ISMAIL KADARE
Homage to Albania
Last month, an Albanian writer — celebrated in his home country but little known here — won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in Edinburgh. Here, we reproduce his extraordinary acceptance speech. Translation: David Bellos
here would be a grave risk of you thinking a
writer who has travelled 2()()() kilometres to be
here a little simple-minded if he were to begin with a hymn declaring his faith in literature. and saying that literature is what made him a free man. All the same. I shall not only make such a declaration of faith in literature. but I will also add that for me. Scotland played a key role in understanding how freedom and literature relate to each other.
Allow me to summarise what I wrote 40 years ago in one of my first books. Chronicle in Stone. I was born and grew tip in a small. medieval Albanian city overshadowed by a great castle. as daunting as it was impressive. All regimes had used the castle as a prison. and the Communist regime was no exception. The castle and its prison tower radiated power and menace in every direction. As a child I grew up in the shadow of that castle. When I was II or 12. however. another castle took over my mind and my imagination. It was a Scottish castle. located not so far from here: the castle of Macbeth.
My fascination with that distant northern castle was enough to make my local fortress fade into insignificance. Its prison and its prison guards and its menace all grew somehow blurrier. A very strange thing had come to pass. A teenager from the back end of a tiny country crushed under the heel of Communism had been propelled. by force of Shakespeare. towards the shores of Scotland.
That teenager was already a citizen of another realm. the realm of literature. He had entrusted to it his imagination and also his moral conscience. lts leaders —— Homer. Shakespeare. Dante. Kafka — became his true masters. I gave myself up as to a religion.
The same question has been ptlt countless times to people who. like me. are writers from the former Communist empire: ‘How do you account for the fact that. in those times. and in that place. you were nonetheless able to write real literature'." My own answer to that question usually goes like this: ‘We believed in literature. In return for our fidelity. literature granted us her blessing and protection.‘
Believing in literature means believing in a reality above that which is. Believing in literature means saying that the ghastly regime holding sway over your country is altogether insipid. compared with literature in all its funereal majesty. Believing in that art means being convinced that the regime to which you are subjected. with its policemen who spy on you. its top leaders and its functionaries — in sum. that the entire edifice of tyranny — is but a passing nightmare. something dead in comparison with the Supreme order whose disciple you now are.
10 THE LIST 21 Jul—4 Aug 2005
‘I WAS A TEENAGER PROPELLED, BY FORCE OF MACBETH, TOWARDS SCOTLAND'S SHORES'
When you are a writer. it is not easy to be aware of
living in a regime of death. In the totalitarian system.
literature and the other arts suffered an ordeal of
unprecedented cruelty. Of course. writers have been punished in all eras. and censorship. prisons. deportation and exile have always existed. But the regime I am referring to was not content merely to ban the most famous works in the canon — the ‘cathedrals‘ of artistic creation. No. the regime tried to destroy the raw material from which such cathedrals are hewn.
In a sense. Stalinism was a great success. The line of
writers abandoning the Temple grew ever longer. whilst
those who kept the faith and stayed ptlt saw their
number dwindle by the day. We were only a tiny minority in that boundless. hopeless desert called Socialist Realism. We propped each other tip as we tried to write literature as if that regime did not exist. The idea that we could create a few mouthfuls of spiritual nourishment for our imprisoned nation tilled us with joy.
And then. suddenly. one day. passing
prison bread ended tip by accident on your table. You took a bite and found it good. and reckoned it was just as edible by you who live in the free world. An Albanian writer could not
praise ever being given. Tiny. forgotten. isolated Albania. a land that had almost been buried alive. had apparently shown a sign of continuing life. Albania had signalled that though bound hand and foot by dictatorship. it hadn‘t yet enslaved its soul.
That signal. broadcast by means of literature and so nony picked up by you. is what has made the unthinkable possible. It‘s what enabled me to travel to Scotland. and it‘s that little sign which will enable me to undertake a visit to where my imagination first dwelt. to a house which fired my passion for literature: the castle of Macbeth. Thane of (ilamis and (‘awdoiz
Gjirokastra, Kadare‘s home town
through the night of dictatorship. our
have imagined any higher kind of
MY
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As part of our 100 Best Scottish Books campaign, we invite a series of personal choices.
BRIAN DONALDSON, BOOKS EDITOR
There are some bits of culture that lend themselves to repeat consumption, revealing new and excnirig aspects on each viSit: The Sopranos. Citizen Kane and Tom Waits' marimba period fall into that category for me. There are others which have a different kind of power that only really work on that very first sampling: Seu/ Contre TOus. Dancer In the Dark, season one of 24 and. I imagine. anyone who saw a pre- hype Blair Witch Project in the Cinema. Alan Warner's These Demented Lands is a book that took at least 35 Sittings. leaving me bamboozled and befuddled to the pomt that I knew I w0uld never pick it up again. Yet. it's also difficult not to be blown away by Warner's raw vision. Having wooed us With the sweetly sardonic Morvern Cal/ar. the urbane Obanite went unapologetlcally against the grain with his follow-up. It was the classic example of the difficolt second novel. except the problems here were almost entirer With the reader. There are passages that are so dense that they become less IuCid With each re-read. But while you force yOurself to continue. you remain lll awe as Warner welds together a story about an aircrash investigation, a hauntingly familiar, stumbling woman and a bunch Of oddballs arranging a rave. No one said it weiild be eaSy.
I To vote for your favourite Scottish book. text the word ‘VOTE' and the name of the book to 81800. The winner wr// be announced In August.