Poetry
Për ty
Not translated into English
Esad Mekuli · 1955
Synopsis
Fifty poems, the first book of a forty-year-old poet. Love and death, the eternal motifs of the genre, are almost absent from it: the collection speaks of the Albanians of Yugoslavia and their history, of the emigrant, the beggar, the poor man, the peasant stripped by the gendarmes, and of the need for freedom of a people kept at the margins. The verses, little polished, carry more matter than they can hold.
Context
Mekuli had first written in Serbo-Croatian and published in Albanian only after the war. The collection, published in Pristina, was reissued three times. Rexhep Qosja compared his renown to that of Mayakovsky, Apollinaire or Lorca and called him a tribune of the people; critics compare him to Migjeni, his contemporary from Albania, also a poet of poverty. The province, autonomous since 1945, saw this autonomy widened in 1974.
Who it is for
Short poems in Albanian, with no French translation; to be read with the context of Yugoslav Kosovo in mind.
Prizes and reception
Robert Elsie regarded its author as the father of modern Albanian poetry in Yugoslavia; his journal was still appearing in 2018.