Essays on World Literature: Aeschylus • Dante • Shakespeare by Ismail Kadare

Author:Ismail Kadare
Format: epub

In his notes about Dante, Ernest Koliqi never mentions any other similarities, not even the resemblances between the Nazi concentration camps, the communist gulag, and the Dantesque world. When those places were first discovered, mouths numb with horror must have uttered the word “Dantesque.”

Koliqi’s notes date to the 1970s, a time when these terrors had already been uncovered. At a first glance, the absence of any reference to them seems surprising. Even more surprising is his failure to mention, even if in passing, his own burden as a political exile—a burden that connects him, the translator and admirer, with the object of his admiration.

But what initially seems surprising makes more sense from up close. Ernest Koliqi had a connection with Italian fascism. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was renowned for his fascist ideologies. There is nothing fascist in his literary work, not even the slightest sympathy for the Italy of his day, but this was different in real life. After the unification of Albania and Italy, he accepted a position in the Ministry of Culture, in the puppet Albanian government.

He never provided an explanation for this tragic choice. It seems as though a grave misunderstanding about Albania’s European future sent him to Rome. Unlike other Albanian writers, many of them his friends, who sang hymns to an isolated and pure Albania, he admired the Italian alliance. Reviving Albania’s historic ties with Venice, Rome, and the Vatican, which had been severed by the Ottoman invasion, seemed to him, as a Catholic, the only way for Albania to return to Christian Europe.

It is not difficult to imagine what the communists would have done to Ernest Koliqi had they caught him. Another poet who shared his sin, the American Ezra Pound, was caught and labeled a traitor.

Naturally, being caught by the Albanian communists was an entirely different thing than being caught by the Americans. Even so, the latter behaved rather cruelly with Pound. Neither his fame, friendships, nor well-known naïveté helped him. Subjected to the mockery of passersby and locked in a cage under a bright light like a wild animal, he who many scholars consider the best twentieth-century poet of the English language lived through something worse than any nightmare.

After the storm, Ezra Pound and Ernest Koliqi—both exiled, one famous in a large country and the other famous in a small country—ended up in post-fascist Italy. Koliqi lived in Rome, while Pound lived in Rapallo, in the north.

It was as unlikely that Pound knew of Koliqi as it was likely that the Albanian admired the great poet. Both were lonely, but what truly brought them together was their connection to Dante Alighieri.

Both had dealt with Dante their whole lives, and in their exile more so than ever. Not only did they feel a sense of kinship with Dante, but the poet was like a church of sorts for them, a place for confession and spiritual purification.

Koliqi remained connected to the great master throughout his youth, boyhood, and later miseries. For much of his life, Ezra Pound tried to erect a tower parallel to The Divine Comedy.

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