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the ancient scrolls were not, after all, some
conventional symbolism for the arcadian
countryside but the literal, representative truth.
Certainly the pastoral poets (on down through
Virgil and Sannazaro, Marot and Ronsard,
Sidney, Shakespeare, and Marvell) clean up the
shepherd’s act a little, as the Chinese poets clean
up the pine forests and little pavilions on the
crags — but they are not exaggerating the frank
intensity of the native oral poetry they imitate.
Lord and Parry were astonished to find Homeric
epic in modern Serbia; the American collectors
of country music found ancient Scots-Irish
heroes in the guise of cowboys; here we can find
ancient pastoral still surviving in the mountains
of Illyria.
But pastoral is not the only genre
represented in the Albanian folk tradition. There
are, besides, poems that might best be called
anthems in praise of regional or national identity
and invocations of God’s aid to it; heroic
ballads about individual named adventurers and
fighters; and what might be the makings of an
epic, in the cycle of longer heroic poems telling
of the exploits of Cetobasho Muje.
Given the rich materials outlined here,
how can they be translated into English One
fundamental problem, that of course a written
poem is not the same as a (partly improvised)
oral poem, has already been mentioned. The
ethical issue is in a sense moot, since human
practice in general has been to render oral
materials into literate form, and some of the
greatest works of human genius, such as the
Iliad, the Mahabharata, and the Popol Vuh,
have been the result. And this problem contains
the glimmerings of a solution to other problems,
such as the faithful rendering of the tone, style,
sound and ethos of the original.
The key is what English and Albanian have
in common, that is, prosody, with all its rich
indications of stress, rhythm, musical tone,
meter, and rhyme. Gjeke Marinaj and I resolved
to reproduce as exactly as possible the metrical
form and rhyming patterns of the original,
believing that if an English-speaking audience
hears the sound of the original — both its basic
beat and its characteristic variations — the
emotional content will at least in part come
through.
The rules of metrical form may in fact
have originated in all the literate cultures as
an attempt, at the point of the introduction of
literacy, to analyze and reproduce exactly the
sound and emotional emphasis of the original
oral poetry. Today the most reliable guide
to, for instance, Elizabethan pronunciation is
the implicit map to it that is provided by the
rhyme sounds and metrical emphasis of Tudor
poetry. So in attempting to match the sound
of the Albanian poems we are, as it were,
reproducing the efforts of any nation’s scholars
to preserve its oral poetry into the era of literary
communication and record. That is, the prosody
and meter of literary poetry is its oral element,
preserved almost like a tape recording or a
musical score — literate poetry is a dry and
robust container for the volatile and fugitive
potion of its oral essence. Beyond all technical
and sociological considerations, however, is the
living presence of a vital folk tradition that is
still reproducing itself in the hills of Albania. v
64 Translation Review