TIRANA, Feb. 6 – Albania has bid adieu to Dritero Agolli, one of the country’s greatest modern writers and poets who passed away last weekend at the age of 85 following chronic lung and heart problems.
Artists, fans and politicians came together to pay tribute to the writer, considered a legend both under communism and during Albania’s transition to democracy after the early 1990s at a ceremony at Tirana’s Palace of Congresses building where he appealed for the reformation of the former Labour Party in 1991 as the communist regime was collapsing and had many of his poems turned into songs in festivals held there.
A writer, journalist and politician, Agolli has been one of Albania’s most distinguished public figures, boasting 65 years of creativity starting from the late 1940s when he wrote his first poems as a seventh grade elementary school student.
Albania’s internationally renowned writer Ismail Kadare described Agolli’s passing away as this winter’s most shocking announcement.
“Dritero Agolli has been and will always be irreplaceable in the values and serious drama of Albanian literature. Agolli’s death announcement was one of the saddest news of this winter, not only for artists, but also for all Albanians wherever they are. We will all miss him,” Kadare, Albania’s perennial Nobel Prize for Literature candidate, now at 81, wrote in a message from Paris.
The country’s Academy of Science said Agolli’s departure was a great loss for Albanian literature and thought.
“The Albanian language, the national literature, the Albanian thought and the whole of the Albanian society lost a historic protagonist who was in the frontline of our people and nation’s most remarkable developments since the mid-20th century,” the Academy said in a statement.
“We are saddened by Dritero’s departure. But, he left a great work. He was great both in literature and as a man. You couldn’t tell whether he was a remarkable man of Albanian letters or an academic. His splendor stood in his simplicity,” said Myzafer Korkuti, the head of Albania’s Academy of Science.
Writer Diana à‡uli said Agolli’s work will remain immortal in Albania’s literature.
“Agolli’s works will live as long as Albania’s literature lives. No doubt his loss is painful for the family members, his friends and all those who worked with him or grew with his works. He was modest just like all great people are. Writers are people who treat others equally. Working with Dritero was like attending another university,” she said.
Fatos Kongoli, one of Albania’s contemporary voices, recalled what a rare man and writer Agolli has been and how Albania’s traditional alcoholic drink, raki, had joined them.
“When you stayed with Dritero you felt equal. Dritero and I loved raki and it joined us to talk lots of times. Agolli was a rare man even in his works,” he said.
The country’s top politicians all paid tribute to Agolli.
“With his departure, the Albanian letters will miss the great writer and poet, the author of remarkable and inexhaustible creativity, who qualitatively and originally enriches the treasure of Albanian people. Our society also lost the smart thinker and activist with huge public impact who with his rare contribution to two historical eras, left unforgettable mark as a protagonist of emancipating movements for more than half a century be it in art or Albanian politics of the multi-party era,“ said President Bujar Nishani.
Prime Minister Edi Rama wished Agolli to “rest in peace in the land where he left a mountain of immortality which will remain a pilgrimage site for all those in love with Albanian letters throughout generations.”
Agolli’s life and heritage
Born in Devoll, southeastern Albania, Agolli studied in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union in the late 1950s where he also knew his first wife, a Russian woman whom he also had a son with, in a relation that came to an end in 1961 after communist Albania split with the former Soviet Union over Marxist-Leninist ideology.
“Dritero Agolli’s passing away is irreplaceable for Albania and everybody for whom Albania is a lovely country. His life path, part of which is strongly related to Russia’s cultural capital, St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) has been long and impressive. Dritero has witnessed the most important 20th century events which he masterfully fixed with his pen,” said Russia’s ambassador to Albania Alexander Karpushin.
Agolli was a journalist and led the Writers’ League for 19 years. He was an MP both under communism and during Albania’s transition.
Drità«ro Agolli has been a prolific writer throughout the nineties, a rare voice of humanity and sincerity in Albanian letters, says Robert Elsie, a Canadian specialist in Albanian studies, in the writer’s bio.
Agolli is a writer who has had a far from negligible influence on the course of contemporary literature. He first attained success as a poet of the soil with his early verse collections in the late 1950s under communism, introducing him to the reading public as a sincere and gifted lyric poet of the soil and demonstrated masterful verse technique. An attachment to his roots came to form the basis of his poetic credo.
As a prose writer, Agolli first made a name for himself with the novel “Komisari Memo,” Tirana 1970 (Commissar Memo), originally conceived as a short story.
Agolli’s second novel, “Njeriu me top,” Tirana 1975 (The man with a cannon), translated into English as “The man with the gun,” Tirana 1983, takes up the partisan theme from a different angle and with a somewhat more subtle approach.
After these two rather conformist novels of partisan heroism, the standard theme encouraged by the party, Agolli produced a far more interesting work, his satirical “Shkà«lqimi dhe rà«nja e shokut Zylo,” Tirana 1973 (The splendour and fall of comrade Zylo), which proved to be his claim to fame. Comrade Zylo is the epitome of the well-meaning but incompetent apparatchik, director of an obscure government cultural affairs department. Zylo is considered a universal figure, a character to be found in any society or age, and critics have been quick to draw parallels ranging from Daniel Defoe and Nikolay Gogol’s Revizor to Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera’s Zert.
Back in 2013, Agolli was awarded the prestigious Carlo Levi Italian national literary award as a poet, journalist and writer closely related to the tradition and roots of his birthplace, and always proudly pointing out his origin. “His lines give life to a touching call where all elements of life mix and merge to form an identity which is childhood, work, pain, battle, love, loss and saviour,” the jury said.
His death come after Albania marked Agolli’s 85th birthday with one week of nationwide events in late 2016.
“It rarely happens to have such a writer loved by all generations, all dialects, territories and the Albanian diaspora,” said Culture Minister Mirela Kumbaro
Dritero Agolli is survived by his Albanian wife Sadije and his daughter Elona.
Below is one of his most famous poems also turned into a popular song, originally written as “Kur tà« jesh mà«rzitur shumà«,” translated into English by Eros Angjeli
I won’t be here
I won’t be here, I’ll be gone
Dissolved underground like many others
At the favorite cafà©
The waiters won’t see me
And through the roads I’ve walked
My dry cough won’t be heard
Above my grave will silently stand
An orchard like a miserable monk
You will be saddened
Because you won’t have me alive in a room
And when the wind blows on the window
You will cry slowly with the wind
But when you are really sad
Look through the bookshelves for me,
I’ll be hiding there
Between words and letters
You’ll only need to move the book
And I’ll come down, I’ll come near you
You will laugh nostalgically like you once did
Like a blooming meadow after heavy rain
