It is a warm, spring Wednesday in Tirana as I cross the tree-lined café district with my translator, Altin Fortuzi, through the once infamous Blloku (The Block) neighborhood, on our way to meet with a group of Albanian writers and poets. During the reign of the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, who served as the head of state of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, only the party elites were permitted to enter Blloku, but now it’s home to shady cafés, mobile phone outlets, upscale clothing stores, and brightly-painted bars; even Hoxha’s former villa has been turned into a restaurant. We pass the now-defunct museum to the deceased dictator, a concrete shrine—its architect appears to have hoped it would resemble a rising sun but it looks more like a squashed grouper—now mercifully stripped of its former marble façade and repurposed as a state television studio.

Tirana is surrounded by green mountains topped with swatches of snow even in mid April; to the north are the Albanian Alps, also called the Accursed Mountains. South and west, the mountains continue to the Adriatic and the Mediterranean eventually plunging to white sand beaches.

Albania borders Greece to the south, Macedonia to the east, and Montenegro and Kosovo to the north. Its ancient Illyrian people are referred to in classical Greek and Roman texts. Today, the conical felt cap—the pileus—worn by Odysseus in Homer’s epic can still be found on the heads of Albanian farmers.

In the 15th century, Albania was the European sore thumb of the Ottoman empire, constantly getting whacked by incursions and excursions. The Muslim Ottomans famously Shanghaied young Christian Albanians, pressing them to fight in their mercenary armies where, devoid of roots, they occasionally grew to overwhelm their masters. One Albanian conscript in the Ottoman ranks cut off a piece of the empire in the 15th century and kept it for himself. Popularly called Skanderbeg, he carved out a buffer zone between the Ottoman Empire and the Italian city states, selling his services back and forth while maintaining territorial hegemony over a proto-Albania for a few years in the middle of the early Renaissance. Today, a bronze statue of the hero, on horseback with raised sword and horned helmet, overlooks Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square, the marble-tiled communist-era parade grounds.

skanderbeg_square_pw.jpg

Skanderbeg Square

Our first meeting is with poet and novelist Arlinda Guma at a restaurant, bookshop, and small publishing house called E7E. Located in the downtown, the café and independent bookstore was founded by a loose and temporary coalition of poets and writers who, in the waning days of the communist dictatorship, transformed the home of the poet, essayist, painter, and rock lyricist Ervin Hatibi into a meeting space for writers, artists, and creative types. The name comes from a bit of Albanian wordplay: E7E stands for E përshtatshme, which means “suitable,” but this can be shortened using texting slang and written as E për7shme. The founders of the café shortened it further to E7E, which also refers to their early goal of publishing a literary arts newsletter every seventh day of the month (i.e. the 7th, 17th, and 27th). We sit at a small table in the open courtyard among other customers.

“I don’t read bestsellers and I’m a little bit ashamed of the name writer,” says Guma. “In Albania, a driver of a politician is more respected than a person of culture.”

arlinda_guma_pw.jpg [1]

Arlinda Guma

Guma has written and published two novels and a collection of poetry while working as an office assistant and assistant accountant for various organizations, including an arm of the European Union and an Italian firm. She is annoyed that it isn’t easier for a writer of literary fiction to make a sustainable income.

Writers typically bear the costs of printing their own books in Albania, she says, while the publishing house handles distribution to bookstores. “When I have to meet a publisher I feel like a child who is afraid of going to the dentist,” she says. “For them it doesn’t matter if you are talented or not, for them what matters is how much you will pay, because in Albania the writer has to pay the publisher [to print] the book.” When a book sells, the writer gets a portion of the cover price, usually 55 percent.

Guma’s annoyance over the fate of artists and writers in Albania’s capitalist economy may reflect the fact that she can remember a time when writers were selected then supported by the communist state. The end of communism has brought greater freedom—anybody can choose to be a writer—but greater freedom, in this instance, also means more uncertainty. There is no guarantee that a writer will earn any money from their work.

Guma’s first novel, Bulevardi i yjeve (Stars Boulevard), which she self-published in 2014, follows characters in a mental hospital, and her second, Terma humanitare si fjala bombardim (Humanitarian Terms Like the Word Bombardment), released two years later, in 2016, is based on a true story about a tragi-comic bombardment of a UN Humanitarian mission during the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Stars Boulevard was praised by some French academics, and Guma, hoping that she might find a French publisher, applied for a translation grant from the Albanian Ministry of Culture, an arm of the Albanian government, but was rejected. Undaunted, she is in the midst of her third novel, a humorous account of the life of a young writer.

She also writes columns for an online Albanian woman’s magazine and, until three years ago, wrote for a local print newspaper, but this relationship was terminated after she wrote an unflattering piece about Albania’s current prime minister, Edi Rama. “During communism, the government only promoted writers who promoted their demagogy,” she says. “During democracy, it’s the same system.” She explains that the current ministry of culture tends to favors writers it views as political allies.

She recalls that one of her childhood influences was Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac, the Post-Napoleonic French realist who influenced Friedrich Engels and others. Most American and Western European writers were banned during the communist era of her childhood, but since the fall of the communists in 1992, literature from around the world is available. “I’m enchanted by Salinger’s style, and I’m heavily influenced by French and German authors,” she says. She mentions Stefan Zweig, the mid-20th century Austrian writer who killed himself during the Nazi occupation, and she’s effusive about John Fante, the American writer who influenced and was championed by Charles Bukowski. (There is a bar named for Bukowski across the street from E7E). She says she also admires the Albanian poet and story writer Millosh Gjergj Nikolla (penname Migjeni) and the poet Frederik Rreshpja, and she appreciates Ismail Kadare, the most famous of all Albanian writers.

bukowski_bar_pw.jpg [2]

You, Me & Bukowski, a bar and restaurant in Tirana.

Under the communist regime, published writers and poets served as the mouthpiece for the state, and few were brave enough to experiment with the party line. One exception was Kadare, author of thirty-seven novels, seven story collections and a play. Like Mo Yan, the government-supported, Nobel-Prize-winning Chinese author, Kadare has a talent for writing philosophically complex novels while also adhering to the party line of his communist rulers. Kadare won the Man Booker International Prize the first year it was offered in 2005, and more than twenty of his works have been translated into English.

“During communism, only the writer of the ruling ideology was respected; the other was shot or sent to prison,” Guma says. “Kadare was the only exception.”

In the center of Tirana, beside Skanderbeg Square, behind the Ottoman-era mosque and adjacent clocktower (built in the 1800s by the architect-poet Etëhem Bey Mollaj), between a row of government ministries and the semi-Deco national theater, there is a concrete dome atop a bunker. A doorway cut into the side leads down a set of stairs fifteen meters or so into an underground tunnel complex, built by Hoxha, the former dictator; the complex has been transformed into a museum detailing the oppressive years of the communist regime.

old_hoxha_museum_pw.jpg [3]

The pyramid of Tirana, a former museum dedicated to Enver Hoxha, now a television studio..

The exhibits range from the mildly humorous (the Albanians attempted to bug the Italian embassy by placing a listening device in the wooden handle of a broom used by a local maid) to the horrific: During World War II, captured communist partisans were tortured and executed by the Italian and German fascist occupiers. After the war, the communists responded in kind. They collectivized the countryside, redistributed the country’s wealth and persecuted the middle class, executing priests, merchants, and other potential enemies of their state.

Hoxha aligned himself with Stalin, mimicking the Soviet dictator’s show trials, public confessions, executions, and concentration camps. But following Stalin’s death in 1953, the next Soviet ruler, Khrushchev, surprised Hoxha by pressuring him to end his cult of personality and share power with a broader coalition of Albanian communist elites. When the Soviets additionally urged the dictator to resolve his differences with Yugoslavia, his northern neighbor who had incorporated the Albanian-speaking province of Kosovo into its boundaries after World War II, Hoxha broke with the Soviets.

In 1961, he succeeded in replacing financial and technical support from Moscow with support from Beijing. But having angered all his neighbors as well as his most powerful regional ally, he grew increasingly fearful of the possibility of outside attack; hence, the bunkers dotting every mile of the Albanian capital, the countryside, the beaches, the mountain tops, everywhere. Hoping to ensure national unity, he turned all churches and mosques, including the Etëhem Bey Mosque on the national square, into community centers (Albanian was and is about 60 percent Muslim and 40 percent Christian).

bunker_pw.jpg [4]

One of many bunkers alongside a road in Tirana.

The bunker museum details all of this in videos, photos, and recordings of concentration camps, executions, forced confessions, and show trials. Dispirited, I return to street level to meet with Rudi Erebara, a poet, novelist, and translator in his late forties, who remembers the communist era well.

The sun has gone down on the beautiful April day and the sidewalks have grown cool when we join Erebara at a table outside a nameless café: The locals call it Lulu’s, after the owner, or Blue Umbrella, after an umbrella that once shaded one of its sidewalk tables.

“After the war, they pulled my uncle’s fingernails out to make him tell them where he hid the gold,” Erebara says, repeating the stories he heard as a child. “When he came home, he couldn’t walk for eight months. He never recovered; he died a year or two later.”

It is evening, and Erebara is dressed in a cap, blue-framed glasses, and a windbreaker. He is celebrating a number of recent victories: He has just been awarded a European Union Prize for Literature for his novel Epika e yjeve të mëngjesit (The Epic of the Morning Stars), which he self-published in 2016, and he also recently reclaimed, then sold, the home taken from his family during the communist era. Jubilant, he chain-smokes cigarettes and downs cognacs. When we join him, he lets us order beers then lifts the floodgates on an occasionally chilling river of information. Erebara’s family and personal histories are as rich and intricate as those of his country.

rudi_and_altin_pw.jpg [5]

Poet, writer, and translator Rudi Erebara (left) and Altin Fortuzi.

His paternal grandfather was a prosperous middle class shopkeeper in Tirana who bought and sold gold from his retail shop. After the communists took over, they arrested Erebara’s paternal uncle to find out where he had hidden his stock. “He told them after four months of torture,” Erebara says.

Luckily, his father, just fourteen at the time, had enlisted and fought with the anti-fascist partisans during the war. As a result, he was permitted to attend university in Prague at the Academy of Performing Arts from 1947 to 1951.

“Miloš Forman was in his class,” Erebara says, citing the Czech director who fled to the United States when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, ending that Eastern Bloc country’s brief experiment with liberalism. Forman eventually became famous for directing the Oscar-winning films One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. Erebara’s father became well known in Albanian, but his path was erratic.

“My father used to say how easy it was to go to jail,” Erebara says, pointing out that this is a central theme in his award-winning novel. In his final year at university in 1951, Erabara’s dad was arrested while directing a show in Prague. Three portraits of communist leaders were hung at the back of the stage in the theater: Stalin in the center with the Czech leader Klement Gottwald on his right and the Albanian leader Hoxha on his left. Hoxha was about four inches lower than Gottwald, and when somebody noticed, his father made an off-hand comment about how a Czech middle-class citizen had more class than Hoxha. The next day, he was arrested and sent back to Albania. As punishment for his remark, he served in the Albanian army without pay for several years, and his family was removed from their comfortable home in central Tirana.

In 1957 Erebara’s father was permitted to work in the state-owned film studios, writing and directing eleven movies and twenty-five documentaries. “Everybody loves him,” Erebara says. “When he died [in 2007], five thousand people came to his funeral.”

During the communist era, such a show of appreciation for an individual would have been impossible. Under Hoxha’s regime, poetry, art and films were credited to communist arts collectives; individual attribution was forbidden. “It was just a big industrial ideological machine,” Erebara says.

Born in 1971, during a period when the Chinese were increasing their subsidies for Albanian infrastructure while using the country as a front to import technology from the West, Erebara remembers a feeling of prosperity in the capital, but without any lessening of the atmosphere of oppression and fear. He recalls watching the communist government build new neighborhoods in the city using political prisoners as laborers. “There was a concentration camp two hundred meters from my house,” he says.

His father’s films were well received, even praised by Hoxha, but still his family lived in constant fear. “My mother had a green valise prepared with clean clothes in it because we were always scared they were going to arrest us and kick us the fuck out of Tirana,” he says.

The writer’s first novel, self-published in 2010, is a fictionalized account of an acquaintance who spent years searching for the remains of his father, killed in jail during the Hoxha years. The acquaintance owns a construction company and, after a mudslide exposed bones on the outskirts of Tirana, he used one of his excavators to uncover the remains of eighty-one bodies. “All shot in the head,” Erebara says.

One of the writer’s maternal uncles disappeared on August 25, 1979, when he was just twenty-five. Erebara believes he attempted to escape the country and defect to the West, but he has never been able to find any record of him resurfacing outside of Albania. “I looked in the U.S. with the International Red Cross, even with the Mormons,” he says. “I don’t think he’s alive.”

In 2010 he self-published a novel inspired by these events, Vezët e thëllëzave (Eggs of the Quails). It sold poorly, but the public’s desire to revisit the crimes of the Hoxha years has increased since then. In 2013, he republished it and quickly sold out his thousand-copy print run.

As a child, Erebara dreamed of being a filmmaker, a writer, and an artist. He auditioned to be a painter and was accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts, now the University of Arts in Tirana, eventually graduating with a degree in textiles and carpets while continuing to paint, write poetry, work on novels, and translate works from English to Albanian. After the fall of the communists he was part of the group of artists and intellectuals who banded together and created the E7E bookstore, café, and publishing house. He rattles off a list of more than a dozen Albanian artists who were involved. In addition to publishing a newsletter and a poetry journal, they began to translate and publish books that had been prohibited under communism, such as Neitzche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Erebara had poems accepted in literary magazines even before the fall of communism, and he followed these with a collection, Fillon pamja (There Begins the View), in 1994. He also continued to be recognized for his paintings, and in 1997, he accepted an invitation with some other Albanian artists to have a gallery show at High Point University in North Carolina. The George Soros Foundation, which has been a steady contributor to the arts in Albania since the early 1990s, paid for their airfare. Erebara arrived in North Carolina and participated in the show, but then disaster struck.

In Albania, after the dissolution of the communist system, there had been a five-year scramble for wealth and resources as the state-owned economy was privatized. Individuals, some with ties to the former communist government and some with ties to the new, democratically-elected government, incorporated themselves and solicited investments claiming they would be used to purchase properties and other resources. Some were legitimate while others were fronts for criminal money laundering and pyramid schemes. In the rush to get in on a good thing, families sold off assets and invested their life savings. With an estimated billion dollars sunk into dozens of these firms, the economy soon hinged on their success. In 1997, the first of the schemes collapsed and the rest soon fell, creating a panic that led to chaos and anarchy.

Erebara’s brother called him and warned him not to come home. Across Albania, enraged citizens were turning on one another, rioting, looting, hijacking cars, kidnapping strangers. It wasn’t safe to travel. Commerce ground to a halt. Criminal gangs took over whole cities, and people fled urban areas for their ancestral villages hoping to find refuge. The European powers and the United States sent in troops to extract their embassy employees and other citizens.

Internationally, the crisis was overshadowed by concern for the neighboring wars in the former Yugoslavia: The civil war of 1997 to 1998 and ethnic cleansing campaigns in Albanian-speaking Kosovo initiated a refugee crisis as Kosovars flooded into Albanian, further destabilizing the country.

In April 1997 the United Nations sent in an Italian-led force of seven thousand soldiers to attempt to separate combatants and oppose the criminal gangs, but it was clear that the country would remain chaotic, poor, and desperate for the immediate future. Erebara took his brother’s advice and overstayed his visa in the USA. He became an illegal immigrant and moved to Brooklyn, New York.

Young and willing to avail himself of whatever odd job appeared, he worked as a roofer, brick-layer, concrete pourer, sheet rocker, painter, and plumber. Within five years, he was subcontracting jobs to a crew of a half-dozen workers. In his final year in the United States he says he grossed a half-million dollars and dutifully filed federal, state, and local taxes. He considered applying for a legal work visa—a green card—but the immigration consultant he approached warned him that he might wind up being deported instead. In 2002, he made the decision to return to Albania.

He had hardly been idle while away. He had worked on his second collection of poetry, Lëng argjendi (Silver Juice), and his years in the United States had improved his English translating skills.

Since returning to Tirana, Erebara has married an Albanian journalist, and they are raising two daughters, ages six and eleven. He has also published sixteen translations, including works by Herman Melville, John Grisham, Harold Pinter, A. R. Ammons, and Kenzaburo Oe. “It took me two-and-a-half years to translate Moby Dick,” he says. “In Albanian, we don’t have the parts of the Nantucket whaling ship.” The United States Embassy subsidized Erebara’s translation of Ammons, and the book won an award for translations from the Association of Albanian publishers.

But today we are celebrating his award for original fiction. As a 2017 recipient of the European Union Prize for Literature, he will receive €5,000 (approximately $5,448) and see his novel translated into eleven languages. We are also toasting the bittersweet sale of his family’s former home.

We leave the sidewalk café and walk around the corner to see a villa in the midst of a renovation. This is the house where Erebara’s father and uncles were born. After the fall of communism, families were able to successfully petition to have properties confiscated during the Hoxha era returned to them. Twenty-five years after the downfall of the dictatorship, Erebara regained the title then sold the building. His pocket bulges with a fat roll of Ablanian leks, and he insists that we take a taxi across town to Petro, a grill house still serving sausages, ribs, steaks and beers, where he continues to enthrall us with stories late into the night.

The next morning, we rent a Dacia Sandero (a French-Romanian car) and plot a course to the nearest beach on the Albanian Riviera, in the south. Infrastructure improvements are evident everywhere along our six-hour journey. A raised and gleaming four-lane highway stretches before us in the port city of Durrës but terminates at a barrier a hundred kilometers later. Behind the fencing, a crew is building an embankment to continue the highway.

Turning onto surface roads, we wind through the seaside city of Vlorë and through an uneven stretch along the waterfront where crews are repositioning traffic islands, inserting new palm trees, and repaving the road. Google Maps scrambles to keep up, rerouting us every few minutes as we negotiate the changing conditions.

In the countryside, we pass farmers in horse-drawn wagons, a seemingly abandoned nuclear power plant with seven cooling towers, and a Roman-era Illyrian archeological site, before entering a long valley after Durrës. The road soon turns upward into Llogara National Park, and we’re surrounded by fir and pine forests as we negotiate the switchbacks toward the pass. Even here, the forests are dotted with the concrete domes and blind eyes of pillboxes dug into the soil.

mule_and_powerplant_pw.jpg [6]

Snow-topped mountains, hillside meadows, and cliffs running down to the Mediterranean match descriptions from Ismail Kadare’s acclaimed first novel, Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur (The General of the Dead Army), translated from the French version of the Albanian by Derek Coltman and published in 1963. The novel follows the adventures of an Italian general and a Catholic priest sent to Albania to recover the remains of fallen Italian soldiers twenty years after World War II.

Written in the midst of the Hoxha years, the book employs the rudimentary syntax and diction mandated by communist censors who required literature to be accessible to the proletariat. At first, the storyline struggles to overcome plot devices that are obvious propaganda: An Albanian peasant tells the Italians of a lone resistance fighter who shot many Italian troops from a hillside before dying bravely, and the general, rather than noting that stories of heroic snipers who shoot hundreds of enemies singlehandedly are a mainstay of Eastern Bloc, post-WWII propaganda (e.g., Vasily Zaytsev, “Hero of the Soviet Union,” a sniper the Soviets immortalized in books and films) or marveling that seemingly every culture contains stories of lone snipers fighting off hundreds (e.g., Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper; Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan; as well as the stories of Simo Hayha in Finland and Zhang Taofang in China), is awestruck: “‘It’s astounding,’ the general said a half an hour later, as they were driving back toward Tirana, ‘that a single man could have dreamed of fighting an entire army.’”

On the other hand, the novel’s premise enables Kadare’s protagonist to reflect on mass burials and the futility of war, two topics that were avoided during the Hoxha years. As the story swells toward its climax, Kadare, writing under the hair trigger of a censor in a paranoid regime, manages to bang the tired mechanisms of totalitarian propaganda into a story that shudders to life: The characters grow increasingly sympathetic as the plot nears its surprising climax.

In 1985, as Hoxha was dying, Kadare smuggled an unpublished novel that blatantly criticized the regime out of Albania to France to be published. As the Eastern Block was breaking up and the Berlin Wall began to be pulled down in 1990, Kadare fled to France and received political asylum. His move proved prescient. Seven years later, the economic crash sent thousands along the same path.

***

Upon returning to Tirana, I meet with Gentian Çocoli at a café across the river—really more of a scenic storm drain than a river—from Blloku. Altin Fortuzi, my fixer and translator, explains that although the owners of the restaurant and bookshop translate the name as “Friend’s Book House,” “Friend of the Book’s House” would be more accurate. During the communist era, Fortuzi tells us, “friend of the book” was an award the government gave to kids who checked out many books from public libraries. “There was an ugly pin to go with the title,” he says. The café’s name both spoofs and honors the old communist prize.

friends_book_house_pw.jpg [7]

Friend’s Book House

It’s an appropriate place to meet Çocoli, who for the last twenty years has edited and published Aleph, a literary journal featuring Albanian and international authors. A typical issue has a color cover and 275 pages.

Çocoli, middle-aged with sandy hair, is wearing a corduroy jacket with a brown-and-white, checked pocket square. He is from Gjirokastër, a southern town near the Greek border that was also the birthplace of Ismail Kadare and Enver Hoxha.

As a young man, Çocoli’s love of nature and science journals made him think about studying biology, but he struggled against the rigidity of the field, as well as the rote-learning style of his teachers; instead, he fell in love with poetry and writing. When he was twenty-two he left Gjirokastër for the capital. “I saw a lot of talented people, so I moved from my hometown to meet my brothers in arms. All came from their valleys,” he says. His peripatetic life has caused him to identify with the story of Odysseus, he says. References to the Greek epic occur frequently in his poems.

In 1991, Çocoli’s parents sent him money to purchase a coat to help him survive the winter, but instead, he spent the cash on a tutor to teach him English. About the same time, a friend gave him an anthology of American poems and an issue of the New York Review of Books. Another friend introduced him to George Plimpton’s Paris Review. “Being a post-communist country is like being post-colonial, you must find your personal identity,” he says. “In post-communist countries, translation is much more important than personal writing.”

A friend introduced him to the board members of the literary arm of the Soros Foundation, a nonprofit founded by the Hungarian-American philanthropist, and they agreed to help him publish his new literary magazine. The first issue of Aleph came out in October 1996, during a time when Tirana, according to Çocoli, was “free with a big capital F.”

But like Odysseus, Çocoli’s voyage has not been easy. In 1997, he went to his family’s country home for a weekend and ended up trapped there for three months. The financial crisis had begun, and it was not safe for him to travel on the roads. Instead, he wrote a collection of poems about the house, pointing out that one of the primary goals of Albanians who leave the country to find work is to send back enough money to build a house. His poetry collection was called Circumference of Ash (2001) and it received the Best Book of the Year Award, given by the Albanian Ministry of Culture.

As the crisis eased, he returned to publishing Aleph. The Soros foundation gave him two thousand dollars a year for the project, but after a dozen years, that support ended. He tried to make the money up by piecing together funding from a network of institutions—the American Embassy, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Albanian Ministry of Culture—but he couldn’t make it work. Struggling to provide for his family, he accepted a position at the Ministry of Culture, but he only lasted a year. He resigned when his boss refused to support his proposal that money be allotted for translators of poetry.

Quitting proved fortuitous, as he applied for and was awarded a residency at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. He spent four months in Iowa City and was tempted to remain when he was offered a job at Prairie Lights, but his two-month-old daughter awaited him back in Albania.

He returned to his wife and daughter (now two daughters, ages five and eleven) and accepted a new job with the Ministry of Culture. This time he succeeded in creating a budget for grants for translators, but he quit again after his boss refused to create a fund for writers and poets.

And still, like Odysseus, he presses on. At present, he is working on two retrospective issues of Aleph, one celebrating the best poetry of the past twenty years and the other featuring the best prose. He’s excited about the project but skeptical that it will result in a large profit. “I live a very poor life,” he says, but he has no plans to change it.

***

That evening, I meet poet Erina Çoku behind the picture windows of the café and restaurant attached to the Hotel Iliria, directly across the street from the pillars and red facade of the School of Albanian Literature at the University of Tirana. Çoku is an editor for Pegi Publishing, a book publisher with headquarters nearby. She has spent the day editing a philosophy textbook with a professor, and she is eager to drink a coffee and talk about poetry.

erina_coku_pw.jpg [8]

Erina Çoku

“It doesn’t matter how busy I am, I write; I’ll write while walking, while shopping in the supermarket, on something like this,” she says indicating the receipt for our coffee. Indeed, when I “friend” her on Facebook the next day, I discover that she posts new original poems every couple of days.

“My uncle was a teacher,” she says. “He kept giving me different books to read.” She remembers that the Albanian children’s author Odhise Grillo was the first poet she read. As she got older, she loved the works of Russian Imaginist poet (and the famously colorful) Sergei Yesenin and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

In 1994, at her high school in her hometown of Burrel in northern Albania, she approached her literature and writing teacher, a writer and critic, and asked him to read a collection of poems she had written. At the same time, she mailed a letter to Toena Publishers in Tirana asking why they didn’t publish new young voices.

An editor at Toena asked to see her work then offered to publish a collection of her poems, and her teacher agreed to help her edit them. She credits him with helping her to temper her youthful impulses. “I needed to step back from teenage enthusiasm for being great and take form and rhymes more seriously. I learned to be more—” she searches for the appropriate English word, “Not selective, to not overinflate words, to clean the words and pick the best one.”

Çoku agrees that many publishers in Albania ask the writers to pay to print their own works, but Toena covered all the expenses for her first book, Krahë s'kanë ëngjëjt e mi (My Angels Have No Wings). It was published in 1996, released on schedule, but the collapse of the economy in 1997 ruined the company’s marketing plans. After high school, Çoku studied literature at the university across the street then got married and, as the country floundered, moved to Greece with her husband.

“After university, I stopped reading poetry for a time,” she says. “I wanted to have my own voice. I wanted to develop my own images, my own vocabulary.”

She worked in a shop, learned Greek, and even traveled to England. She credits these experiences with helping her to mature and grow. She acquired new literary influences, including the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis, a romantic modernist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1979. Çoku gestures with both hands: “[Living and working in Greece] fed me new feelings, new thoughts, new ways of thinking. It was a kind of food for my poetry.”

After seven years abroad, she returned to Albania and contacted her high school teacher; he helped her edit her second collection, Gjurma e gjethes (Leaf’s Trace), which she self-published in 2011. Shortly after this, newly divorced with two children, she began her work at the publishing company.

She points out that sometimes she writes formal poems with rhyme and meter, and sometimes her poems follow no rules. “I wanted to have my own voice. I’m not interested in imitating something.”

Çoku paid for the printing, marketing, and distribution of her second collection herself, but as an established poet, the book earned the attention of Albanian writers and critics; she drew a crowd to her public readings and favorable reviews appeared in local media.

Today Çoku is bright with optimism about what the future holds for her and her young sons. Her boys have recently developed a passion for studying the cello, and the oldest is studying with a good teacher in the public music school in the neighborhood. She enjoys her life as an editor, and she continues to write: Currently she’s working on her third collection.

“It would be better if I was kind of rich,” she says thoughtfully. “I would do a lot of traveling; it would help my poetry; it would be good. I would have more time for meditation. But even in this busy time, I’m still writing a lot. Poetry is still with me. It is good.”

***

The next morning I walk south through the city to a road leading up Salita Hill. Developers have begun to build expensive neighborhoods on the hillsides overlooking the capital, and the poet and painter Eljan Tanini has been given a studio by the owners of Kodra e diellit (Sunhill Residence), one of the new developments.

“My second book is about the city,” Tanini says when we sit down at the Fiesta Bar, a coffee shop with views of the downtown, located at a piazza on a switchback between parallel rows of mountainside condominiums. Bearded with a rebel’s mane of brown hair, wearing a scarf, a turquoise shirt, plaid pants, leather hiking boots with yellow laces and beaded bracelets, Tanini is a twenty-nine-year-old activist and artist who speaks passionately about his love for the Albanian capital. “I don’t have a wife, but I know my daughter will be called Tirana,” he says.

eljan_tanini_pw.jpg [9]

Eljan Tanini

The city features heavily in his first book, a collection of poetry called Pa pik’ (Without Periods) that he self-published in 2015 and dedicated to his ex-girlfriend and the corner of the Hemingway Bar in the city center where he composed much of the text.

Impressed by his poems, paintings and reputation, the developers of the condos have granted him a glass-faced retail space on the main street to use for the creation of his artwork. His latest paintings, colorful abstracts that recall the work of Joan Miró, lean against the walls of his studio beneath hung photographs of puddles, clouds, and stains—abstract shapes that inspire him. Images from his paintings illustrate Without Periods.

Over coffee, he tells me about his efforts to preserve a lake in a nearby park. Working with other young people, he has been at the forefront of protests intent on slowing the development of the city’s open spaces that has proliferated since capitalism supplanted the planned economy. Holding up his phone, he shows us a picture of himself surrounded by policemen. He was arrested while protesting the city’s efforts to fill in an artificial lake at a nearby park and build a kindergarten on the site. A judge sentenced him to five days of community service for his actions. “I was a journalist for the two biggest TV stations, but I stopped to join the protests at the lake,” he says.

Although political activism has interrupted his journalism, he has never stopped his poetry and artwork. As a child, he convinced his parents to hire a costly tutor to prepare him for admission to a prestigious arts high school, the Lyceum Jordan Misja. The investment paid off:  He was accepted to the high school, then to the University of Tirana, where he studied philosophy as an undergraduate, then earned a masters degree in literature. His master’s thesis analyzed the concept of beauty in the works of Umberto Eco.

Since graduating, he has read at literary festivals across Albania and been awarded a writers residency in Split, Croatia. Recently he was invited to exhibit at the Mediterranean Biennale. Meanwhile, the city government is planning on installing several of his sculptures—gargantuan models of paper airplanes—at the site of a former Albanian airfield that has been developed into an apartment complex.

Tanini continues to live with his parents in the apartment in the city center where he threw paper airplanes from the windows as a child. His father, who is struggling with heart problems, nags him to find a wife. “Before communism, [Albanians] were married with birth,” the poet says, referring to the custom of arranged marriages. “In communism, matchmakers would arrange marriages. Probably this is why most people did not marry for love. Love was supposed to grow out of marriage.” But Tanini isn’t ready to settle down yet.

eljan_and_steve_pw.jpg [10]

Stephen Morison Jr. (left) and Eljan Tanini at Tanini’s studio in Tirana.

The city awarded him the commission for the paper airplane sculptures, but the prize was only €100 (approximately $117), so he found a private investor, a wealthy man whose father was a pilot during the communist era. The man is pleased the sculptures are the same size as the jets his father once flew. Tanini plans for the folded “paper” of the planes to contain passages and phrases from the works of Albanian poets and writers. “It’s a nice thing to remember history,” he says.

The poet shows us around his studio, then we begin the walk back to the center of the city. As we descend, Fortuzi, my translator, remembers the day after the communist government fell when he and his high school classmates broke into the cabinet in the classroom reserved for the teaching of the histories and philosophies of Marxism and the Albanian labor party. “We took pages from the books of Enver Hoxha and used them to make paper airplanes,” he says. He pauses on the hillside sidewalk and mimics releasing a paper airplane into the wind.

Stephen Morison Jr. is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. He has reported on the literary communities of Afghanistan, China, Denmark, Egypt, Jordan, Myanmar, Rome, Vietnam, North Korea, and Syria. He currently lives in Maine.