Agron Sela: Songs of silence

INTRODUCTION

 

            In his poem, “The Word,” Agron Sela writes:

 

                        Do not look with a compass

                        To search for my soul.

 

But a compass, or map, helps when reading the poems Sela has collected in this volume. A man who leads his life according to deeply felt principles, he has been an exile from his native Macedonia and Kosova for a quarter-century. Many of his poems need to be read with that background in mind.

            To say that Sela is an ethnic Albanian may stir only a vague notion in a reader’s memory. It might be of a mountainous country tucked away in the Balkans, next to Greece and the old Yugoslavia. But Albanians believe their influence on world history deserves much greater recognition. Although hotly disputed by Graecophiles, Albanians claim Alexander the Great as one of their own and contend they were the forefathers of the Egyptian Ptolemy dynasty.

            The allusions in Sela’s poems go back to the Illyrians, one of whose groups later called themselves Albanians, who shared the Balkans with the Greeks. One of Illyria’s most storied leaders was Queen Teuta, who reigned when Rome was ascendant. Some historians believe she provoked the empire by attacking its Adriatic shipping; others say Rome used piracy as a pretext to start its first war with her country.

Another poet might have compared Teuta to Boadicea, queen of the ancient Britons who also led a vain assault on the Romans, but Sela looks forward to Elizabeth Tudor, the queen who presided over England’s renaissance. Adopting the voice of Anne Boleyn (“I was just a flower of the season”), he has Henry VIII’s tragic queen say:

 

                        My daughter Elizabeth

                        Can reign in England

                        Like Queen Teuta in Illyria.

 

            It took three wars and as many centuries, but at last Rome annexed Illyria, after which the Illyrians became integral to the Roman Empire. Emperors Diocletian and Constantine, among others, had Illyrian lineages. Meanwhile, Christianity swept the province. When the Empire split into two, Illyria fell under Byzantine rule, but became itself divided in its religious loyalties between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Islam entered the mix after the Ottoman conquest in 1385.

            For half a millennium of Ottoman rule, Albanians and Greeks, along with Serbs and Croats, kept alive their resolve for self-determination. They also found themselves in a no man’s land between contentious powers, as the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires emerged to vie with the Ottoman. But the resolve for self-determination stayed strong. On November 28, 1912, Albania at last felt able to declare independence. Alluding to the double-headed eagle on the Albanian national flag, Sela captures the odds the country faced and the strategy it would employ in the decades to come:

           

                        Even with broken wings 

                        By pushing east and west

                        The Eagle starts to fly

 

            Albania’s statehood and borders were affirmed at Versailles in 1919. Following World War II, the Balkans once again turned into a political battleground, this time between communism and Western democracy. Albania and Yugoslavia fell into the communist orbit. While both countries maintained degrees of autonomy from the Soviet Union, their governments ruthlessly enforced internal stability for over forty years.

In 1991 Albania’s totalitarian government, along with the rest of Eastern European communism, collapsed. That same year, Macedonia, with its sizable Albanian population, declared its independence from Yugoslavia. After Yugoslavia’s disintegration turned violent, America carried out an air campaign to protect the ethnic Albanian majority in the Serbian province of Kosova. Serbia still claims the province, with Russian support, but it has been recognized as an independent country by the United States and the European Union.

Sela opposes ideology in any form, but he has the discernment to recognize that, even in these triumphs over tyranny, there can be suffering. His poem, “The Forsaken,” suggests that loss of an outmoded ideology can be an affliction as debilitating as a war wound:

 

 

                        My friends are like sunflowers

                        Even though the sun has set,

                        They still keep their heads turned that way.

 

                        They wait for the light to come from behind.

 

 

            Born and raised in the Macedonian town of Dibra, Sela attended university in Kosova’s capital, Prishtina. In his poems, Sela sometimes calls Kosova by its alternative Albanian name, Dardania. Dibra sometimes appears as “Dibër,” depending on its grammatical placement in a sentence. Some readers may infer the similarity here between Latin and Albanian grammar, even though Albanian is not considered a Romance language.

             At university, Sela’s subject was Albanian literature, and his dream was to teach the subject. However, during his first year, he participated in demonstrations against the Yugoslav regime. Five of his activist friends were arrested, and fearing guilt by association, he left on a student visa to work for the summer in Germany. He planned to return at summer’s end, but an official publication announced the sentence of those five friends. After another five months in Germany, he was persuaded to migrate to Italy, where he spent nineteen dismal months in a refugee camp. In his poem, “New Year ’83,” the calendar holiday serves only to measure the refugees’ feelings of futility:

 

                        The arms of a clock

                        Will stand up like scissors

                        And cut in silence

                        A year’s umbilical cord

                        Of a decent new year to come.

 

                        Cheers!

                        Far from the songs and the dances

                        Around an empty table,

                        We raise our glasses

                        Full of predicament and hope.

 

            In September 1983, Sela gained authorization to enter the United States, where he has lived ever since. He and his wife have four children.

            Still, his emotions will always swirl around his home town:

 

DIBRA

 

The years went by

Like the long nights in winter          

Far way from my Dibër.

 

I returned deeply touched

Like a bird in migration.

 

The town has been emptied.

 

I walk the streets

Like a soldier returned after battle.

 

            His poems are often about the pain and sometimes the nostalgia that exiles experience; the pity in his poems is mainly for his people. Here is an elegy for Macedonia, Kosova and Albania, where the Radika and Drin Rivers run and Mount Korab rises:

 

A WOUND OVER A WOUND

 

                        A spate of tears

                        Radika Run,

                        Years wearing sackcloth. 

 

                        In gloomy weather,

                        The song sang to Korab

                        Darkens the verses.

 

                        Drin a bitter door

                        For greetings,

                        With tearful eyes.

 

                        Shivers with fear, kissing

                        The youth yet ungrown

                        Who speed in emigration’s disorder

                        Drunken across the sea.

.

 

            Unfamiliar names in these poems are usually those of Sela’s Albanian heros. Here are the opening lines of his tribute to one Jusuf Gervalla, articulating another of Sela’s recurring themes that history will vindicate truth:

 

                        In the deep veins of earth

                        You caressed a smile of knowledge,

                        The wind of freedom

                        Opens a word’s door.

 

                        On lighting the fire in the hearth

                        You lit a resistance’s soul,

                        The light of history

                        Cuts through time’s shadow.

 

            Sela has written his share of poems about love, or as he often puts it, “the love,” the way French speakers say, “l’amour.” A poem with the John Donne-like title, “Love’s Constant Worry,” concludes with these lines:

 

                        People help me

                        To find truth’s cure

                        Where love will live long,

                        And Romeo and Juliet

                        Don’t get hurt!

 

            These renderings provide insight into Sela’s rare sensibility, his gentle sense of humor, and the tradition in which his work is steeped. It is poignant to see how his love of the love of the Albanian language goes hand-in-hand with the longing he expresses for the mother country from which he is separated. This example is the poem he wrote on the occasion of his first daughter’s birth:

 

 

                        With a sweet word

                        Like a clear crystal

                        My mother embraced me.

                        From my mother tongue

                        Your name I selected,

                        My daughter, Bora.

 

 

By Adrian Spratt

Brooklyn, New York

September, 2008

 

 

AGRON SELA

 

SONGS OF SILENCE

 

 

A CUP OF COFFEE

  

The morning still rubs its eyes.

Your aroma 

Opens the window

To see a smile of day

Where, like a violet starting to bloom,

My verse line’s ice-cold

Through a frost’s life. 

 

 

WAITING FOR YOU

 

Since you left that moment

My heart wanders

As if wounded in battle.

 

My eyes without light

Like two stars forgotten

Wait for you to ignite them.

                                               

    

MY LOVE

 

Like a butterfly, you lay your head

On petals of my heart.

A flower crown of beauty

Hugs a smile

Of my hope

With the shining eyes of love.

 

You are fragile - red poppy

That burns bright.

My kiss on fire

Like a volcano’s lava

Flows through your body,

To light the light of desire

At the gate of love.

 

 

PEACE

 

Even though the night is silent,

Quiet, no noise,

It isn’t peace. 

 

A voice vibrates yonder,

Cords of darkness

From where struggles to appear

A morning dawn.

 

 

MOTHER’S WORD 

 

I walked from genesis,

Like the sun’s smile at dawn;

Refuge to find the knowledge,

Through the faded years, my son.

 

Me, the gospels that I nourished,

Who has stolen my God?

 

 

THE PICTURE

 

You avoided the camera

And people in whispers, 

But from my soul album

You will not disappear.

 

Once again I see

Your smile on your lips

Like the sun in sunset

And reminds me of a time 

Running toward me.

 

I will bare time’s shoes

To slow down the speed

In wonderful youth.

Because still we love each other.

 

 

MY VERSES

 

How many nights I’m left without sleep

Even exhausted.

I wanted you to grow beautiful,

Well.

The fatigue I defeat

Possessing your smile.

       

 

WHEN I SEE YOU

 

When I see you,

My heart like a disturbed sea

Dashes the waves

On my rocky chest.

 

Because you are just a sunny day

But you are even a storm.

 

 

LANDSCAPE OF MY BIRTHPLACE

 

Time shines on the white caps of mountains

Where the light lights into a crying season,

The warbling birds embrace the song,

The rivers gather up the streams of snow.

 

The dark clouds start to depart,

Where the long legs of frost shorten;

Lullabies in the cradles rarely can be heard,

Here, without youth, life is getting wrinkled.

 

 

TO MY DAUGHTER 

 

With a sweet word

Like a clear crystal

My mother embraced me.

From my mother tongue

Your name I selected,

My daughter, Bora.

 

 

THE GOOD DAY

 

Come celebrate the Good Day!

The smile and our New Year’s Day

The holiday that sings to life

With a beauty that has no demise.

 

We gather up the beginning flowers

With joy in the month of Abib

Where the year’s door opens

Like flower bud, dressing for spring.

 

 

IN PLACE OF ELEGY

 

The face of the sea is wet

From the crying sorrow

When the waves push destiny

On a road with no return.

 

The voices call the land

A hope to give a hand

For time that cries.

 

The silence starts to grow,

The earth doesn’t move

Because a response disappears

In the noises of government.