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iblical, humorous, learned, scatological,
neologistic, polite, “poetic,” vulgar, technical,
etc. Is it in a local dialect, does it involve puns
or suggestive assonances or multiple meanings
I write down a rough English version of what I
hear, together with some variants and cognates
if there is an ambiguity. Albanian grammar and
word order are not unlike English, which makes
it easier in that respect than, say, German,
Hungarian, and Chinese in my experience.
I then take the result home and render it into
the same metrical form and rhyme-pattern in
English as the original, taking care to include
variations and metrical reversals in about the
same ratio as in the Albanian, and attempting
to find the same diction register in the English
as in the Albanian. I make no attempt to
“Anglicize” the language or bring it up to date
if, as many of these oral poems do, they contain
archaisms indicative of earlier versions of it
and concomitant traditional worldviews. For
instance, the word “bardhë” as applied to a
woman is, I believe, cognate with and properly
translated by the archaic/poetic English word
“fair.” I do not try to modernize it to “beautiful”
or literalize it to “pale” or “white” lest the social
and even moral implications of the old word be
lost.
I then share the draft of the finished version
with Marinaj at our next meeting, and make
needed corrections. Matters of judgment often
come up, for instance where it becomes obvious
to one of us that a later poet has at some point
interpolated disparate material into a finely
honed old poem or has forgotten an essential
plot point in a longer poem. For instance,
in the strange and supernatural poem “Muje
and the Three Witches,” which exists in other
known oral versions, the reciter of it has clearly
forgotten and left out the key to breaking the
spell of the golden goats, which is that they lose
their magic if they drink human blood. Later in
the recitation it becomes obvious to the reciter
that he has erred, and he then, rather flustered,
alters the ending to give the poem a different
(and rather misogynistic) ending. In this case,
I, as another oral poet, so to speak, improvised
a few lines to repair the damage and gave a
construction of the ending that made more sense
without altering the general literal meaning.
The canonical meter of Albanian folk poetry
is the trochaic tetrameter rhyming couplet.
It is varied by the addition of light syllables,
including an extra one at the end to make a
feminine ending, by using interlaced rhyme
schemes instead of the couplet, and by the
addition of several lines with the same rhyme
to create a climax. As an example of the last, in
“Poor Hysen,” a rich young man has just bought
the beautiful wife of a bankrupt and married her,
but he learns to his horror, after the marriage
is consummated, that his second-hand bride is
his own long-lost sister. She (like Jocasta in
Oedipus the King) tries to help him escape his
fate, but the relentless rhymes, so to speak, draw
them to the shocking surprise ending:
Now to comfort him, she tried
Questioning him of his mother:
“Poor man, did you have a sister”
“Wretched girl, had you a brother”
“I left behind a little brother
With a birthmark like a blister
On his forehead, from his mother.”
Lightning-fast, he fetched a light,
Parted his hair to show the sight:
There the mark was, red and white.
Bare as she was, she hugged him tight,
Naked in her brother’s hold;
“Since for us there is no light,
Give my brother back his gold.”
Another example might help clarify the power
of poetic form as a key element of poetic
meaning and a vital guide to translation. One
of the favorite devices of the Albanian oral
poet is the repetition of a line but in reverse
grammatical order for emphasis, while
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