Tess LewisĚýis a writer and translator from French and German. SheĚýis co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee andĚýserves as an Advisory Editor for theĚýHudson Review.ĚýHer translations have won a number of awards including the 2015ĚýACFNYĚýTranslation Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Ěýby Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated from Albania by Ani Gjika (Albania, New Directions)

“Negative Space is always fertile,” we read in the title poem of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s latest collection in Ani Gjika’s crystalline translation. Indeed, this collection is fertile ground for thoughts physical and metaphysical. The wry, matter-of-fact tone that dominates these poems highlights all the more dramatically their subtle glimmers of import and nuance as well as flashes of insight. Lleshanaku’s poems are filled with striking and unexpected metaphors and similes that open new perspectives onto ordinary objects and reveal layers of meaning that have accrued to them. The poems in Negative Space offer a metaphysics of the ordinary, an epistemology of observation.

Trains approach small town stations “like ghosts, / the way a husband returning after midnight / slips under the covers, / keeping his cold feet at a distance.” Poetry books, “thin, sly, bought at discount prices” break apart “like crumbled bread thrown at swans in the park.” Fear retreats “like periodontal disease revealing the roots beneath gums.” Diphthongs on a blackboard rub “against one another like kittens.” And, most exquisitely, the hácek on the end of the poet Charles Simic’s name was washed away by the rain in transit when he left Serbia for the United States as a teenager.

His last name is pronounced differently

in his new language than in his mother tongue:

the final consonants hardened along the way

like cardboard boxes drenched on the deck of a ship

only to dry again under another sun.

Lleshanaku was born in 1968 in Albania under the ruthless dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, so rigid a Marxist-Leninist that he severed ties with the Soviet Union in 1961 after Kruschev’s “Secret Speech” and then cut off diplomatic relations with China, Albania’s last ally, in 1972 after Nixon’s visit. Politics—suffocating, corrosive—was all-pervasive in her childhood and early adulthood.

I grew up in a big house

where weakness and expressions of joy

deserved punishment.

And I was raised on the via politica

with the grease of yesterday’s glories,

a thick grease collected under arctic skies.

Some who survived those harsh decades, left “damaged like lottery numbers scratched away with a blade,” bore witness to their experiences and through their narratives created “their own grease.” Others emigrated and buried their “wretched survival . . . in the darkest crevices of their being.” But neither silence nor distance provides an escape from “annoying history,” the scent of which lingers indefinitely like perfume.

Absence and silence are not necessarily empty, but can, indeed, be made fertile. ĚýThe negative space left by relatives sent to prison, by words no longer to be said because of censorship, emotional or material constraints, by want was something Lleshanaku learned to read, to mine for significance. Yet the meaning and lessons she finds there are descriptive, not prescriptive. She could draw conclusions, but for whom? In “Children of Morality,” the poet announces that after receiving her first lessons in morality as a young child “without chewing them like cough syrup” she has learned so much more about it.

 

In fact, I actually could be a moralist,

pointing my index finger out as a rhetorical gesture.

But without referring to anyone. Where did everyone go?

This is urgent, resonant poetry, a bracing tonic in any age.

Click here for all past and future posts in this series.

Today’s post is by poetry committee member Brandon Holmquest.

Child of Nature by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi

Language: Albanian
Country: Albania
Publisher: New Directions
Pages: 108

Why This Book Should Win:

It begins
when she searches in the darkness
for her likeness, a line of verse awaiting its end rhyme

and it goes on from there, and in just about every poem there’s something that grabs your attention. As in the quote above, where the rhythm of the use of the letter S is so nice in the first two lines, establishing a beat which then opens up to let the long I come in, “likeness” “line” then the same S in “verse” and the long I again in “rhyme.”

This is English-language poetry, of course. I have no Albanian whatsoever and the book is not bilingual, something which I generally regard as a minor crime, though this book may have persuaded me to be a little less hard-line about it. As I was attempting to explain to a bookseller friend of mine not that long ago: I want the original even in languages I don’t know because I want to see what I can see. Are the original much longer or shorter than the translations? Are they shaped differently? Do they rhyme and if so, do the translations? And so on. I’m suspicious, in short.

And often, there’s reason to be. But, sometimes, maybe it doesn’t matter at all, because the English is so good I cease to care if it’s even a translation. I just want more of it, whatever it is, however it came to be made.

Case in point, the poem “Monday in Seven Days,” a longish serial poem of ten parts, which I’m only going to quote once because otherwise the whole thing is going to wind up in what is supposed to be a brief review:

Preparing for winter
isn’t tradition, but instinct. We hurl our spare anxieties
like precious cargo from a shipwreck.

Read that again. If you don’t see on your own how good it is, how truly excellent the choice of the word “hurl” is and how excellently true the observation contained in the lines is, maybe you don’t like poetry as much as you thought. Or maybe you need to read a lot more of it.

Well, there’s a lot more of it in this book. Both the above quotes are pulled from the first quarter of a 100+ page book. At about the halfway point we find:

They are dying one after the other;
shoveling earth on them has become as common
as sprinkling salt on food.

I don’t know what anyone could say to work like this except, “Hell yes.” I could go on dropping quotes all day, but I can see no real percentage in aggressively preaching to a mixed congregation of the choir and the uncovertable.

Lleshanaku’s work is in a vein with some other writers from Eastern Europe I’ve run across in the last few years. She reminds me of Mariana Marin with a less severe case of depression, but really most of the good work I’ve seen from Romania or Poland and elsewhere in the region is in the ball park. Lots of images, vernacular language, a tendency to roll around in the lower reaches of the culture, and a level of comfort on the part of the poet with the saying of things, the making of explicit statements about the nature of something, be it the self, the world, or some interaction between the two.

Point being, there’s something going on over there that we’re only just now getting a chance to see in this country, thanks to books like this and translators like Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi. There are literary cultures less dominated by the inane war between boring middlebrow crap and equally boring academic crap. Child of Nature is a book that comes from such a place. Read it.