Translating the significance of ‘Two’ in Albanian author Mujë Buçpapaj’s book ‘Two Sheets of Wind’
BY GJEKË MARINAJ – ALBANIA
Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to come; and from the seven Spirits which are before his throne (Revelation 1:4)
On August 20, 1997, CNN and other media sources reported that Mujë Buçpapaj, then the political editor of the RD newspaper and a prominent political activist, had been shot and seriously wounded. Following the details of the incident, US reporters interviewed Genc Pollo, at that time the Albanian Democratic Party spokesman, who blamed “the ruling clique” (The Albanian Socialist Party, formerly known as the Communist Party of Albania) of being behind the assassination attempt for political reasons. Later conclusive reports indicated that the poet had received two bullets, one in each thigh, both of which were fired from a car that had on two police license plates. Yet, unless you are a literary translator, the significance of the number two in Mujë Buçpapaj’s Two Sheets of Wind is not indistinguishable with, for instance, seven in the Bible or in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. For Claude C. Freeman III, however, translating its connotation into English must have been an enormous task. Whether it represents Buçpapaj’s second chance in life, the two political lives of his country (under communism and in democracy), the alternation between war and peace in Kosovo, or the love and hate that exist in today’s world, the number two seems to remain a key word throughout his soon to be published book ‘Two Sheets of Wind’.
Nothing Buçpapaj writes is without self-awareness, nor is it ever without a specific poetic purpose. He is known as a poet who likes to crystallize the essential social and political events and make part of his poetic vision the troubles and the happiness, the beauty and the ugliness of his experiences. His verse is his sole witness whenever he finds himself in a complex mixture of personal trauma and fame, the center of constant political turmoil of his people and their life in peace, the heat of international anxiety and social disorder, and the magnificence of the natural beauty that surrounds it all. As complicated as it all sounds, it is a mixture that often dominates Buçpapaj’s world. It is a reality that he encountered humanely and poetically and simultaneously reconstructed its impact into his verse before extending it to Freeman to translate into English.
And that is not a simple task. Because esthetically, particularly in terms of how he approaches his subject matter and utilizes his metaphors, Buçpapaj bears a resemblance to the American poet Ted Kooser. The poems of both poets consist of delicate metaphors, often within larger metaphors, so that the smallest misrepresentation in translation could alter the metaphor’s intended meaning, destroying its specific function in the poem. To illustrate this point, let’s direct our attention to the following stanzas taken from two poems, the first by Buçpapaj and the other by Kooser:
Man built
The other side of life and river
Between rain and field
But wind will have its say. (Buçpapaj’s “The wind’s portrait”)
***
All night, the cities,
Like shimmering novas,
Tug with bright streets
At lonely lights like this. (Kooser’s “Flying at night”).
Clearly, both poets make it very difficult for any translator to reconstruct the elegance of the above lines and the internal layers of meaning they offer. Freeman has steered clear of the danger of either under-translating or over-translating. And that is important. Within that poetic frame, in addition to triumphing over the great degree of difficulty of translating multiple metaphors within a stanza of four short lines stanza, which stands as a metaphor in itself, Freeman has gone even further towards his goal of capturing the subtleties of the original. And, to paraphrase Hugo Friedrich, the creative stylistic power of the Albanian verse is visible in the translation, and it has even regenerated itself as the creative force stylistically in the English translation (Schulte and Biguenet 15). Furthermore, maintaining the conceptual hypothesis within the imagery with such eloquent rendition of the original, as he does, can be considered nothing short of a remarkable translation.
Nevertheless, knowing that “translation is sin” (Showerman), such perfection is the exception rather than the rule throughout the book. Two Sheets of Wind consists of forty eloquent and heartfelt poems originally written in Albanian (an Indo-European language) that are linguistically and poetically entrenched in the Albanian culture. What’s more, Buçpapaj’s poems are abundantly composed in accord with the linguistic properties of yet a deeper localized northern culture within Albanian national culture.
Read: Luan Rama – A Genuine Polymath of Albania
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