For a writer who comes to receive the title of Doctor honoris causa, the first thought that comes to mind is that, if a speech is required, it should be threaded by the line of a scientific argument.
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| Lectio magistralis — delivered by Ismail Kadare on the occasion of receiving the title of Doctor honoris causa in Social Communication Sciences from the University of Palermo, June 11, 2007.) |
I have noticed that my fellow writers from the overturned communist empire, on such occasions, have often spoken about the repression of literature. In other words, a theme that should have belonged to journalism—or, I would add, to emotional memoirs—was elevated to the status of a scientific argument.
In essence, there is no great error in that. The oppression of literature and the arts in the communist world was indeed raised to the rank of a science. Consequently, dealing with this oppression could be carried out in the same style.
All authoritarian regimes in the world have had problems with literature. In every case, it is literature that, in the end, has triumphed. However, it must be said that of all regimes, the only one that came close to victory over literature was communism.
Much has been said about this, so I will not dwell. I will recall only a question that has been asked many times: did communism invent any new weapon, a weapon that could be fatal against literature? The answer is yes. Indeed, a new invention was used. Communism was the first regime in the world to understand that great literature suffered nothing from censorship, nor from prisons, nor from other terrors. To bring it to its knees once and for all, something else was required. This new invention was the creation of a new breed of writers, a breed that with its own hands would corrupt the art of the word. In other words, to paraphrase Joseph Brodsky, it was not necessary to demolish the edifice of literature directly; it was enough to spoil the bricks, the material out of which it was built. Thus, with sabotaged bricks, the building would collapse of itself.
This radical solution was achieved only partially, through what was called “socialist realism.” Why did it not finally triumph? What was missing? The age of the system, perhaps? Likely it was that. Communism, as is known, had two lifespans: one of 70 years, reached only by two states—the Soviet Union and Mongolia, and toward which Cuba and North Korea are still moving. And another lifespan of 45 years, which was more or less that of the Eastern European countries, including my own country, Albania.
In the history of humanity, what I mentioned as a “radical solution for literature” also had another version, extremely rare and terrifying. This version was not linked to communism, but to another misfortune: the Ottoman rule.
You know this rule. It spread over the entire Balkan Peninsula. It subdued dozens of peoples, languages, cultures. It detached the Balkans from Europe, aimed at conquering the center of Europe to the north and your Italian peninsula to the west. As with communism, in the case of the Ottoman conquest my country, Albania, cannot in any way claim to have been a solitary victim. It fell under that rule together with all the peoples of the Balkans. It endured the same hell.
Since I mentioned the lifespan of communism, let me emphasize that the time of Ottoman rule, in terms of length, can without fear be called infernal: five hundred years. It sounds unbelievable, and it is indeed so unbelievable, that recently revisionist historians have put forth the thesis that such a long domination cannot be called conquest. They are searching for another name, more different and, above all, more suitable to today’s European vision of reconciliation among peoples. Despite the effort toward understanding, personally I do not believe another word will be found to replace the word “conquest.”
Just as no other word has been found to replace “death,” which, though much longer than any conquest, continues to be called, as before, “death.” I drew your attention to the five-hundred-year duration of the Ottoman conquest not to dramatize something that already has drama in excess, but simply to return again to the problem I mentioned earlier: that of radical solutions to the problem of literature.
I mean another radical solution, twice, perhaps ten times more horrific: the prohibition of writing itself. Let me say it outright: among all the languages of the great Balkan Peninsula, the Albanian language—the one I use—is the only one whose writing was forbidden for five hundred years. I do not know of any other language in the European continent whose fate was such a terror. Why? How was it judged later, why did it not change with the passing of centuries, why did it continue until the very end, even as the old empire was breathing its last? These questions are hard for me to answer. Albanians were allowed many things: they were allowed churches, properties, high ranks in the army and administration, even the post of imperial prime minister, which they held several times, but they were never allowed one thing: the writing of the Albanian language. This was a true, dramatic, and irreversible prohibition.
In the world chronicles of education, I do not believe cases can be found where teachers and children, caught secretly learning to write their language, were massacred on the spot without mercy or remorse. What can happen to a language that suffers such a horror? What happens within it, in its depths, where the mechanisms stir? How do the living tools coexist with those that one by one die? How does the language itself remain standing, does it soften or become harsher? What qualities does it gain, or lose? Angelic qualities or more demonic? To this day I have not encountered studies that deal with such questions. I can only repeat that I am one of the writers who has used this language.
And now allow me to speak a little more about it. More precisely, to recall some notes I made years ago, in a period not easy—not only for my own life, but for the whole people to whom I belong.
“Unte paghesont premenit Atit et birit et spertit senit.”
This is the first sentence ever written in the Albanian language.
I know no other language that begins the history of its writing with the baptismal formula. It seems as if invented by poets, though it is not an invention at all. The fact is exact, and the document where this sentence was found—a circular written in Latin by the Bishop of Durrës, Pal Engjëlli—bears its date: November 8, 1462. Nearly five hundred years later, on this same date, November 8, 1941, the Albanian communists would found their party, which seems like another coincidence, but this time in the opposite direction. The Communist Party would fight mortally against religion to uproot it from the Albanian universe. But it would circle endlessly around Albania, with the opposite hope: to return there again.
In 1555, a Catholic monk, Gjon Buzuku, published the first book in Albanian, a translation of prayers, thus doing for Albanians what, thirty years earlier, the famous Martin Luther had done for the Germans.
In 1592, Lekë Matranga published the Spiritual Song, the first cultivated poem of Albanian literatur
The beauty of the eleven-syllable verses testifies to an earlier tradition of poetry, not to mention the much older oral tradition. But during the great exodus of Albanians, that sorrowful flight—which must have been the deepest wound of this nation during two millennia—many books and manuscripts must have been lost. Black despair, haste, nervous shock, forgotten chests, mud, roadside ditches, sea water—all these swallowed their share of the archives of princes and barons, of church bells loaded onto ships, of icons and women’s jewelry.
Many bells fell and drowned in the sea.
They still lie there, in darkness and rust,
with their thunder locked inside forever,
that from within corrodes and consumes them.
But melted bells could be recast again in the Italian lands where the Albanians took refuge. They would sound different, of course, and explanations would be found: the air was not the same, the missing mountain nearby to return the echo, the shape of the valley, or the metal that was not identical—until someone might say the bells were the same, but it was the people who were no longer the same as before.
Thus bells and jewelry and many other things could be replaced to some extent, but lost manuscripts could never be remade.
Something happened to Albania that had rarely happened to any country. When the nation’s elite—its lords, officers, men of letters and archives, diplomats, counts, dukes, monastery scribes—unable to imagine life under the sign of Islam, crossed the sea, it seemed that with their heavy chests they carried away the very brain of the nation.
And in a sense, it was so. The whole Albanian plateau fell into stupor and mourning. It seemed the country, as if struck on the head, would remain crippled forever.
But at that very moment, the impulse of self-preservation reactivated an ancient mechanism: oral literature. High in the mountains, where a glimmer of light still lingered, the old machine trembled again. It had always been there, but somewhat neglected, especially since Albanians had learned to write, and even to publish books in Latin like other learned Europeans. (One of them, the Shkodran priest Marin Barleti, had already been translated into all the languages of Europe.)
So the machine had always been there, but now, in the days of apocalypse, it showed how much the country needed it. Yet like any machine of this kind, it had its peculiar technology: it could work only with ancient dough. These were mysterious laws inherited from Homeric times. The eyes of the rhapsodes, though covered for six or seven centuries ahead, saw brilliantly further: seven hundred and fifty, eight hundred, a thousand years.
Thus, while Albania was living a new tragedy, they, blind to it, returned to an earlier tragedy: the Slavic invasions. Down on the plain, now and then a rare bell was heard, a fire flickered here and there in half-deserted parishes.
Between 1566 and 1622, another Catholic priest, Pjetër Budi, wrote verses:
Where are those women and maidens
in elegance and majesty,
with garments of silk,
raised above lords?
Death has struck them all down
as if cut with the sword…
These curiously recalled the verses of François Villon:
Where are the snows of yesteryear,
Where are the ladies of old?
showing that poetic cyclones swept the globe even when everything seemed cut off and poets’ communication impossible.
After Pjetër Budi came Pjetër Bogdani, one of the broadest and brightest minds of the Albanian world. He was poet, philosopher, and great scholar. In all his work one feels the struggle, the fatigue of a titan. Albania had now endured almost two hundred years of Ottoman night. Thus it was still near midnight (the stroke of midnight had yet to fall fifty years later, since the night was to last five hundred years). Even though no one knew exactly what hour of night it was, the poet felt it. He felt that under the Asiatic weight, the Albanian world was cracking every day and suffering collapse.
Religion was among the first ramparts to tremble. For an inexplicable reason, two of the oldest and most stubborn peoples of the region—the Albanians in the north and the Cretans in the south—were the first to turn to Islam. Were they too old, too tired of Christianity? Just as they had once, tired of paganism, embraced Christianity? No one can fully explain this enigma.
Pjetër Bogdani, being a Catholic bishop, surely felt this fracture. Along with it he felt many other pains: the whole Albanian universe sliding downward. He sensed that the colors of clothing were fading, music dragging like a paralytic, even Albanians’ movements becoming sluggish, while Oriental influences seeped drop by drop into their brains: javashllëk (slowness) and kismet (fate).
He felt that even the Albanian language, however noble and tiger-like compared to Turkish, was being dulled by the heavy blow of the other’s tail. He felt all this, and so decided to undertake something titanic: to shoulder the world that was collapsing. This explains the galactic scale of his work, its universality, planetary visions, and above all its cosmogonic motifs.
These last especially fascinated Lasgush Poradeci. Recalling his first encounter with Bogdani’s work, he wrote: “I copied a cosmogonic poem, which by its original conception, powerful idea, and unique form, I believe must be considered a literary monument—not only of the Albanian language, but of the republic of letters in general. The cosmogony of the Great Albanian stands, by its own qualities, alongside the Assyrian (Babylonian) cosmogony, as we see in the Hebrew Bible, and the Indian cosmogony, as the Holy Vedas reveal.”
Titanism, like catastrophe, would appear now and then in Albanian literature, just as in cosmic cycles. They would appear during the National Awakening with Naim Frashëri. They would reappear at the end of the 20th century during the drama of Kosovo, which still reeks of ashes.
Pjetër Bogdani was from Kosovo, but this is not the main reason his work was best studied there. The deeper reason is that precisely there the old tragedy was repeated. Just as in Albanian oral epic the Ottoman nightmare revived the Slavic invasion, so in Kosovar letters the Slavic-Serb nightmare revived the Ottoman invasion.
Flashes of ideas harmoniously nailed Albanian letters, which—born with the holy formula of baptism—closed their cycles of resurrection with another holy formula: Albania rose from the dead.
In closing these remarks I would like to return again to their beginning: the prohibition of Albanian writing. What would potential Albanian writers do with such a language? The choices were not many. And besides, all were sad.
The first thing that comes to mind in such cases is renunciation of one of humanity’s oldest passions: literary creation. And most potential Albanian writers did exactly this: they abandoned the art of writing. We do not know and cannot know their number. We know with certainty only one thing: that the loss of Albanian culture was irreparable.
Another choice, more illusory than real, was a return to the old rhapsodic tradition of oral literature. Yet it must be said that, despite the glorification often accorded to this tradition, it always remains incomplete compared with written literature.
A third, essentially mournful choice was the use of other languages for expression, primarily Latin, and later other European languages.
Some Albanian writers thus took shelter in other tongues, giving the word emigration a doubly dramatic resonance. An entire literature was created by those known as the Catholic writers of the North—a powerful literature in which, beneath the Latin garment, the Albanian drama could be felt.
Conformity with a certain Turco-Ottoman literary contrivance—a kind of permitted, even encouraged literature by the occupier—was not only an illusory solution, but could have had fatal consequences had it taken root in Albanian culture. Its first peculiarity was writing Albanian in Arabic script. Worse still was the linguistic dough from which this pseudo-literature was kneaded: Albanian held only a minor place. In it one could clearly see the language suffocating under the grip of another—one that was not only the tongue of the conqueror, but not even of the Indo-European family.
In such conditions and dilemmas, Albanian writers wandered too long, like tigers in a cage.
A final solution, one born of despair, would perhaps take inspiration from an old model, precisely from the first written Albanian phrase—the baptismal formula mentioned earlier. That formula, composed in 1462 by the Albanian bishop of Durrës, was found within a Latin text.
Albanian writers had only this model left: to shelter modest Albanian fragments within Latin texts, which Ottoman law could not touch. In other words, to hope that a few patterns of their endangered language might find refuge within the cold body of a language that no longer breathed.
Allow me to close my speech with this image, which is as moving in its symbolism as it is tragic: the symbolism of salvation sought by my people’s language in another language that, though no longer alive, remains indispensable to the imagination of European civilization.
Thank you.
(Speech — Lectio magistralis — delivered by Ismail Kadare on the occasion of receiving the title of Doctor honoris causa in Social Communication Sciences from the University of Palermo, June 11, 2007.)