Life and works of Luan Rama, a renowned Albanian-Franco scholar, film-maker, a distinguished diplomat and author 60 books and several articles
- He has written 4 full-length screenplay films, 12 cartoon films and 40 documentary films. He authored many articles on cinema published in the magazines
By Angela Kosta
Luan Rama, born in Tirana, Albania, in 1952, is a scholar, filmmaker, editor and writer. He graduated in journalism from the Faculty of Political and Juridical Sciences, University of Tirana, and subsequently specialized in filmmaking and communication in France, at Paris VII Denis Diderot University. His career spans more than fourteen years as a screenwriter of award-winning feature films, documentaries and cartoons for Albanian cinema studios. For 13 years, he was a screenwriter in the Kinostudio film studios. He has written 4 full-length screenplay films, 12 cartoon films and 40 documentary films. He has written many articles on cinema in the magazine. From 1996 to 1997, he was editor of the French-language newspaper Le Courrier International (Paris) and he continues to contribute articles to both daily newspapers and Albanian revues. He is a distinguished diplomat, who served as an ambassador of Albania (1992–2005) in Paris, Lisbon and Monaco.
He further served as an Albanian cultural representative in Paris (1997–2003) at both UNESCO and the international French language organization, OIF (La Francophonie). Luan Rama has written sixty books, including novels, short stories, poetry, correspondence, essays and historical works published in Albanian, English, French, Italian and Greek. Many of these explore linkages – historical, cultural and personal – between Albania and Europe, especially France. Among them are politico-historical works on General de Gaulle, and on former French President François Mitterrand; studies on Greco-Albanian poet Jean Moréas, a founder of French Symbolism, and on Omer Kaleshi, a modern Albanian painter and Abedin Dino; essays on poets Jean Cocteau and on Arthur Rimbaud; and a novel on dancer Isadora Duncan’s 1913 sojourn at the Albanian resort town of Saranda.
A number of his literary works have been published in France, including two volumes of poetry, Territoires de l’âme (Territories of the Soul), “Porto Palermo” and Couvrez-moi avec un morceau de ciel (Cover Me with a Piece of Sky); the essays Le long chemin sous le tunnel de Platon (on the fate of the artist during the totalitarian era in Albania) and Pont entre deux rives (on Franco-Albanian linkages). He has authored studies on Jean Cocteau such as Rendez-vous avec Jean Cocteau, and on French archaeologist Léon Rey and his pioneering work at the ancient Greek site of Apollonia, Albania, Auguste Dozon – le Consul qui aimait les contes (Auguste Dozon – The Consul who loved the Conts), Udhëtimi i fundmë i Arthur Rimbaud (The last trip of Arthur Rimbaud) and Parisi letrar (Literary Paris). His works have also appeared in various anthologies: Appulé, Paris, 2018; Bantam, An anthology of Albanian poetry, AM Publishers, UK, 2019; Antologjia e Tregimit shqiptar (The Anthology of Albanian Prose, Tirana, 2019); Giornata della poesia mondiale (The Day of World Poetry, Roma, 2020), Anthology of World Poetry, Edition “Les Caractères, Paris, 2021; Atunis Galaxy, Anthology, Bruxelles, 2021, etc.
Distinctions:
He is “Grand Officer of the National Order of Merit”, medal awarded by the President of the French Republic in 2002; “Medalja Naim Frashëri”, (“Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters”), granted by the President of the Republic of Albania in 1987; Diploma of “French Personality of the Year 2014” awarded by the Minister of Foreign Affairs; European Prize of the Association of Writers of French Language, Paris, in 2000 for his book The long way under the tunnel of Platon; Best book for children – Book Fair 2016 with “Më quajnë Aleksandër Moisi” (They call me Alexandre Moissi), ed. ALBAS; Golden Award “Alexander the Great” by the “Café des Idées” and the Greek Commission of Unesco, 2017; “The Man of the Year” by the HARPA Foundation, Albania, 2017; and “The Golden Crown of Poetry”, by “The Poetic Nights of Korça”, 2018, etc.
He is regularly invited to speak on the subjects of literature and diplomacy to national and international symposia and has published fifteen from French to Albanian and vice versa. It is published in Albanian, French, English and Greek languages. Apart from his journalistic work, which is similar in four volumes (At the Crossroads of Times – Në udhekryqet ekohës), he has also published about fifteen books for children. He has also translated a dozen books from French into Albanian and from Albanian into French. He is publisher of several books of travelers and French artists. He lives in Paris, where he has lectured on the history and geopolitics at the Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilization (INALCO).
YOU LEFT
Under the neon light
Lying in agony
You raised up your hands to flee like an angel
“I took my last breath!” you told me
While I watched you wounded
Unable to stop you leave,
How so?
Stretched hands shaking
Hands that once had held
Only life and love,
The litter and pain of a wicked time
The death of our mother and father,
You walked with your hands stretched towards the sky
Stepping on a lake of tears…
My sister,
My Grace,
My love and blood,
The colour red
In my purple heart
From the open wound that still
Silently cries out,
Under these birdless lonely skies,
The murmur,
The whisper of a monk…
You leave
And you return and you leave me again
Slipping onto another world
And I don’t know what to do
With this beautiful butterfly
Flapping her wings upon my chest
In my long, long night
In this hinterland…
***
PURPURIC BUTTERFLY
“Black is a color,” Matisse used to say
Abedin Dino used to once paint
Black tulips on the autumn breeze.
This October afternoon,
The ochre of the sunset, though like velour
Takes on the color black,
And the echo of an endless fall.
Weightless, breathless black October days,
In the backyards of the world roses are black,
With dark skies on top
And a soul wandering in a nowhere land,
While the body slowly sinks
Like a Titanic in its last dive…
A purpuric butterfly suddenly appears,
Up it flies flapping its silent wings,
In this muted world, without gravity.
It is the butterfly of yore
That seeks to open your eyelids…
***
SISTER …
A cloud over her head
A mountain on her back
The sun upon her chest
The flowers of love
And a moon that is suddenly lost
And you run searching for it
In the dark of the night
Like in the dead grandmother’s tale
To the end of the world.
Only your eyes remain in the atmosphere
And a kiss on your burning forehead
My sister,
Half the moon
Half the sun.
***
YOU, MY SACRED PSALM
A little church you wanted for a long time
A bell that spreads the word of love
Whereas I, I looked for a single psalm
Hummed in the old songs of the late Solomon.
But all the psalms were chanted
In the whirlwind and sadness of time
Mouth to mouth
Bed to bed
Breath to breath
In ruined synagogues and churches
That did not survive.
Then I asked for my very own
The haunted psalm, the humble and the grey
The psalm of the lips awakening the dead and the dawn
That fill the small bird chests and homes
The psalm that lightly steps on the grass
With green eyes,
With a crushed pomegranate dripping juice
The psalm for a lonely church erected
Beside a stone-made altar
And a forgotten cult wall
Where the monks have left a million words of prayer
Under the celestial dome
With gods and deities falling in love.
For a church you asked
I found the purple psalm
At the palimpsest of all time
Laudamus the soul that has honored the hands
And holds me by his spirit
Today is the glorified day
Full of Mozart arches
Cello and oboe
That elevate the world and our bodies
Praised, my holy psalm!
***
ELEGY FOR AEGEAN SEA DOLLS
For dolls, an elegy has never been written,
An elegy mourning their dreams,
But today on the Aegean coast,
An elegy alone too little seems to be,
For their faint eyes in the great calamity
Burned and thrown by thunderstorms and lightning.
For the silent mouths of children left at sea
Fleeing the war and the horror of the world,
There is nothing but their small shoes left,
The scarves of the lost mothers who knows where
And these nameless dolls without hands and feet,
Without their adorned shirts
And eyes that no longer can speak of anything
From their hell-journey,
Dolls washed out on the Aegean coast…
For dolls, elegies have never been written says the foamy wave,
Never, repeats the wind that hits the rocks,
The wind that weeps with its Homeric tears.
This is the elegy of shoes that will not walk tomorrow,
The elegy of children who can no longer dream,
The elegy of their extinguished eyes in the world of bullet-like wonders
In the Sea of the Dead Humanism…
(Translated in English: Miranda – Shehu Xhilaga)
____________________
Angela Kosta is the Executive Director of MIRIADE Magazine, Academic, journalist, writer, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, translator, and promoter
