Short stories
Hija e maleve
Not translated into English
Ernest Koliqi · 1929
Synopsis
Twelve stories of Shkodra and the northern mountains, where the custom of blood feud and arranged marriages collides with ideas coming from the West. Doda, a young schoolteacher full of idealism, finds himself bound by his kin to avenge his brother's murder. A village musician courts a girl from Shkodra; gendarmes hunt a man whom the ties of the tribe protect; two outlaws hidden in a cave hear seven gunshots which they take for a prophecy. The fairies of the mountains return from one story to the next, and one of them takes the place of a sleeping girl.
Context
Its author spent the years of exile that followed 1924 in Montenegro and Bosnia, partly in Tuzla, where he learned Serbo-Croatian. The collection appeared in 1929 in Zadar, a Dalmatian city with an Albanian population since the eighteenth century. Its realism and its analysis of conduct displeased some of the established writers, who had remained faithful to romantic nationalism. The stories draw on oral tradition and legend, and the customary law of the mountains governs honour, hospitality and vengeance in them; a critic from Pristina sees in it oral literature stylized in a concrete mountain setting.
Who it is for
Twelve short stories, between legend and realism, which call for some knowledge of the unwritten laws of the highlands; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
The collection sold well, and critics regard it as the birth of the modern Albanian short story.
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