Place: Albania

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

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The Simultaneous Precision of Each Person’s Storytelling and the Unknowability of the Truth: On Ismail Kadare’s A Dictator Calls

Kadare suggests that memory itself can build discourse, poetic and otherwise, with those who are no longer living.

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, Counterpoint Press, 2023 

In A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare creates an interwoven narrative of historic suspense, gently challenging the line between personal storytelling and an encyclopedic index of information. John Hodgson’s eloquent translation from Albanian is densely packed with perspectives, anecdotes, and curiosity surrounding a significant moment in Soviet literary history. How a legendary conversation transpired and what impact it had on all involved is the question that Kadare seeks to answer in A Dictator Calls; he approaches the question from all angles, and in the process investigates his own complex relationships to historical and literary legacies, afterlives, and the very act of storytelling.

Kadare’s novel is grounded in a story from 1934: Osip Mandelstam, a legendary Russophone poet, had been arrested after writing a poem critical of Joseph Stalin, a text known in English as “The Stalin Epigram” or “The Kremlin Mountaineer.” According to the general narrative, Stalin himself decided to call Boris Pasternak, a contemporary of Mandelstam’s, to ask whether or not Mandelstam was a great poet. Stories diverge, and contemporaries of both poets, from Viktor Shkhlovsky to Isaiah Berlin to Anna Akhmatova, claim different conclusions to that conversation. 

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What’s New in Translation: October 2021

New works in translation from Poland, Croatia, and the Netherlands!

This month, our selections of the best in world literature are unified by their writers’ undeniable strength of voice and masterful control of the narrative form. From the Netherlands, a collection of A.L. Snijder’s very short stories—a genre invented by their author—revels in the unreal natures of our reality. From Croatia, the dark humorist stylings of Robert Perišić masterfully delineate the unrealiable boundaries of nations and psychologies. And from Poland, reporter and writer Margo Rejmer brings us a rare and intimate glimpse at Communist Albania under the fractious rule of Enver Hoxha, from the people who lived through it. 

night train

Night Train by A.L. Snijders, translated from the Dutch by Lydia Davis, New Directions, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

            “For more than fifty years I have cherished one wish: to travel. This wish is part of another wish: for reality without reality—stories that are indistinguishable from the truth.”

—A.L. Snijders, “Baalbek” from Night Train

The key to understanding A.L. Snijders’s very short stories (dubbed zkvzeer korte verhalen) lies inside “Baalbek,” where the Dutch author connects his desire to visit Lebanon’s ancient Roman outpost with creating stories that depict “reality without reality.” The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a megalith found in Baalbek and enshrouded with otherworldly presence, represents the perfectly magnified symbol for Snijders’s miniature approach. His Night Train—a collection of ninety-one zkv translated by Lydia Davis—is a shapeshifting amalgam of fable, zen koan, commentary, lyrical essay, and autobiography. As an immersive foray into the unknown, the instability of Snijders’s narrative form produces a trompe-l’oeil effect “indistinguishable from the truth,” giving the reader a sensation of being at once disoriented and illuminated.

Born Peter Cornelis Müller in 1937 in Amsterdam, Snijders came from a large, bourgeois Catholic family. The dual forces of freedom and order constitute the main themes of his life and work. Artistic and cosmopolitan, Snijders nevertheless chose a stable career teaching at a police academy and led a placid life as a gentleman farmer in rural Achterhoek, Holland’s eastern region. Even after being awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 2010—one of the three most prestigious literary honors in Holland—Snijders did not, for years, deviate from the low-key routine of reading his work on an early morning radio show and circulating his steady flow of zkv among an email list of loyal readers. Ever industrious, he passed away this past June while working on new material.

The commonplace in Snijders’s oeuvre is imbued with mystery. In “Minor Characters,” Snijders’s alter-ego wonders if his compressed fiction may actually be “unpsychological novel[s] for people who understand nothing about psychology.” If reality resembles an unseen but anarchic mole emerging each night to turn Snijders’s garden into a surrealist landscape (“Mole”), then the author’s aesthetic philosophy suggests holistic means to affirm “what can never be understood.” This notion of reality as unknowable, or “unpsychological,” represents the trademark of Snijders’s fiction, allowing his narrative—as both burrowing animal and spy—to elude conventional expectations and assume an enigmatic depth, despite its compact form. READ MORE…

Physical Object and Metaphysical Destiny: To the Lake Journeys to the Heart of the Balkans

Kapka Kassabova’s English-language travelogue invites readers in the Balkans to consider local culture with a fresh perspective.

On a website called Lost Bulgaria, anyone curious enough can browse thousands of carefully preserved and curated photographs depicting the poignant yet essential ways in which the people, customs, and landscape have transformed or been transformed from the last quarter of the 1800s until 2010. About a dozen of the blurred images kept in this time machine take us back to the first half of the twentieth century and Lake Ohrid, one of the world’s oldest and deepest, which nowadays is split by the border between North Macedonia and Albania. The majority of the visuals reveal everyday life near the shores, the monasteries that dot the mountainous terrain, the traditionally clad locals, or the passers-by who felt the need to extend a prayer to Saint Naum of Ohrid. Kapka Kassabova’s latest travelogue with distinct autobiographical elements, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, offers a similar but much more powerful passage through the lake’s past and present.

The book, which reviewers often place in the travel fiction genre, is pronouncedly personal, even though the disclosed memories, both on an individual level and as an outlet for the collective subconscious, undoubtedly remind readers from diverse regions of the globe of their unique roots and unending voyage of self-discovery.

The author (b. 1973) spent her childhood and teenage years in Sofia and later moved with her family to New Zealand, only to finally—or at least for the time being—settle down in the Scottish Highlands. Her extensive travels have informed her writing, which encompasses poetry collections and novels, in addition to literary travelogues. Although Kassabova’s mother tongue is Bulgarian, she writes in English, a practice that evokes the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Khalil Gibran, and Joseph Conrad and makes her Bulgarian translations all the more fascinating.

Located on the edge of her grandmother’s homeland, Lake Ohrid is where she passed a few of her summer holidays. Once considered the pearl of the Balkans, nowadays it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and boasts endemic species and unique prehistoric remnants. Despite this international protection however, its pristine waters are still threatened by climate change and widespread pollution. While making a convincing case for immediate preservation action of global scale, Kassabova’s fictionalized reportage can also be perceived as a continuation to her previous one, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, in which she sets on a quest to comprehend the meaning of the separation points not only between countries, but also between people. In a similar fashion, To the Lake prompts us to tag along as she traces the ancient Via Egnatia and dives into the bloody history of the region, where Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, and Greek are always at crossroads, especially in the aftermath of the two Balkan wars and the ensuing decades under communist rule. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from China, Albania, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news from China, Albania, and Central America. In China, the prestigious October Literature Prizes have been presented, with Jidi Majia awarded the 2020 Special Achievement Award; in Albania, the National Center for Books and Reading has revealed the winners of the its 2020–2021 translation fund; and in Central America, Carlos Fonseca and José Adiak Montoya have been featured on Granta‘s best young Spanish-language authors list. Read on to find out more! 

Xiao Yue Shan, Blog Editor, reporting for China

October 十月, the renowned literature magazine founded in August 1978, gets its name from the downfall of China’s Gang of Four (a group of Communist Party leaders who took most of the blame for the Cultural Revolution’s devastations) in the October of 1976—upon which, as the line goes, the people of China were able to put behind them ten years of terror, and begin anew the aspirational proceedings of a new national context. As such, it is a publication that took upon itself the tremendous responsibility of delineating the rapidly changing cultural milieu, as well as rousing once more the imaginary and illuminating capacities of a language crippled from years of demolishment. It remains today one of the most prestigious publications of the nation, and the October Literature Prize amongst the highest honours awarded to Chinese writers.

On April 16, the sixteenth and seventeenth October Literature Prizes were presented in “the first town built on the Yangtze”—Lizhuang in Sichuan province. Of each edition, twelve writers were honoured in categories of Novel, Novella, Short Story, Essay, Poetry, and Special Achievement. Jidi Majia 吉狄马加 received the 2020 Special Achievement Award for his book-length poem, 裂开的星球 (The Split Planet), a totemic work that brings the soaring epics of myth into the startling light of the present, as inquiries to the human soul once again come to the poet’s consciousness; the work is emblematic of Jidi’s conviction that poetry holds a knowledge of the future. Also amongst the awardees was writer A Lai 阿来 for his novel 云中记 (In the Clouds), which describes the complete disappearance of a Tibetan village in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and a local priest’s invocations of how one copes in the face of profound, replete obliteration. A full list of winners can be found here (Chinese only).

If you are to find yourself somewhere near Nanjing, it would be worth your time to visit the Tangshan Quarry Park, a devastatingly beautiful, painterly topography formed from a past limestone mine. It is also the site of the latest location of the Librairie Avant-Garde, a chain of bookshops well-respected for its literary selections, newly opening this month. Taking over the site of an abandoned processing plant, the newly opening Librairie is a stunning feat of contemporary architecture, preserving the red-brick facades rounded towers of its past life, while adopting cleanly to the slopes and gentle light of its natural surroundings. And even if you’re not the type to be impressed with elegant arches and staircases, the books should do; Librairie Avant-Garde is known especially for their revere of poetry, and the thousand-volume collection available here, ranging from Bei Dao to Pessoa, is given proper regard and pertinence. The opening event, held on April 17, also featured the first Librairie Avant-Garde Poetry Awards. READ MORE…

Pleasantly Odd Prose: An Interview with Translator from the Albanian, John Hodgson

When Albania was isolated under communism, Kadare tried to help his readers travel in their imagination.

Throughout Ismail Kadare’s autobiographical novel The Doll, recently published in English by Counterpoint Press, the narrator voices a dilemma that most writers know well: the insufficiency of language. “It was hard to explain because there were no words for it,” he says at one point. “Either I didn’t know them, or they weren’t yet invented.” And later: “No language could describe what I felt in my heart. I needed a different one. The one I had would not obey me.”

So much of the literary translator’s work lies in courting the obedience of language. Translation makes intelligible the previously unintelligible, imagines new words to convey preexistent meaning. John Hodgson knows this well: The Doll is the sixth book of Kadare’s that Hodgson has translated. Considering his outsized role in bringing Kadare’s work to English-language readers, he cuts a modest, unassuming figure. One of the few Albanian-English literary translators working today, Hodgson has translated Kadare’s novels The Three-Arched Bridge, The Traitor’s Niche, and A Girl in Exile, among others. In comparison to the Albanian writer’s previous novels, Hodgson describes The Doll as “a gentle, reflexive, and humorous book” and found “the experience of translating it was correspondingly relaxed.”

Hodgson and I recently discussed his work as an Albanian-English interpreter and literary translator, as well as the inimitable pleasures of “a Kadare sentence.”

—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor

Sophia Stewart (SS): You were born in England and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle. What initially drew you to the Albanian language, and what led you to pursue Albanian translation professionally?

John Hodgson (JH): In the 1980s, I taught English in several now vanished Eastern European countries: the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. The British Council sent me to the University of Prishtina in Kosovo. I knew nothing about Kosovo when I arrived, but I was enthralled by the life there. Now, during lockdown, I’ve written a short book in Albanian about this time, which I recall with great affection. Soon afterwards I was head-hunted by the United States Government to translate Marxist-Leninist propaganda.

SS: Seeing as you were born in England, and therefore speak British English, do you actively avoid Briticisms in your translations? While there is no such thing as “standard English,” do you attempt to make your English translations as universally intelligible—that is, “unmarked” by dialectical indicators—as possible?

JH: When I worked for the United States government, my computer would bleep whenever I used a Briticism, and this taught me, for instance, not to write the word “whilst.” English is very rich and capacious, so it is possible to write in an “unmarked” style without lapsing into bland UN-speak. Albanian also has a lot of variation, particularly between the north and south, and Kadare writes in a non-regional literary Albanian that is quite a recent flowering, and which he himself has done a lot to shape and infuse with expressive power. Recently he has been consciously reviving old words and creating neologisms. A Kadare sentence in Albanian is quite unlike any other writer’s. I was pleased when a reviewer described the prose of one of my translations as “pleasantly odd.” I thought I had perhaps captured something of this. Dialectical indicators in the original language pose more intractable problems than a translator’s own idiom. So does slang. Kadare hardly ever uses slang, and presents none of the difficulties of, for example, the soldiers’ Bosnian in Faruk Šehić’s Under Pressure.

SS: The author-translator relationship can vary so much depending on the particular project or pairing. Having translated so much of Kadare’s work over the course of more than two decades, what does your working relationship with Kadare look like?

JH: Kadare has had dozens of translators and he can’t spend all his time dealing with us. I have been grateful for the confidence he has shown in me. Generally, after I have completed the first draft of each book in English, the editor and I put together questions for Kadare, which he has always answered conscientiously. He doesn’t use the internet, and I like to respect his privacy. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

The latest news from Albania, France, and Japan!

Many countries around the world are now weeks into their lockdown, but literature continues to thrive and is necessarily concerned with the current crisis. In Albania, literary events are moved online whilst booksellers are expected to continue working; in France, a Romanian writer and opponent of the Romanian communist regime sadly passed away from coronavirus. In Tokyo, pandemic literature sees a revival. Read on to find out more! 

Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from Albania

There was a moment when it felt like an early April literary dispatch from Albania would just be a chance to mourn the events that I was excited about but that never came to pass. Albania registered its first cases of COVID-19 on March 8 and went into full lockdown less than 48 hours after. That obviously means that for almost the entire duration of March, literary news and activities have been scarce. There was one event that I was sad to see postponed: a panel and discussion to be held on the lost voices of Albanian women writers, something that was long overdue.

That being said, Albanians with a literary inclination have found other ways to remain engaged with their reading lists or interests. Radical Sense is a reading group that meets weekly in Tirana to read and discuss radical leftist texts at 28 November, a versatile bookstore/safe space for readers and activists, among its many other uses. Although the physicality of the charming attic where these discussions are held is sacred to the group, participants have taken a page from universities and workplaces across the globe and have just held their first online book club meeting through Zoom. Readings and discussion happen in English, so for those who live in Albania and are interested in participating, you can check in with the lovely owners of 28 November here for more details. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's literary news from Morocco, Albania, and the United States!

This week our reporters bring you news of Morocco’s publishing industry—including reports of a plagiarism scandal—the release of Albanian LGBT activist Kristi Pinderi’s memoir, and a series of events celebrating global literary publication and design in New York. Read on to find out more!

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco 

The King Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud Foundation, a Casablanca-based non-profit organization that provides rare and rigorous documentation about Morocco’s publishing industry, released its fifth annual report in February to coincide with the Casablanca International Book Fair.

According to the report, some 4,219 titles were published in Morocco last year, representing a steady growth of the publishing industry’s output. In 1987, by comparison, Morocco published 850 titles. But this increased production is served by an increasingly fragile distribution network: whereas Casablanca was home to 65 bookstores in 1987, only 15 remain today. Kenza Sefrioui, author of the meticulously researched (if disheartening) Le livre à l’épreuve, estimates that there is no more than one bookstore per 86,000 inhabitants and 84.5 percent of Moroccans do not have a library card.

The trend towards the Arabization of Morocco’s publishing industry continued in 2019, with Arabic accounting for 78 percent of literary works; French comprised 18 percent, and Tamazight just over 1 percent. Of these literary works, poetry is the dominant genre with the novel coming in a close second. And while 11.5 percent of literary works published last year were translations, nearly half of these translations were from the French (and almost a quarter from the English).

Moroccan books are, on average, the least expensive books in the Maghreb. The average price of a book published in Morocco is 72.74 dirhams, or about the cost of 10 liters of milk. In neighboring Algeria, the average price is 85.93 dirhams, while in Tunisia it’s 90.81. But in a country where a majority of people earn less than 2,500 dirhams a month, 72.74 dirhams can seem a prohibitive price.

The report ends with a sobering statistic: in Morocco in 2019, a whopping 83 percent of published works were written by men. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Mr. Shyti Sheds Light on Some Lesser Known Aspects of National Hygiene” by Ardian Vehbiu

. . . it resembled those desk calendars with individual date sheets, on the back of which one can read a quote by Marx or some curiosity from Mars.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, the prolific Albanian writer, Ardian Vehbiu, mixes the language of bodily intimacy with the language of the state and bureaucratic maintenance. A dry metaphor takes root, illuminating not only the persistence of pastiche but also the tendency of humans to analyze and rearrange thoughts. This tendency, what some may call the poetic or political, exists in some way at every level of human work. With humour, Vehbiu manages to, in the space of a small speech, cast light on material circumstances, personal history, and the idiosyncratic phenomena that rises from circumstance.

“There will be those, among you,” Mr. Shyti said, “who still remember the time when one could not find any toilet paper in Albania: the State of Workers and Peasants, which thought of everything, did not consider it necessary to provide for this indispensable item for the daily wellbeing of its citizens, not because it was its intention to abandon them in their efforts for keeping their private parts clean, but because it was, perhaps, rather confident that the Albanians had such adequate tradition that they would not find it difficult to overcome such a trifle. I, for a start,” Mr. Shyti continued, “did use polished river stones or, indeed, fig leaves for personal hygiene purposes; however, the truth is that, leaving aside a significant—and still unknown—number of compatriots that humbly used jugs of water to wash themselves, the Albanians of the time used the daily newspaper as toilet paper. I do remember, as a matter of fact,” he recalled, “my late Uncle Neptun, who developed a habit of saving his newspaper copies, which, later, when they were past their relevance, he would cut into equally small pieces, with the precision of a surveyor or metalworker, using his wife’s fearful sewing scissors. He used to do this on Sunday afternoons, while listening to live football coverage on his battery-powered transistor. The result of his work was a handsome pile of regular square sheets, fixed on the wall with a monstrous nail right next to the Turkish toilet; it resembled those desk calendars with individual date sheets, on the back of which one can read a quote by Marx or some curiosity from Mars. And, so, like many other guests at Uncle Neptun’s,” he went on to explain, “I, too, would happen to squat on his toilet, waiting for ‘relief,’ while perusing pieces of field news, recommended phrases, headlines as large as tank tracks, fear-instilling political invectives, accusations and counter-accusations against the superpowers and Eurocommunism, letters from common citizens and public epistles; or watching photographic fragments of leaders, terraced hills, military naval ships, milky cows, and front-runner textile workers, always out of context and randomly remixed as if in a Dadaist work of art, thanks to poor Neptun’s magician folding and precise scissors, may his soul rest in peace! Thus, a toilet was transformed into a recycler not only of the Albanians’ metabolic waste and periodical paper, but also of news and information disseminated by those newspapers, even the ideology of the times, albeit always in the form of collage, or in stark combinations. To those of you who are young and have no recollections of such times,” concluded Mr. Shyti, “I will limit myself to saying that reading slightly outdated newspapers in such minimalistic and fragmented pieces resembles, more than one would think nowadays, a news aggregator or portal, including Facebook, which people now think of as something new.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

In Romania and Albania this week, literature abounds.

Any occasion to celebrate language is a happy one, as demonstrated in this week’s dispatches from Romania and Albania. With events honoring Romanian Language Day and an emphasis on Albanian literature in Italy, the forces propelling the continuation and evolution of literary language are well and alive. Read on for the news, reported from the ground by our committed editors.

Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor, reporting from Romania

Romanian Language Day has officially been celebrated on August 31 since 2011. This year, I had the privilege of being in Romania to observe this holiday, more specifically to find myself in Cluj-Napoca, a city with a powerful literary scene thanks to its academic and historical tradition. The event dedicated to this occasion (held one day before, on August 30) was held in an interwar casino revamped into an art gallery in Cluj’s central park, and the general public ranged from the city’s literary elite to a group of kids in baseball caps.

Horia Bădescu, one of the representative literary figures of the 1960s (available in English and French translation) and historian and writer Ovidiu Pecican spoke on the history, significance, evolution, and particularities of the Romanian language, while professor of journalism and writer Ilie Rad and translator Gabriela Lungu (who has translated books like Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Alessandro Baricco’s Mr. Gwyn, among many others, from Italian to Romanian) discussed the originality, richness, and their own intimate perceptions of the Romanian language.

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The Multiple Worlds of the Writer: In Conversation with Margo Rejmer

I feel that I live longer than I do in reality, because I have three parallel lives . . .

Margo Rejmer’s spare, exacting prose and illustrious methods have earned her widespread praise for both her meticulous reportage and her discerningly detailed narratives. From recollections garnered from the survivors of Communist Albania, to the stories collected from the varied and elaborate landscape of Bucharest, to the grappling of relationships in certain toxic fictional characters in Warsaw, the worlds depicted are all at once worn with secrecy, curious with hope, and bold with the human instinct for survival. In this following interview, Asymptote’s Filip Noubel speaks to Rejmer on subjects of writerly process, choice under totalitarianism, and individual freedoms.

Filip Noubel (FN): You have written two books on the experience and the consequences of dictatorial Communism in Ceauşescu’s Romania and Hoxha’s Albania. What drew you to those countries that, even within the context of then Communist Central Europe, have been generally perceived as economically underdeveloped, politically very conservative, and unattractive as destinations?

Margo Rejmer (MR): Both of the books, Bukareszt. Kurz i krew (Bucharest. Dust and Blood, 2013) and Błoto Słodsze Niż Miód. Głosy Komunistycznej Albanii (Mud Sweeter than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania, 2018) deal with problems of power, strategies of survival in the authoritarian system, and searching for spaces of freedom. Although, when I started working on them, I didn’t know where they would lead me, as it turns out, everyone has their own inner path that leads to the same point. My book about Albania was supposed to simply be a guide to the Albanian mentality for the Polish reader. In the end though, it turned out to be a story about an isolated Orwellian-Kafkaesque space where people are controlled and punished, yet try to look for happiness and for a substitute for freedom, at least internally.

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Postcolonial Philosophy in Idlir Azizi’s Novel Terxhuman

Building Terxhuman on postcolonial thinking, hitherto absent in Albanian literature, Idlir Azizi has created a new literary genre.

By rebelling against his country’s dominant Euro-centric discourse and disobeying the fundamental rules of Albanian grammar, writer Idlir Azizi has created a new kind of Albanian literature. In today’s essay, researcher Adem Ferizaj analyzes Azizi’s Terxhuman and helps us understand the implications it might have for Albanian-language literature and Albania as a whole.

The pyramid crisis in Albania and the Kosovo Liberation War are the only two Albanian incidents that simultaneously made headlines in The New York Times, Le Monde, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the 1990s. Since Western journalists’ interest in the Albanian lands depends on political turmoil in the Balkans that could ruin European “geopolitical stability,” this comes as no surprise. When Western editorial offices are urgently in need of articles about this region, the local who organizes meetings, provides information on the addressed issue, and translates interviews becomes indispensable for them.

In Albania, this local is often referred to as a “fixer,” although the word terxhuman (which shares a root with the English “dragoman”) is used as well. The latter is also the title of Idlir Azizi’s 2010 novel, which takes this profession as a starting point to address Western arrogance towards Albanians and to provide an unprecedented analysis of Albanian society. In a very original way, Azizi deconstructs the mainstream Albanian discourses that are based on Eurocentric concepts, or, to put it differently, on Western arrogance towards Albanians. In this way, Terxhuman (which has yet to be translated into English) interprets Albanian reality in an alternative and postcolonial way. Such an analysis did not previously exist in contemporary Albanian literature.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary updates from our editors on the ground in Albania and Slovakia.

As central Europe heats up this month, so does the literary scene! In Albania, an unprecedented $10,000 prize was awarded, while in Slovakia, readings are taking place everywhere: in gardens, on trams, and at an old mill! Read on for details.

Barbara Halla, Assistant Editor, reporting from Albania

Although it is only in its fifth year, the Kadare Prize is one of the most important prizes in Albanian literature at the moment. Readers might be forgiven for thinking that I use this label because the prize bears Kadare’s name, but I think its importance relies more on a few other elements, the first of which is not strictly literary. First of all, the Kadare Prize proclaims to award its winners the sum of $10,000 (though there has been gossip floating around that the awarding body has not been forthcoming with the cash) that includes financial help to get the book published in the first place. A not insignificant amount of money to consider, especially as in the Albanian publishing world, literary agents don’t exist and new authors have to pay publishing houses to get published in the first place.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Three continents in a ten-minute read. We're bringing you literary news from Morocco to Poland to the USA.

This week, publishing gets political in Morocco, Polish authors show us their best hands, and a scatter of multilingual literary soirées light up eastern USA. Paul Bowles once said that Tangier is more New York than New York, and this week, you can make the comparison. Our editors around the world have snagged a front-row view, and here are their postcards. 

Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco

The 23rd edition of Le Printemps du Livre et des Arts took place in Tangier from April 18-21. This literary event, hosted by the Institut Français in the stately Palais des Institutions Italiennes, stood in stark contrast to the hurly-burly of the Casablanca book fair. A reverent hush filled the air at Le Printemps as small clusters of well-heeled attendees browsed the books on offer or closed their eyes to drink in the plaintive melodies of the malhoun music playing in the palm-lined courtyard.

To further its stated mission of “fostering debate and discussion between writers and thinkers on both sides of the Mediterranean,” Le Printemps offered ten roundtable discussions and conferences—all delivered in French (Morocco’s official languages are Arabic and Amazigh). Questioning the sidelining of Arabic, journalist and publisher Kenza Sefrioui called French a “caste language” and a social marker during a standout roundtable discussion on publishing.

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