Poetry
Më jepni një emër
Not translated into English
Fatos Arapi · 1972
Synopsis
The poem that gives the book its title asks for a name: a life that would fit in a drop of blood, a being who blends among others as one passes through a street, the flight of Icarus enclosed in a tear. Elsewhere, the poet leaves Vlora without saying goodbye to the sea; weary, feeling himself grow old, he experiences this departure as the separation of one body from another, and the sea that burned his lips with iodine and salt becomes a memory that wounds. Identity and the need for freedom collide there with the pressure of power.
Context
The book appears in 1972 and marks, according to scholarship, a turning point: the sea, with which the poet identified in his collections of 1966 and 1968, is now only separation and wounded memory. It is banned, and during the purges of 1973 it narrowly escapes being pulped; its author then falls silent and publishes nothing of note until 1989. Until then he had formed, with Ismail Kadare and Dritëro Agolli, the trio that set the tone for the country's verse in the preceding decade; this book places him among those who turn towards modernity and collide with the censors.
Who it is for
Brief pieces, with tight images, darker than those of the earlier books; a few of the author's poems appeared in French in a 1973 anthology.
Prizes and reception
Critics regard it as the most modern collection of its generation; its title was reused for the first volume of the author's selected poems, published in 2014.
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