Visar ZHITI
BIOGRAPHY
Visar Zhiti (b. 1952) is the Albanian writer whose life
and works perhaps best mirror the history of his nation. He was
one of the many to have suffered appalling persecution for no
apparent reason. But Visar Zhiti survived - physically, intellectually
and emotionally, and he is now among the most popular poets of
present-day Albania.
Born in the Adriatic port of Durrës as the son of the
stage actor and poet Hekuran Zhiti (1911-1989), Visar Zhiti grew
up in Lushnja where he finished school in 1970. After studies
at a teacher training college in Shkodra, he embarked upon a
teaching career in the northern mountain town of Kukës.
Zhiti showed an early interest in verse and had published some
poems in literary periodicals. In 1973, he was preparing the
collection "Rapsodia e jetës së trëndafilave"
(Rhapsody of the life of roses) for publication when the so-called
Purge of the Liberals broke out in Tirana at the Fourth Plenary
Session of the Communist Party. Zhiti, whose father had earlier
come into conflict with the authorities, was one of the many
scapegoats selected as a means of terrifying the intellectual
community. The manuscript of the verse collection which he had
submitted to the editors of the Naim Frashëri publishing
company was now seen to contain grave ideological errors and
was interpreted as having blackened socialist reality. His works
were denounced as anti-communist agitation and propaganda, and
there was nothing the poet could say to his interrogators to
prove his innocence. None of his fellow writers saw fit or dared
to help him. Indeed in October 1979, some of them prepared an
insidious report condemning the works of the poet, no doubt to
save their own skins. It was this "expert opinion"
which led directly to Zhiti’s fall and subsequent torment.
After years of uncertainty under the Damocles Sword of the
Party, Visar Zhiti was arrested on 8 November 1979 in Kukës
where he was still teaching, and spent the following months in
solitary confinement. To keep his sanity, he composed and memorized
over a hundred poems. Sentenced at a mock trial in April 1980
to thirteen years in prison, he was taken to Tirana jail and,
from there, transferred up to the isolated northern mountains
to do the rounds in the infamous concentration camps similar
to the Soviet gulags, among them, the living hell of the copper
mines at Spaç and to the icy mountain prison of Qafë-Bari.
Many of his fellow prisoners died of mistreatment and malnutrition,
or went mad. Visar Zhiti was released on 28 January 1987
and was then ‘permitted’ by the Party to work in a
brick factory in his native Lushnja, where he kept a low profile
until the end of the dictatorship.
In the autumn of 1991, when Albania was in a state of chaos,
Visar Zhiti managed to get to Italy and worked in Milan until
July 1992. He visited Germany for several months in 1993 on a
scholarship offered to him by the Heinrich Böll Foundation,
and was in the United States in 1994. On his return to Albania,
he worked as a journalist and was appointed head of the Naim
Frashëri publishing company, which had once abandoned him
to his fate. He was later employed by the administrative services
of the new Albanian parliament, in the building of the former
Central Committee of the Communist Party where, as fate would
have it, he shared an office with one of the writers who had
denounced him many years earlier.
In 1996, Visar Zhiti was elected himself as a member of parliament
but, shaken by the sombre realities of Albanian party politics,
he soon withdrew from political life. In 1997, he joined the
Albanian foreign service and was appointed cultural attaché
to the Albanian Embassy in Rome, where he lived and worked until
1999. This appointment gave him an opportunity to make up for
lost time, to devote himself to writing and to pursue personal
and literary objectives which he would not even have dared to
dream about a decade earlier.
Visar Zhiti’s first volume of verse "Kujtesa e ajrit"
(The memory of the air) was published in Tirana in 1993. It contains
some of the so-called prison poems as well as verse inspired
by his first journeys outside the ‘big prison’ that
was Albania. The second collection, "Hedh një kafkë
te këmbët tuaja" (I cast a skull at your
feet), published in Tirana in 1994, contains the full cycle of
110 prison poems composed between 1979 and 1987, verse which
survived miraculously in the recesses of the poet’s memory.
Both volumes were well received in Albania and by Albanian-speaking
readers in the former Yugoslavia. Someone had finally given voice
to the hundreds of silenced and broken intellectuals.
Among Zhiti’s subsequent verse collections are: "Mbjellja
e vetëtimave" (Sowing lightning), published in Skopje
in 1994; "Dyert e gjalla" (The living doors), published
in Tirana in 1995; "Kohë e vrarë në sy"
(Time murdered in the eye), published in Prishtina in 1997; and,
most recently, "Si shkohet në Kosovë" (Where
is the road to Kosova), printed in Tirana in 2000. The latter
volume mirrors, among other things, the poet’s horror at
the sufferings of Kosova and its people during the ten years
of oppression and the two years of war leading to NATO intervention
and to the final liberation in 1999. Several collections of Zhiti’s
verse have also appeared in Italian translation.
In addition to his poetry, Visar Zhiti is the author of numerous
short stories which have been compiled in the volumes "Këmba
e Davidit" (David’s leg), published in Tirana in 1996,
and "Valixhja e shqyer e përrallave" (The battered
suitcase of folktales), published in Prishtina in 1997. He has
also published translations into Albanian of the works of Mother
Teresa, Federico Garcia Lorca and Mario Luzi.
Despite the paucity of literary translations from the Albanian,
Visar Zhiti’s verse has been appreciated abroad and he has
received notable international recognition. In 1991, he was awarded
the Italian "Leopardi d’oro" prize for poetry
and in 1997 the prestigious "Ada Negri" prize. He is
a member of the Alfonso Grassi International Academy of Art and
has taken part in many international poetry festivals in recent
years. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Modern
Authors from Albania (late 20th - 21st centuries)
