| Daniela
Hurezanu
Books discussed in this
essay:
Chronicle in Stone
Ismail Kadare
Translated from the Albanian
The Meredith Press, 1987
277 pp., Hardcover, $29.95
ISBN: 0-941533-00-X
The Three-Arched Bridge
Ismail Kadare
Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson
Arcade Publishing, 1997
184 pp., Paperback, $12.95
ISBN: 1-55970-792-5
The Palace of Dreams
Ismail Kadare
Translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by Barbara Bray
Arcade Publishing, 1998
208 pp., Paperback, $12.95
ISBN: 1-55970-416-0
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
Ismail Kadare
Translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by David Bellos
Arcade Publishing, 2002
182 pp., Paperback, $12.95
ISBN: 1-55970-669-4
The Successor
Ismail Kadare
Translated from the French of Tedi Papavrami by David Bellos
Arcade Publishing, 2005
207 pp., Hardcover, $24.00
ISBN: 1-55970-773-9
Agamemnon’s Daughter
Ismail Kadare
Translated from the French of Tedi Papavrami and Jusuf Vrioni
by David Bellos
Arcade Publishing, 2006
240 pp., Hardcover, $24.00
ISBN: 1-55970-788-7
A well-known name in Europe, Ismail Kadare has been discovered
by a wider audience in the English-speaking world only after
having been awarded the first Man Booker International Prize
in 2005. Kadare is one of the rare contemporary authors whose
works are translated into English not from his language, Albanian,
but from their translation into French. This unusual situation
has inspired some of his reviewers to do something they never
do under normal circumstances: mention the translator and
pass judgment on the translation itself (not that they have
read the French version from which the translation has been
done). Several reviewers of Kadare’s most recent books
have declared themselves unhappy with the translation—one
of them even opined that we cannot speak of a translation
in this case because the translator doesn’t know Albanian
(as if translating from the French were done by the grace
of God). Another one felt that there was something “amiss”
with the translation, and another one mentioned the use of
“clichés” in English.
Being a translator myself, I couldn’t help ponder the
implications of these remarks. There are indeed many expressions
in Kadare that could be characterized as “clichés,”
but that would be to miss the tradition within which he writes.
In fact, these expressions are, as Kadare himself puts it
in Agamemnon’s Daughter, “set phrases,”
that is, old expressions we find in proverbs and folktales,
which the Communists tried to ban, and which have slowly disappeared
in the West under the influence of technology. Kadare is trying
to keep alive this language of folktales, and to see it as
“clichés” would mean to read a folktale
with the expectations we have from a modern novel. The challenge,
though, for both the translator and the reader resides in
Kadare’s constant shift from the language of folktales
to that of contemporary novels. This constant move between
two different worlds demands an ongoing “translation”
from the reader himself.
Chronicle in Stone, first published in Albanian in 1971 and
sixteen years later in English in a translation whose author
remains unidentified, describes life in a small Albanian town
during World War II. The mystery of the novel’s translation
was elucidated for me through an Internet search, and its
story is worth telling: translated by an Albanian émigré
who lived in the States and who is now dead, Arshi Pipa, the
book was published without the translator’s name because
he had entered into a conflict with the publisher and/or with
the author, and as a consequence, he demanded to have his
name taken off the translation. According to David Bellos,
Kadare’s current translator into English (who was chosen
by Kadare as the recipient of the translation prize awarded
together with the Booker prize), the dispute is known as the
“Pipi-Kaka quarrel.”
Chronicle in Stone has an original structure in that each
chapter is followed by an alternate chapter, a short “Fragment
of a Chronicle” written by the town’s official
chronicler. The regular chapters are written in the first
person, in the voice of a child who seems very much an alter
ego of the young Kadare, a child fascinated with words, who
reads Macbeth, as Kadare himself did when he was eleven, and
consequently applies its human drama to his neighbors, imagining
blood and crime everywhere. Not that it was hard to imagine.
In this little town ravaged by history, we see characters
walking down the street with severed heads under their arms;
the Italian fascists hang several young Albanian rebels, the
Greek occupants kill “enemies” chosen according
to the whims of their spies, and the Germans indulge in the
killing of hundred-year-old women.
Toward the end of the novel, the absurdity of the political
situation culminates in a whirlwind-like scenario, in which
within two weeks or so, the town changes hands several times:
from the Italians to the Greeks, back to the Italians, back
to the Greeks, the Italians, the Greeks, until finally no
one is in control. Each time the Italians come, they bring
along two groups of women, one of nuns and one of prostitutes.
Each time the town changes hands, another proclamation by
another Garrison Commander is posted and another flag is raised.
Each time another flag is raised, the Albanian Gjergj Pula
changes his name: to Giorgio (when the Italians come), to
Yiorgos (for the Greeks) and to Jurgen Pulen before the arrival
of the Germans, a name he never gets a chance to use because
the Germans kill him as soon as they enter the town. Nor does
he get to use “Yogura,” which he prepared in case
of a Japanese invasion.
With its flavor, tone and spectacular events reminiscent of
an ancient epic, Chronicle in Stone is probably the funniest
and at the same time most tragic of Kadare’s novels,
depicting a world in which people believe in black magic,
women live to be a hundred and fifty, and girls are drowned
in wells by their families for having kissed a boy. Its characters,
the folklore and mythology infusing historical circumstances
call to mind some Carribean novelists or even post-colonial
African storytellers, and one cannot help compare its blend
of surreal situations and political drama based on real events
to South-American novels, although Kadare apparently dislikes
the label “magical realism” applied to his novels.
It is not hard to imagine why: as some South-American novelists
have said, he too could say that the world he describes is
not “surreal” or “magical-realist;”
it is simply the real, pre-modern world of the Balkans, albeit
a world which is universalized through esthetic transfiguration.
Chronicle in Stone was published in Albania during the years
of Enver Hoxha, who came to power with the Communist Party
after World War II, and stayed there until his death in the
mid-eighties. In this context, we can speculate on the reasons
for the episodic appearance toward the end of the novel of
a character described by the Italian Garrison Commander as
“the dangerous Communist Enver Hoxha.” Although
it is known that the dictator came from the same small town
as Kadare, one wonders whether his presence is indeed historically
justified or whether this was the price Kadare had to pay
in order to publish his novel.
The Palace of Dreams, written in Tirana between 1976 and 1981,
takes us into an entirely different universe set at the fictitious
crossroads of a twentieth century dictatorship and the fourteenth
century Ottoman Empire. Characters from those ancient times
mix with contemporary characters—state employees and
office clerks reminiscent of Kafka’s world—in
a bureaucratic labyrinth identical to any other bureaucracy,
save for its purpose: to collect, sort, interpret and finally
choose the “Master-dream” of all the dreams dreamt
throughout the Empire, and to decipher in it the fate of the
Empire and of its rulers.
The Palace of Dreams incorporates the traits of all powerful
secret institutions—one cannot help think of the Sigurimi,
the Albanian Secret Police of the Communist era—as well
as the characteristics of an almost Totemic figure, a Kafkaesque
Castle whose rules no one can figure out. Kadare himself has
declared that this is probably his best novel from a literary
standpoint, and very likely his most courageous, an opinion
the Albanian Communist regime must have agreed with, considering
that shortly after its release the novel was banned.
But Kadare’s genius is such that, in the end, the Palace
of Dreams has no precise signification, except that revealed
by its name. It is a fabulous, otherworldly place where the
“real world” doesn’t exist, sleep is reality’s
only substance, and it isn’t the real, as we know from
Freud, that brings the dream into being, but the other way
around. Thus, at the end of the novel, one of the dreams that
the main character, Mark-Alem Quprili, who works at the Palace,
sorted and filed at the beginning of the novel, makes an unexpected
appearance, literally acting upon the present and causing
the drama the reader has been anticipating all along.
The Quprilis or, in the Muslim variant of their name, the
Köprülüs, are a recurrent family in Kadare’s
novels, and their thousand-year-old existence is intertwined
with the history of the Balkans. Of course, history and myth
always mix in Kadare; thus, the history of the family name
begins with Gjon, the ancestor who many centuries ago built
a bridge for whose endurance a life was sacrificed by being
walled up. This myth of sacrifice and creation, which also
appears in other works by Kadare, and is present in different
versions throughout the Balkans, has inspired one of his best
novels, The Three-Arched Bridge, written in Albania between
1976 and 1978.
The legend is about three brothers, all masons, whose efforts
to build a castle were in vain because everything built during
daytime was destroyed by an unknown force at night. After
having unsuccessfully worked for a long time, the masons are
told by a wise man that the construction will endure only
if a human life is sacrificed, so the brothers decide to immure
one of their brides in the foundations. The sacrifice should
strike the first wife to come in the morning with the midday
meal for her husband, and the youngest wife is consequently
walled up alive, one breast left out so she can feed her infant
even after her death.
In the Romanian version of the ballad the theme of the brothers
is absent. A chief mason renowned for his skills is summoned
by a king to build a cathedral—the most beautiful cathedral
that ever existed—and, after the walls collapse several
times, he is told in the dream that the first wife to come
next day should be immured. As it happens, this is his wife,
and in spite of his plea to the winds and the waters to stop
her, she defies all adversity and arrives with her husband’s
meal. She is walled up entirely, and from her lament we find
out that she is with child.
According to the narrator of The Three-Arched Bridge, the
monk Gjon, the kernel of the legend was the idea that all
labor requires some kind of sacrifice, and the spilled blood
is in fact sweat. But the legend becomes reality when the
construction of a bridge demands a human life, and a mason
is found immured in the bridge piers. Thus, the notion of
sacrifice, which is at the core of the story, can be read
in several ways: as a legend, as a crime done in the name
of the bridge, as the idea that all human orders are founded
on blood, and at the end of the novel, when the monk, author
of “this chronicle, [which] like the bridge itself,
may demand a sacrifice,” announces his own sacrifice,
as a commentary on the essence of great art, always built
on the sacrifice of the artist (184).
Mythical and folktale motives also make the skeleton around
which Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, written between 1998 and
2000 in Tirana and Paris, is constructed. With a formal structure
similar to that of Chronicle in Stone, this post-Communist
novel alternates a regular chapter whose events take place
nowadays with a “counter-chapter” narrating a
fairytale or a myth. Thus, the snake found by a group of people
in the first chapter reappears in “counter chapter one”
in the tale of a girl married to a snake that turns out to
be a man under a spell (in the Romanian version of the story
the snake is a pig). The animal slips out of his skin at night
and puts it back on the morning. Wanting to keep her husband
in his human form, one night the girl throws his skin in the
fire, and her husband disappears.
The contemporary story and the folktale are variations on
the same theme, and at times they intersect. The result is
a contemporary setting and characters anchored in both a mythical,
ahistorical past, and a present full of references to the
history of the Balkans. This double anchoring is probably
what gives Kadare’s stories their enduring power because
it infuses them with a truth that transcends the present,
while illuminating it.
The main theme of Spring Flowers is that of the Code of Laws
and of the Secret Archives. In fact, we are dealing here with
two aspects of a single theme, one referring to the old Albanian
Code of Laws or the Kanun, and the other, to the Communist
Secret Archives, but they constantly intersect, to the point
that the truth about the one seems to hide (or to reveal)
the truth about the other. The Kanun or the Book of the Blood
is a book where the “debts” of each family are
inscribed, according to the ancient lex talionis or “an
eye for an eye:” “who redeemed the blood, and
who still has to do some redeeming, who still has a blood
debt and who hasn’t” (76). The ambiguity between
the ancient code based on the law of the blood and the modern
secret archives is deliberate, as if the crimes and the blood
staining the pages of the Communist archives were but a new
version of the same primitive institution of the blood debt.
The Successor is one of those rare books that can be read
with equal pleasure by lovers of psychological or analytical
writings, and by readers looking for “action.”
Written in the form of a thriller, the novel manages in some
miraculous way to go to the essence not only of Communism,
but of all dictatorships, revealing with unusual psychological
finesse how throughout history there are some archetypal dramas
that keep repeating themselves, from Greek myths to Macbeth
to the history of the Balkans. Here too, Kadare’s most
powerful gift resides in inserting a “regional”
story within a universal model, in finding mythological equivalents
to contemporary events, and in reading the signification of
one through the other.
The novel’s plot, a fictionalized version of a political
crime that happened in 1981 in Albania, is simple: on the
night of December 13 the designated Successor of Communist
dictator Enver Hoxha is mysteriously shot dead. From the beginning
to the end of the novel, Kadare crafts a successful drama,
in which the answer to the questions “Was it suicide
or murder? And if it was murder, who was the killer?”
shifts—as the genre of the murder mystery demands—from
one chapter to the next. But unlike the usual mystery novel,
The Successor doesn’t have a “shocking ending.”
In fact, the narrator tells the facts as if even he didn’t
know the answer. Moreover, the dictator himself, referred
to as “the Guide”—an appellative shared
by most Communist leaders—doesn’t seem to possess
the key to the entire story either, although he obviously
is the gray eminence behind the crime.
Kadare’s skill in creating an ambiguous situation that
triggers the reader’s curiosity to the maximum matches
his genius in going straight to the essence of things, particularly
in the scenes involving the Guide before and after the Successor’s
death, which reveal the mechanism of power in Communist dictatorships.
To begin with, when the Guide summons to his office the Successor’s
successor—Hasobeu—he never pronounces the words
“Kill him!” though this is what he is getting
at. What he says is so vague and ambiguous—he orders
Hasobeu to go to the Successor’s house and do “what
is to be done,” and, in spite of his confusion, Hasobeu
doesn’t dare ask “What?”—that Hasobeu
goes twice to the house, wandering around and trying to interpret
the Guide’s words. The game of interpreting is present
throughout the book whenever the Guide appears, revealing
a system in which everything is a sign demanding to be interpreted
correctly if one wants to keep his head. But the absurdity
is that there are no rules one could follow in order to properly
decipher the signs, and any head could fall at any time. Because
of the system’s total arbitrariness it seems at times
that the Guide himself, although theoretically the one who
makes and changes the rules, doesn’t know everything,
as if Power secreted itself like a mythological monster mortals
cannot touch, but can only surrender to. Thus, Kadare’s
numerous comparisons of the Communist regime to a religion
aren’t simply metaphors, but deep insights into its
power structure. He compares the ties of comradeship forged
at the beginning of Communism between those who spilled blood
to come to power, with the ties of clan and family, because
it too was a tie of blood—but with a difference. It
wasn’t based on inner blood, the blood in your veins,
identical to the blood of your family going back a thousand
years, according to genetics, but on the other kind, on outer
blood. That’s to say, on the blood of others, blood
they had drunkenly spilled in the name of Doctrine. (97)
That Communist Doctrine literally filled up the space left
empty by the official interdiction of religion in Communist
countries is something anyone who lived under such regimes
can testify to. The cult of the Guide and of the Party—“The
Party is our Mother,” cites Kadare, words I myself heard—or
was it “The Party is our Father?”—hundreds
of times in Communist Romania. If the Doctrine called for
it, parents wouldn’t have hesitated to trample on their
children and do “what Abraham did three thousand years
ago, when God asked him to sacrifice his son” (104).
Communist atheist ideology was paradoxically grounded in a
primitive form of religion, a religion demanding a human sacrifice.
Trying to decipher the mystery of the Successor’s death,
Hasobeu keeps asking himself what did the Guide actually believe?
Perhaps, like half the population of Tirana, the Guide took
him for the killer. Or did he suspect that his minister [i.e.,
Hasobeu] had intended to commit murder, but hadn’t managed
to do so, seeing as someone else got his bullet in first?
Or that the Successor has beaten both his assassins to the
wire by pulling the trigger on himself?” (138)
After leading us to believe that Hasobeu is the killer, Kadare
implies that in fact he isn’t. But he also tells us
that the Guide himself is engulfed in his own guessing game
and deciphering of the signs, as if he didn’t know either
who the killer was. Indeed, a few pages further we are told
that the Guide “didn’t know and never had known,
what had really happened at the Successor’s residence
on that night of December 13. And since he didn’t know,
it could take a thousand years for anyone else to find out”
(157).
At this point, what we have suspected so far is confirmed:
no one knows who the killer is. But immediately after this
revelation we are led to another possible suspect: we are
told that, apart from Hasobeu, the only other individual that
seemed to have been implicated is the Architect of the Successor’s
house. And then the story suddenly takes a turn, but the move
is so subtle that the reader might still believe he is reading
a murder mystery, when in fact the novel has become a reflection
on art and the condition of the artist.
We know that the Architect had had his own reasons to hate
the Successor for once having been publicly humiliated by
him. We know that he had thought of punishing him, but when
asked by the Successor to remodel his residence, the desire
of punishing him by building something ugly is immediately
replaced by a much stronger impulse: that of building something
of unsurpassed beauty. In a Communist country where almost
all buildings were state property and of a monotonous, uniform
gray, the Architect has the rare chance of realizing his artistic
vocation by building something unique. Indeed, once finished,
his work is so beautiful that at the Successor’s party
where the Guide himself is present, the gasps of admiration
let out by the guests are indirectly saying the unsayable:
the Successor’s house is more beautiful even than the
Guide’s house!
Kadare’s psychological analysis of the oldest and most
common reason for committing a crime—envy—is doubled
by another legend, this time a Hungarian one, which narrates
a monarch’s revenge on a vassal who not only had the
cheek to have a castle built that was finer than his, but
he had invited him to the inauguration party. (In the Romanian
legend I had already mentioned, the king who had ordered the
raising of the cathedral also condemned the masons to death
by taking away the ladder and leaving them isolated on top
of the cathedral. His motivation was the same as in the Hungarian
legend: so no one else could have a cathedral as beautiful
as his.)
Now, it appears that the Guide had been, after all, the one
who had ordered the Successor’s death, because he was
jealous of his house. But this hypothesis is, again, undermined
in the last chapter written in the voice of the Successor,
who speaks from beyond the grave, and we are back to the idea
that the enigma remains unsolved. Even the opening of the
secret archives after the fall of Communism hasn’t managed
to uncover the secret, says the Successor. And if he tried
to explain it, there is only one person who could understand
him, Lin Biao, who had once been the Successor of Mao Tse-Tung,
and whose life ended in circumstances similar to those of
the Albanian Successor. No one will ever know what really
happened on the night of December 13. Although, right before
the end of the novel, the Successor seems to remember how
that night, as he was dozing off, he saw his wife—whom
the Guide called “Comrade Clytemnestra” after
her husband’s death—point a gun at him. . . But
did he really see her or was it just the vision of a man who
was falling asleep?
The Successor, first published in Albanian in 2003, is a sequel
to Agamemnon’s Daughter, a novella written much earlier,
which, together with “The Blinding Order” and
“The Great Wall” constitutes the most recent translation
into English of Kadare’s books. Agamemnon’s daughter,
Suzana, also a protagonist in The Successor, is here the narrator’s
lover, though she only appears indirectly through the latter’s
reminiscing. The novel’s title is not gratuitous, however:
“Agamemnon’s Daughter” is a metonymy for
the idea of sacrifice, viewed as a pact of blood that lays
the foundation of all dictatorships. The “campaigns
of purification” or “great purges,” as they
were called during Communism—names that call to mind
religious rituals accomplished periodically in order to appease
the angry gods—were campaigns of terror in which anyone
(or rather, anyone except the Leader of the Communist Party,
significantly called “Himself” in The Successor)
could be accused of being an enemy of the State or of the
people, forced to do his self-criticism, then punished. The
punishment ranged from having one’s membership in the
Party revoked, to a downgrading of one’s career, to
being moved to the countryside and constrained to embrace
the joys of farming, to being sent to the chrome ore mines
and shoved into a deep, nameless pit by some unknown hand
in the dark. Often, the punishment began with its lightest
form, the revocation of the card, and ended in the mine pit.
As a reflection on sacrifice, Agamemnon’s Daughter links
stories of sacrifice from different times and places—the
ancient Greeks, the Russians under Stalin, the Albanians under
Hoxha—and ties them into an eternal, universal story.
It wasn’t for a noble cause that Iphigenia was sacrificed,
in the same way it wasn’t for a noble reason that Stalin’s
son, Yakov, was sacrificed. The latter had been, apparently,
sent to war by Stalin in a gesture implying that all Russians
were equal; in fact, says Kadare, Stalin’s gesture had
a much more sinister and cynical motivation: the sacrifice
of his own son gave him free hand in demanding anyone’s
life from then on. The Successor’s daughter, Suzana,
is sacrificed by being forbidden to see her lover because
their relationship could compromise her father’s political
career. Reflecting on all this as a spectator at the May 1st
Parade—one of the biggest Communist holidays—the
narrator compares the father to a successor of that grand
master of all sacrificers, “Comrade Agamemnon MacAtreus,”
member of the Politburo.
Even more than The Successor, Agamemnon’s Daughter describes
with clinical lucidity the mechanism of power in a society
resembling a concentration camp. The Communist concept of
“self-criticism” was, in Kadare’s words,
a truly “diabolical mechanism,” because once you’ve
debased yourself, it was easy to sully everything around you.
People who have returned from concentration camps are known
for having said that no one can understand their experience
save for those who were there. Likewise, it could be said
that the diabolical mechanism of self-criticism and denunciation,
of flinging mud at yourself and others, can only be understood
by those who have lived under Communism.
The complete lack of logic or coherence of the system, its
schizophrenia, are exemplified by several accounts, including
the narrator’s own experience, which, fortunately, has
a happy ending. In all these accounts the precise accusation
against the accused is never mentioned out loud by the officials,
as if pronouncing the words themselves carried some great
danger. Indeed, more than once I experienced myself this aspect
of Communist ideology, which made it akin to the magical thinking
of those “primitive” peoples afraid of uttering
a certain word because it would bring into being the reality
or the thing behind it. Whence, the absurdity of a system
in which people were punished for something the accusers couldn’t
bring themselves to mention publicly. In Communist Romania,
for example, there was a law which was often invoked by the
authorities when punishing dissidents, but no one knew what
the content of the law was, because the law was officially
a “state secret.”
As in all of Kadare’s stories, here too there is a folktale
whose meaning functions as an allegory for the contemporary
story. It is the ancient tale of Bald Man, who one night fell
into a hole, and kept falling until he reached the netherworld.
After his fall, Bald Man strove to find the way and the means
to clamber back to the upper world, and found an eagle that
took him back on one condition: if Bald Man would feed him
raw meat all the way up (Incidentally, Albania is called “the
land of the eagles.”). When Bald Man finished off the
piece of meat he had brought, he cut into his own flesh and
fed the eagle with it, and by the time the eagle came out
into the upper world, Bald Man was a mere human skeleton carried
on the bird’s back. This tale is told in fragments interspersed
in-between the story of a man who, in order to stop his fall
from grace with the Communist regime, feeds the latter not
only his own flesh but also that of others, people he denounces
and tramples on as he finds his way back up.
Written in 1984, “The Blinding Order” is an allegory
set, like The Palace of Dreams, in the Ottoman Empire, but
its political allusions to Communist Albania are transparent
even for the uninformed reader. In their desire to preserve
society from the evil eye, nineteenth-century Turkish authorities
pass an edict enforcing the blinding of those suspected of
exercising the eye’s maleficent power. But how are the
carriers of misophtalmia (or “eye trouble”) going
to be identified? Although many of them are said to have blue
eyes, eye color alone is not enough for their proper identification,
and the lack of any specific characteristics of these potential
enemies, the fact that anyone could be one of them, contribute
to the sense of terror among the population. In its magnanimity,
the State doesn’t sentence to death the carriers of
the evil eye, but prevents them from perpetrating their deeds
by depriving them of their eyes. In addition, those who turn
themselves in before being identified by others as carriers
of the evil eye receive a monetary compensation from the State
after their disoculation. Everyone is encouraged to practice
denunciation, and any resistance is punished. After a campaign
of terror in which we can easily recognize the Communist purges
or “campaigns of purification,” the authorities
decide to hold a Banquet of Forgiveness or of Reconciliation,
where all the blind people are invited. There, as the blind
are playing the Balkan lyres and lahutas, and a huge cacophony
is rising to the skies, the authorities bestow forgiveness
upon their victims, and the terror of the past is conveniently
forgotten for the greater good of the State.
The manuscript of Agamemnon’s Daughter had one of those
unusual fates that predestine a work to last. Written in the
mid-eighties, it was smuggled out of Albania by Kadare’s
French publisher (Claude Durand from Fayard Press, an impressive
character, whose credentials, besides having been the director
of several big publishing houses, also include translations
from García Márquez, and promoting Lech Walesa,
Nelson Mandela and Alexander Soljenytsin, whose agent he was)
who took several trips there and returned each time with a
part of the manuscript. Other works by Kadare, whose subversive
content put his life at risk, enjoyed the same adventurous
fate. They were all deposited in a safe in a Parisian bank,
with the intention of being published in the event of their
author’s natural or “accidental” death.
After the Communist regime collapsed, they were all published
in both French and Albanian. Like so many other Eastern Europeans,
Kadare has consequently made Paris his part-time home. We
can only hope that he will never switch to French, as another
writer from Central-Eastern Europe, Milan Kundera, has done.
But unlike Kundera, whose critical attitude toward his translators
is notorious, and whose unhappiness with them has led him
to write directly in French, Kadare has no problem with the
different voices that his work inhabits in translation. Those
who have read Kundera both in translation and in his adopted
French know that the joke was on him, as the move has proved
fatal for his creative genius. Maybe translations, unfaithful
as they are, can sometimes be “the real thing”.
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