The history of the Albanians in Kosovo and elsewhere in the Balkans goes back more than two millennia. Poet, linguist and translator Rami Saari looks at the rich language and literature of the Albanian people and considers their current plight
The Albanian people, who have figured prominently in the headlines in recent weeks because of the policy of ethnic cleansing being pursued by the tyrannical regime in Yugoslavia, is one of the most ancient nations in the Balkans, with a literature that has scaled creative heights in the 20th century.
The earliest inhabitants of the western Balkans were the Illyrians, the ancestors of the Albanians, and Greek and Roman literature relate to their presence in several written eyewitness accounts. Their earliest tribal states were established in the 4th century BCE, and until they were subjugated by Rome, their land spread over most of what is now Yugoslavia, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia. The invasion of this part of the Balkans by the Slavic tribes in the 6th century CE gradually pushed the Albanians from the northwestern part of the peninsula to their present terrain: Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro and northwestern Macedonia. Speakers of Albanian also live in Greece and Sicily; they arrived during the period when the Ottoman Empire ruled the Balkans.
The Albanian language constitutes an independent branch of the family of Indo-European languages. Some linguists believe it is a new stage in the development of ancient Illyrian, while others hold that it is a remnant of the Thracian language. Throughout its long history, the Albanian language has borrowed many words from other languages (Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Turkish, Greek, Italian and French), but it has preserved a great many of its Indo-European features. Albanian is divided into two main dialects, the southern Tosk and the northern Gheg, but they are mutually comprehensible and as standard Albanian is something of a hybrid of the two, the literary use of this form of the language now prevails.
The earliest documented text in Albanian is from 1462: a version of the baptismal prayer. Most of the subsequent early texts, from the 16th and 17th centuries, are also translations of Christian texts. Only in the 19th century did Albanian become a literary language, in part by virtue of the contributions of the linguist Christophoridi, who translated the Old Testament and the New Testament into Albanian, and of the national poets Gjergj Fishta and Naim Frash-ri. In the 20th century, the rich, varied and original folk poetry of the Albanian people began to be collected. Parallel to this, a variegated and interesting literature, both poetry and fiction, began to develop.
Among the most important writers of the first half of this century, mention must be made of Fan Noli (author, politician, bishop and politician), Faik Konica (1846-1942; diplomat and father of Albanian journalism), Mitrush Kuteli (1907-1966; author), Nikolla Migjeni (1011-1938; poet) and Lasgush Poradeci (1899-1987); poet and translator, the father of modernism in Albanian poetry). Among the contemporary poets who are outstanding for the uniqueness and the richness of their work are Ali Padrimja, Visar Zhiti, Kasim Trebeshina, Xhevahir Spahiu and Luljeta Lleshanaku. The outstanding contemporary Albanian authors are Ismail Kadare, Drit-ro Agolli, Nasi Lera, Diana Çuli, Mira Meksi and Naum Pristi.
Books by Ismail Kadare (b. 1935) have been translated into 40 languages and in recent years he has been one of the regular nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In one of his books, which has been translated into English as “The General of the Dead Army,” Kadare has a foreign priest who has been sent on a mission to Albania say of his countrymen: “The Albanians are a ferocious and primitive people. As soon as they are born, a rifle is laid by their heads, so that this weapon will become an inalienable part of their existence… This nation is imbued with an impulse for extinction that never leaves it, toward the outside and toward itself, and its end is to become extinct.” In many of his other stories, Kadare also addresses the image of his people and the uniqueness of his country’s past, the long periods of war in its convoluted history and the blood vendetta, which was prohibited in Albania only in the 20th century.
In preparing this article, I reread the books on my Albanian shelf. The titles of many of these books hint at the vicissitudes of fate and the human suffering in Albania and Kosovo: “Choked Scream” (N. Lera, 1996), “Broken People” (D. Agolli, 1995), “Smile in the Cage” (A. Podrimja, 1993) and “The Memory of Air” (V. Zhiti, 1993). The journal of the Albanian Writers’ Union is called Drita – “The Light” – and it is no accident that another literary journal, which first came out in Tirana two years ago, was given the German title Mehr Licht! (“More Light!,” Goethe’s last words).
Despite the systematic attempts to repress Albanian culture in Kosovo up until the outbreak of the current war, or perhaps because of these attempts, a wry, hard-hitting and even brutal poetry has sprung up there that has been widely translated and is held in high esteem in Western Europe. This is exemplified by the poem by Beqë Cufaj (b. 1970), “Portraits of Poets:” Bukovsky is an alcoholic/ Ginsberg bisexual/ Verlaine sleeps with Rimbaud/ Mallarmé lives in a brothel/ Apollinaire writes pornographic novels/ Hölderlein is insane as is/ Baudelaire/ Morrison will never die/ the abandoned Lasgush [Poradeci] meanders with the stars/ Life is wonderful/ if you know nothing about it. (Translated by Robert Elsie.)
The historical background to the strife between the Serbs and the Albanians began in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo (the place name means “the field of black birds”) between the Turkish army, led by Sultan Murad I, and an army made up of Albanian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Hungarian, Serb, Polish and Romanian soldiers under the leadership of Serbian Prince Lazar. The burning memory of this battle, in which the Christian army was roundly defeated, is at the basis of Serbian nationalism. The Albanians fought the Turkish invader even after the defeat at Kosovo. During the time of their national hero, Gjergj Kastriota, known as Skanderbeg, they were even able to repulse the Turkish attacks (1444-1466) for a while and win temporary independence. Another battle at Kosovo in 1448, in which the Christian army was also defeated, ensured that the Ottoman Empire would rule the Balkans for 400 years more.
In the Middle Ages, most Albanians, whose ancestors were pagans, converted to Christianity. Under Ottoman rule, many converted to Islam, and today, 70 percent of them are Muslims, 20 percent Orthodox Christians, and 10 percent are Catholics. (Mother Teresa of Calcutta, for example, was an Albanian Catholic nun born in Skopje, Macedonia.) In the tribal Albanian society, religion did not play a central role. Due to constraints stemming from the policy of land registration followed by the local rulers, Christian families habitually raised one of their sons as a Muslim and Muslim families raised one of their children as a Christian. In this way, the ownership of the land remained in the family even when the ruler changed.
More than 40 years of fervent communism in the 20th century allowed for many cases of mixed marriage between people who had been born into the three religions, and further weakened the status of religion among speakers of Albanian. The main reason for the war in the Balkans today is not religion, but rather the blind nationalism and brutal politics that impel it. It is foolish and wicked to see Albania or Kosovo as a potential breeding ground for Islamic terror.
The national awakening of the Albanians began only 30 years after the “Spring of the Nations.” When the Congress of Berlin decided to annex territories inhabited by Albanians to Serbia, Montenegro and Greece, the “League for the Defense of the Rights of the Albanian People” was founded in Prizren in Kosovo. In the summer of 1913, the Great Powers decided upon the establishment of an Albanian state, but Kosovo, where the majority of the inhabitants were Albanians, remained in Serbia: half the Albanian population remained outside the borders of Albania, hundreds of thousands of Albanians immigrated in order to escape the Serbian regime, and by 1940 18,000 Serb families were settled in their place. In the mid-1950s, about 200,000 more Albanians were forced to emigrate from Kosovo to Turkey, but in 1968 Kosovo won the status of an “autonomous province” within the Yugoslavian federation. Nonetheless, Yugoslavia continued to exploit and oppress Kosovo; demonstrations in 1981, aimed at achieving the status of a republic in the federation, took 300 lives and led to the arrest of 7,000 Albanians. On July 5, 1990 the Serbian parliament under Slobodan Milošević annulled the autonomy of Kosovo; the Albanians were forbidden to use their language and a policy of apartheid was initiated in the province. It has been clear since then that war would break out eventually. In 1991, Yugoslavia embarked on a war in Slovenia, then in Croatia and later in Bosnia.
Milošević’s nationalist tyranny has again brought a bloodbath to the Balkans. “Kosovo is here,” wrote Gideon Levy in Ha’aretz recently. He was not wrong, but he was not exactly right either. Kosovo is, in the words of the song by Yehuda Gur-Aryeh: Right, left and onwards/ and here, there and far and wide/ in your hand and above the cloud/ and outwards and also inside. Kosovo is a reflection of the face of the world and this is what we look like at the end of the 20th century.
To those who are blatantly lying to the Israeli public and calling the victims terrorists, and to those who are sitting on the fence, and to those who are waiting for the right moment to build fences for the people of another nation – or the people of their own nation – since the lives of others have no value for them, to all these I dedicate the following words by the Albanian poet Visar Zhiti: “To you who have become ugly faces, I wish beautiful masks.”
Rami Saari’s article about Albanian literature, translated by Vivian Eden and published in the English version of Ha-Aretz (1999)
GREEK POETRY translated by Saari to Hebrew
GREEK PROSE translated by Saari to Hebrew
Rami Saari’s page