Poetry
Dranja
Not translated into English
Martin Camaj · 1981
Synopsis
Dranja is a tortoise that bears a woman's name, a dialect form of the name meaning rose. In the first of the madrigals, a young mountain man finds a fossil in which a tortoise is gripped by a serpent; further on, the serpent shows itself full of desire for her. The creature, half reptile and half woman, survived the cataclysms that wiped out her kind, the great reptiles of old, thanks to her impenetrable shell, but this protection leaves her unfinished. Patient, cunning, skilled at blending into nature, she flees the dark.
Context
The book was published in Munich in 1981, with the subtitle madrigals on the fate of an imperfect creature. The word comes from Italian poetry, but the text has neither its verse nor its song: critics read it as poetic prose, made of short pieces with no causal link, which can be read separately, like the pericopes of the Gospel. Beneath the fable shows through a veiled autobiography: the exiled author recognises himself in an animal common in his native mountains and looked on badly by popular mythology. The snake there has something of a totemic figure, close to the old solar cult of the mountain people. One study notes in it more than seventy sign-words.
Who it is for
A dense prose, to be read in several layers, that rewards rereading; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
An Albanian study regards it as its author's most important prose work; it was reissued in Tirana in 2012.
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