A text by Jean-Jacques Didier, Doctor of Philosophy and Letters (reproduced with his kind permission). This text is also published by the literary journal "Traversées" under the title "Un exilé majuscule" » .
A year ago, on this first of July, Ismaïl Kadaré died.
Isma who?
Ismaïl Kadaré.
Nothing to turn in his grave for this man who laughed so much – a corrosive laugh – at the fleeting pretension of human beings to endure, to make their power, their fame, their role last, whether obscure figures puffing themselves up or the powerful actors of their age.
What mattered essentially to him was the celebration of a people, its language, its stories, its rituals, as in Broken April (about the vendetta that will bring an Albanian village to its knees, economically and morally) or The Three-Arched Bridge (finally a bridge in our region! But it is through that very place that the Ottoman invader will come). The same is true of The File on H, in which the novelist evokes the stories of the last Albanian rhapsodes, who chant an ancient memory across mountains and valleys, much as their neighbours the ancient Greeks did in their own way – whose songs would one day be set down in writing under two titles: the Iliad and the Odyssey, by a certain H[omer]. Kadaré would go on to devote other works to the Greece of Aeschylus and Homer.
Could the writer hope for anything more than a local readership, that of a land the size of Belgium with barely four million inhabitants? of a language utterly unknown to the world, dangling orphaned at the tip of a twig of the vast Indo-European tree, alone amid the staggering canopy of Romance, Germanic and Slavonic languages? of a country more politically isolated than an island throughout fifty years of communist dictatorship?
And yet, at twenty-seven, Kadaré made his dream of a wider audience come true. In The General of the Dead Army, an Italian general and a German one land in Albania twenty years after the war, searching for the bones of their respective countrymen. The fresco could have been grim; it is as epic as it is droll. Translated into forty-five languages, the novel met with dazzling success and was even adapted for the cinema.
Exiled to Paris in 1990 after serious run-ins with the Albanian regime, Kadaré went on writing in his mother tongue, the tongue of blood and memory, of farce and tragedy: The Siege, The Palace of Dreams, Chronicle in Stone, The Concert, more than fifty novels, story collections, essays and plays altogether, of unwaning intensity and wit.
But make no mistake: no identitarian note ever issues from his pen. His is a universal discourse, as firmly rooted in love for his country as in deep compassion for humankind. If he explores the most singular strata of his native place, it is always to dig deeper, down to the common water table. Whether the wells are drilled in the Albanian mountains or elsewhere in the world by others, only the water table’s irrefutable truth matters.
Read Ismail Kadaré
Isma who?
Ismaïl Kadaré, Nobel Prize in Literature, just as Milan Kundera – that other exile with a capital E – was not awarded it either.