Zef SEREMBE
BIOGRAPHY
Italo-Albanian lyric poet Giuseppe Serembe (1844-1901), known
in Albanian as Zef Serembe, was a restless soul destined to bear
the heavy burden of human suffering. The atmosphere of despair
and tragedy that haunted him throughout his life surfaces time
and time again in his verse. Serembe was born on 6 March 1844
in San Cosmo Albanese (Alb. Strigari) in the Calabrian
province of Cosenza and studied at the college of Saint Adrian.
At an early age, he fell in love with a girl from his native
village who emigrated to Brazil with her family and subsequently
died. Obsessed by this loss and by the thought of finding at
least her grave, Serembe set sail for Brazil in 1874 in search
of a new life. With the help of a letter of recommendation from
Dora d’Istria , he was received at the court of Emperor
Dom Pedro II . After a brief love affair there, he returned to
Europe, disappointed and dejected. On his arrival in the Old
World in September 1875 his fortunes took yet another turn for
the worse. Robbed of all his money, apparently in the port of
Marseille, he was forced to return to Italy on foot, and is said
to have lost many of his manuscripts on the way. In Leghorn (Livorno),
Demetrio Camarda provided him with train fare for the rest of
his journey back to Cosenza. Despair, arising no doubt from chronic
depression or some other form of psychic disorder, accompanied
him wherever he went and rendered him solitary and insecure.
He took refuge in the dream of the land of his forefathers, a
vision marred by the reality of Turkish occupation in Albania
and by the indifference of the Western powers to its sufferings.
In his emotional isolation, Italy became more and more the dheu
i huaj, a foreign land. In 1886, Serembe visited Arbëresh
settlements in Sicily and in 1893 travelled to the United States
where he lived for about two years. A volume of his Italian verse
was published in New York in 1895. In 1897, he emigrated from
his native Calabria to South America a second time and tried
to start a new life in Buenos Aires. The following year he fell
ill and died in 1901 in Sao Paolo.
Many of Serembe’s works (poetry, drama and a translation
of the Psalms of David), which he constantly altered and revised,
were lost in the course of his unsettled existence. During his
lifetime he published only: Poesie italiane e canti originali
tradotti dall’albanese, Cosenza 1883 (Italian poetry
and original songs translated from the Albanian) in Italian and
Albanian, Il reduce soldato, ballata lirica, New York
1895 (The returning soldier, lyric ballad), verse in Italian
only, and Sonetti vari, (Naples 189?), an extremely rare
collection of forty-two Italian sonnets with an introduction,
all crammed onto four pages of tiny print. One poem also appeared
in Giuseppe Schirò’s journal Arbri i ri (Young
Albania) on 31 March 1887. Thirty-nine of his Albanian poems
were published posthumously in Vjersha, Milan 1926 (Verse),
by his nephew Cosmo Serembe. Other works have been found in various
archives and manuscripts in recent years and some of his poems
indeed survived in oral transmission among the villagers of San
Cosmo Albanese. This sign of his popularity at home is rather
surprising in view of the fact that he spent much of his life
away from his native village.
Serembe’s verse, despondent and melancholic in character,
and yet often patriotic and idealistic in inspiration, is considered
by many to rank among the best lyric poetry ever produced in
Albanian, at least before modern times. His themes range from
melodious lyrics on love to eulogies on his native land (be it
Italy, land of his birth, or Albania, land of his dreams), elegant
poems on friendship and the beauties of nature, and verse of
religious inspiration. Among his romantic poems of nostalgic
nationalism, which cement the literary link with the rising generation
of Rilindja poets in nineteenth-century Albania, are lyrics dedicated
to his lost homeland, to Ali Pasha Tepelena, Dora d’Istria
and Domenico Mauro. Patriot though he may have been, Serembe
was not an intellectual poet who could provide us with a poetic
chronicle of Albania’s past. He was a poet of sentiment,
primarily of solitude and disillusionment. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Early
Authors (16th - 18th centuries)
