The File on H. by Ismail Kadare

Author:Ismail Kadare [Kadare, Ismail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781559704014
Google: mV24V4XuPzgC
Amazon: 1611457998
Barnesnoble: 1611457998
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 1981-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Late February,

at the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo

We’re waiting with impatience, not to say anxiety, for the rhapsode to come back.

Sometimes we are frightened of burying ourselves in the world of the epic and losing sight of the main aim of our visit We are Homeric scholars. That’s what we keep telling ourselves, every day, reminding ourselves that we came here not to study the Albanians' epic poetry but to try to solve the enigma of Homer.

Easier said than done. In spite of ourselves, epic absorbs us. And then we encounter issues that are more tangled than grass roots. For example, we have now identified two other versions of the adventures of Ajkuna, wife of Muj, and they give quite different explanations for what happened to hen It must have been the same with the rape of Helen in pre-Homeric poems — until Homer came along and chose one of the variants.

The Homeric account itself implies that there had been various different earlier views of Helen’s position. The whole story of the rape of the queen is deeply ambiguous. Did she follow Paris of her own free will, or was she taken by force before she fell in love with him? Maybe she never did love her violator but was just his slave! Alternatively, was she first fascinated by Paris, then, when tricked, did her feelings abate? Or was it rather he who first fell in love with her, then felt his passion waning, which is not exactly a rare event in such circumstances?

Homer manages to keep all these questions in the air. He never gives a final answer, neither during the Trojan War nor afterward, when the enigma of Helen’s absconding ought to be explained. All you find is a degree of remorse for all that happened, and that sentiment is, moreover, spread rather thin. As for her behavior toward Menelaus, her lawful husband, that too is hardly transparent: we do not know if she hated him, despised him, or loved him.

Though each of them recounts Ajkuna’s position variantly, the different versions of the Albanian ballad are, individually, clear and straightforward. In one version, Ajkuna is carried off into slavery by Muj’s Slav rival and, like any prisoner, spends her time waiting for her release from captivity. But there is another version, where the kidnapper is so fascinated by her that he turns her into a princess. Not only does he abandon his wife, but he forces her to hold a torch between her teeth to illuminate the first night of his love-making with Ajkuna. This variant does not mention Ajkuna’s own feelings; hut in two other versions, those feelings are clearly delineated. In one despite being made a princess, Ajkuna remains faithful to her first husband; in the other, she falls in love with her kidnapper as soon as she is carried off and furthermore, when Muj comes to rescue her, she cheats on him heartlessly. That was the version the rhapsode had sung — where

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