to land at the end of the third
line. Or in other words, the additional line “of
childhood” would offer an unexpected revelation
about the “theater” ending the line just above it.
Finally, I added “my” to “of childhood,” since to
me it seemed implied, arriving at: “Marionette,
Marionette, / little wooden Hamlet / in the private
mythical theater / of my childhood” (77).
Elsewhere, confronted with the same
problem, I decided to drop adjectives and/or
modifiers that seemed inessential or redundant to
the meaning of a line. For example, in the second
stanza of “Shqetësim” (“Trouble”), Zeqo writes:
“Mund të them për shembull se kulla e Ejfelit /
xhirafë vigane fantastike prej hekuri / Kullot mbi
glob yjet” (30), which translates word-for-word
something like: “I could say for example that the
tower Eiffel / giraffe giant fantastical made of
iron / grazes (grazing) on globe starry” (30). First
of all, it seemed to me that “fantastical” wasn’t
necessary in English, as Zeqo already claims in
the poem that his metaphor here is a “fantastical”
invention, not to mention that it seems less wildly
“fantastical” outside the Albanian poetic context,
where leaps of the poetic imagination for their
own sake were frowned upon. To an American
reader, drawing attention to the imaginative
nature of a metaphor might seem foolish,
which would likely not have been the effect in
Albanian. Second, that “starry globe” seemed
to me a little clunky in English, since we don’t
usually describe the stars as connected to the
globe. So I dropped the globe and arrived at: “I
could tell you, for instance, that the Eiffel Tower
/ is an iron giraffe / grazing on the stars” (31).
Sometimes Zeqo’s modifiers seemed to
point toward a more specific word in English,
and when it was possible I went with the more
specific as a way of streamlining the English. For
example, here’s one of Zeqo’s shorter poem in its
entirety:
“KANUN I SHEKUJVE”
I bije ne grusht portës së yllit më të largët
“O i zoti i kullës! A pret miq” i them.
Here’s more or less a word-for-word translation:
“THE CANON OF CENTURIES”
I knock with my fist on the (outer) gate of the
farthest star
Translation Review 39