TIRANA, Nov. 26 – The complete works of Bilal Xhaferri, a late Albanian modern author who escaped Albania after persecution by the communist regime, have for the first time been published in five volumes under a project funded by the Albanian Culture Ministry.
The books containing Xhaferri’s best creativity, most of which written in the United States, where he lived from 1969 until his death in 1986, were promoted in a scientific session bringing together writers, scholars, friends and family.
Deputy Culture Minister Suzana Turku described Xhaferri’s works as some of the most representative of Albanian literature bringing artistic and aesthetic novelties in Albanian poetry and fiction.
The five separate volumes of Bilal Xhaferri’s works contain poetry, short stories, two versions of his only novel which he was not allowed to publish in Albania during communism, drama and research.
Bilal Xhaferri
Bilal Xhaferri (1935-1986) is the poetic voice of Albanian Chameria (ȡm쳩a), the southernmost portion of ethnic Albanian territory, which is now for the most part in Greece. He was born in the village of Ninat, near Konispol, and grew up as an orphan there and in Saranda. Xhaferri’s first poetry and short stories appeared in literary magazines in 1961-1962, and his first short-story collection, Nj쳫z t롲inj, tok롥 lasht련Young People, Ancient Land), was published in Tirana in 1966. In 1967, he wrote a novel called Kastakraus, but he was banned from publishing in Albania the following year, and the work only appeared posthumously. Due to his criticism of Ismail Kadare’s novel Dasma (The Wedding), he was expelled from the Albanian Writers’ Union and sent into internal exile to the village of Hamallaj near Durr쳮 In August 1969, upon learning that he was about to be arrested, Xhaferri escaped to Greece and emigrated from there to the United States. In Chicago, he founded the periodical Krahu i Shqiponj쳠(The Eagle’s Wing), as the voice of the Chamerian League in exile, of which 39 issues were published (1974-1986) in English and Albanian. Bilal Xhaferri died of cancer in a Chicago hospital on 14 October 1986. His remains were returned to Albania in May 1995, and were reburied in his native soil in Saranda.
Cham Ballad
By Bilal Xhaferri
In the distance fades a rainbow
Over the tips of the pyres,
A tearful word of farewell
In the pouring rain.
In the distance fades Chameria, our homeland in flames
And all of the roads take us northwards.
Over ancient Epirotic lands moans a Mediterranean wind,
Over the precious fields of our ancestors,
Lightning now feeds on the abandoned pastures,
Olive groves, unharvested, groan like the waves beating against the coast,
And on all sides, Cham land,
Enveloped in clouds,
Gasps and drowns in blood and tears,
Forsaken
And forlorn.
The bullets slicing through the darkness show us the way,
Flames that have devoured the soil, light up our path,
Behind us the storm lashes at the creaking doors of one-time homes.
And the road stretches northwards, northwards forever.
A folk now in exile, we wander in the downpour,
Farewell Chameria!
[Balada ȡme, from the volume Eja trishtim (Prishtina: Rilindja 1995), p. 99. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie.]
