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fundamental to the poem.
I hope the above examples offer a brief
glimpse into my translation process throughout I
Don’t Believe in Ghosts. Overall, my goal in this
project was to bring to an American audience
the feeling of foreignness and metaphorical
complexity that Zeqo’s poems would have
produced in their intended Albanian audience
in the 1970s. Unfortunately, some of the very
influences on these poems that would have made
them feel foreign and strange, perhaps even
exotic, in Albania — I’m thinking especially of
Shelley — would have made them feel a little
outdated to an American audience if
I had translated them too directly. It
was my sense that that would have
done the poems a disservice by misapproximating
their original effects,
and so I sometimes gave myself
some necessary flexibility in my
translations. Nonetheless, despite
my occasional deviations from the
“literal,” the spirit of my translating
throughout I Don’t Believe in Ghosts
was more often than not that of
working “close to the bone” (as J.D. McClatchy
describes it in his introduction to Horace, the
Odes). I tried to make approximations only when
it seemed necessary.
Meduza made this easier than another book
might have done for two primary reasons. First,
Zeqo’s poems almost never rhyme, so I didn’t
have to address the potentially sticky question
of whether or not to rhyme in English. Second,
the original book Meduza actually contains 152
poems. Consequently, it was easy to simply
ignore poems that were less effective in English
or else became tangled in process, either because
of syntactical problems or obscure Albanian
references, and still put together a book-length
work that feels complete. Thus, what ended up in
I Don’t Believe in Ghosts is really the strongest
and most translatable 67 poems from Meduza.
Finally, in Meduza, each poem has a date
on it, because the book was published only in
1995, when the poems were more than twenty
years old. Because I was putting together
a selection from the original book, thereby
disrupting Zeqo’s original order, and since part
of what is potentially fascinating about Zeqo’s
work, especially to an American audience, is the
historical context from which the book emerged,
I decided to group the poems according to year
of composition, thereby foregrounding their
historical progression. Within each year, though,
I tried to construct something of a poetic arc so
that the poems would interact with each other
thematically and aesthetically. My hope
is that my translations are able to convey
in an American idiom Zeqo’s exuberance,
his hope for the future, and his overall
view that even in a country and political
climate from which “it’s more difficult to
leave / than to take gloves off icy hands”
(27), truth and beauty continue to become
entangled with the difficulties of everyday
human experience. For Zeqo, it’s the
case that the resulting wounds — of both
daily life and political oppression — are
“wrapped in mother-of-pearl” (79). v
Works Cited
Elsie, Robert, Ed. An Elusive Eagle Soars: Anthology
of Modern Albanian Poetry. London. UNESCO/Forest
Books. 1993.
Jacques, Edwin. The Albanians: An Ethnic History
from Prehistoric Times to the Present. Jefferson, NC.
McFarland and Company. 1994.
Kessler, Jascha. “On Collaborative Translating.”
EPOCHE 9 (1981). 100–104.
Logoreci, Anton. The Albanians: Europe’s Forgotten
Survivors. London. Victor Gollancz, Ltd. 1977.
Zeqo, Moikom. I Don’t Believe in Ghosts: Poems from
Meduza. Trans. Wayne Miller, et al. Rochester. BOA
Editions, Ltd. 2007.
Translation Review 41