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“O man (owner) of the tower/turret/manor
house)! Do you welcome guests” I say.
Immediately, that “Canon of Centuries”
looks clunky, since in English we would refer
to what Zeqo seems to be describing as either
“the literary canon” or simply “the canon.” So,
in my mind, there was no reason to include
“of Centuries.” Also, “knock with my fist”
seems awkward. Knocking with a fist would,
presumably, be in contrast to knocking with
the knuckles, which in English we just called
“knocking.” Knocking with the fist, then, would
be something like “pounding.” Finally, the word
Zeqo chose for the building in the poem, “kullë,”
conjures a particular picture. The structure in
question is something like a tower, or a turret, or
an old-fashioned country manor house — almost
a castle. The scene in the poem, then, is similar
to one from classic Romances: a desperate,
solitary, late-night traveler seeks shelter at a
strange nobleman’s house. I decided that the way
to make the poem work was to choose words
in English that would play up this archaic feel.
Thus, my translation reads:
“THE CANON”
I pound on the gate of the farthest star,
shouting
“O man of the house! Do you take boarders”
Another potential pitfall I encountered while
translating Meduza is the fact that Albanian
indicates definite and indefinite nouns through
their endings. For example, in the final stanza
of “Burotinoja” (“The Marionette”), the closing
two lines read: “për të ngrohur çdo fëmi të
varfër / do të digjeshe pa ngurim në vatër” (76),
which I have translated: “to warm each destitute
child / you’d have burned yourself / without
hesitation in the fireplace” (77). In the Albanian,
the noun “vatër” is indefinite singular and
literally translates “fireplace” or “a fireplace.”
(In contrast, the noun “vatëri” is definite singular
and would translate “the fireplace.”) Yet, despite
a noun’s necessary and inherent specificity in
Albanian, whether or not the same noun should
end up as definite or indefinite in English
is sometimes colloquially different than in
Albanian. If I had ended the above poem with “in
fireplace” it would have sounded ungrammatical,
and if I had translated it “in a fireplace” it would
have sounded as though the Marionette threw
himself into a random fireplace while wandering
through town, rather than into the fireplace in
front of the destitute child needing warmth.
As an illustration of the difficulties I
sometimes encountered in translating Zeqo
— and the difficulties generally inherent in
translating poetry — I should briefly mention
an entirely untranslatable moment in Meduza.
The poem “Jeta” (“The Life”), a fairly direct
politically allegorical poem, describes how “[f]
all made the flowers disappear” and “[w]inter
froze our eyes,” and in each circumstance the
inhabitants of the poem survive by calling on
summer, who returns to “fill [their] hands with
petals” and “melt [them] with a bit of sun” (109).
This seems fairly direct, but in the first two
stanzas the line that repeats, “[n]e i thirëm verës”
(108), contains an untranslatable pun. In fact, the
word “verë” means both “wine” and “summer,”
and so the implication of that line is that when
things get bad in the depth of winter, the people
can always have wine, which is capable of
producing for them a momentary bit of warmth.
I debated whether or not to translate the line as
indicating “wine” rather than “summer,” but that
would have disrupted the overall conceit of the
poem, since the closing stanza continues with
the idea of the seasons, asserting (in relationship
to the nascent thaw of the early 1970s) that “[s]
pring has come” (109). And though I briefly
considered not including it, the poem seemed
too important a statement regarding the political
and cultural moment Zeqo addresses in Meduza
to be left out. In the end, I went with “summer,”
knowing that my translation had lost something
40 Translation Review