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available. I believe that some of the tragic and
heroic “bite” of these poems is lost by being so
translated and have sometimes felt that I would
prefer to render them into the classic tetrameter,
even if by doing so I would falsify the metrical
form of the original. But the stories these poems
tell are usually so striking, graphic, horrific, and
moving in themselves that perhaps the heavy
beat of the tetrameter over a long period would
be unbearable in addition.
In traditional English verse, as I have
already noted, there was from early days
a distinction between the “high” urban
cosmopolitan educated voice of the iambic
pentameter and the “low” rural provincial
unlatined (and even illiterate) voice of the 4-3-
4-3 ballad form. This class distinction can be
seen in other literatures, too, the alexandrine
and the endecasillabo playing in French and
Italian the same role as the English iambic
pentameter. Medieval popular Latin verse,
based on stress, and often in trochaic tetrameter
(“Dies irae, dies illa”), existed in a social space
below the quantitative classical poetry of the
ancient Romans and Greeks. But Albanian
poetry seems to share with the Chinese classical
poetry the peculiar feature that for most of
its history it never diverged into high and
low styles. Albanian and Tang poetry is both
“high” and “low,” and there is no difference in
metrical form between the voices. I believe the
reasons for this similarity are quite different,
however. Albanian society was in a class sense
beheaded by the Turks — its upper courtly and
cosmopolitan class was replaced by Turkish
beys and administrators. Thus poetry had
no chance to formally separate in terms of
class. Chinese Tang society, however, was so
dominated by the mandarin class at all levels, a
class of people chosen by examination for their
poetic gifts from the whole population, that a
separate folk tradition never got a chance to
emerge into the light before it was co-opted into
the clerical class.
The love of the land is one of the most
prevalent subjects of Albanian poets.
The flavor of their ferocious love of their land is
nicely caught in “Homage to the Warriors”:
HOMAGE TO THE WARRIORS
When I take my lute to sing
Snow-peaks perch upon my string,
And the forest heights fall still
And the starry heavens chill
And the ice-fields and the crests
Come to sing the heroes’ gests.
Words like water from the spring
Teach the heroes’ deeds to sing;
Green-clad hillsides raise the call
Echoed from the mountain-wall.
Time harrows rocks and stones and all,
Yet heroes for the flag still fall;
The Cemi brook runs red with gore,
But their mothers will bear more.
They give birth to bravery,
Let the Alban eagles fly.
It is not only the males who guard women’s
honor with violence. In “Kole’s Peerless
Women,” Drane avenges an attempt on her
honor by Gjin Ndresa with a quick shot from
her faithful pistol while they are talking it over
afterward. And she warns the judge, before
whom she is brought for the murder, that there
is another bullet meant for him if he does not
acquit her.
Any society in which the opposite sex
is a forbidden object guarded by dangerous
protectors is going to be a pressure cooker for
sexual passion. The Albanian folk poets evoke
with appalling frankness the pain and existential
vividness of desire and recognize with a cleareyed
tragic honesty the ruthless politics of love.
In these politics, the women often seem to have
the upper hand:
62 Translation Review