…Let the uprooted “Stone” roll all the way to the bottom. Let us close the commemorative essay “A Cup of Nectar from the Garden of Love,” on the poetry collection Kin to the Seas by the poet Qazim Shemaj, with a sensitive page: his Albanian renditions, few indeed, but full of poetic nerve.

It is a known fact: poetry is a distinct substance, “translated” first in the author’s mind and soul, packed with imagery, rhythms, sounds, and nuances that belong to the language in which it was created. Therefore, translating poetry has always been one of the hardest trials in the art of translation. Many literary scholars have argued that poetry, in the true sense of the word, cannot be translated, because in the passage from one language to another, something of the original’s magic is inevitably lost.

But when the translator is a poet himself, like Qazim Shemaj, things change.

It is like that traveler who reaches the right destination because he is from that place; he knows the roads and the paths, even when he has to walk them with his eyes closed…

In this volume, Qazimi does not simply call the poems of foreign authors “translations.” He accompanies them with a more meaningful definition: “Albanian renditions.”

Isn’t it worth pausing for a moment on this distinction?

Translation aims to convey from one language to another what the text says: the meaning, the thought, the event, the image. An ad litteram translation, word for word, mainly answers the question: “What does the text say?”

An Albanian rendition, especially when it comes to poetry, demands something more: “How can what the poet said in his own language sound in Albanian?”

Because poetry is not just meaning. It is also sound, rhythm, breath, imagery, emotion, and inner music. A line can be translated accurately in meaning and yet no longer be poetry.

This is where the trial of the rendition begins.

The renderer must find a word, an image, a rhythm, or a resonance in the Albanian language that comes as close as possible to the original. In this process, he might stray from the word, but he must not stray from the spirit of the line. Therefore, rendering poetry into Albanian is, to some extent, also an act of recreation.

And when a poet does this, like Qazim Shemaj, he knows from the inside that difficult terrain where the translator must walk: between fidelity to the author and the freedom his own language affords him.

Perhaps this is also the reason Qazimi chose the term “Albanian renditions.”

Here are a few of them.

AFANASY FET

Spring

this morning, this joy of yours,

This power, this dawn, this light,

This blue above us,

These calls to one another,

These flocks, these birds,

These words of the streams.

So many crops, willows abound,

These drops, these tears,

And this leaf awakening,

These mountains, these leaves,

These midges, these bees,

And this whistling sound.

And this sky with no shadow anywhere,

This sigh through the village air,

This fitful sleep,

This sweltering bed of mist,

This exhaustion, these whims,

Look, this is spring.

ALEXANDER BLOK

And so the guitar strings were stretched,

The heart pleads and longs.

The moment the guitar feels a gypsy hand,

It bursts into song.

And before the choir, the old man like a brave,

Stamps his foot on the floor:

Burn me all up with your voice, with your gaze,

Ksyusha, oh joy!

And throaty voices, sounds of a bell

Thundered away;

As if in silver the dark-skinned hands

Clasped tightly today.

A mad delirium is this love,

Oh, how perverse…

so impossible—this happiness,

Just try and catch it!

ALEXANDER BLOK

Blue-eyed, God must have wept for you,

Genius of first love so true,

Wrapped in the rains you tempt me now,

Like a venomous hornet you hum in my brow.

He has no name like anyone else,

He wakes yesterday’s wounds for me to see,

And again I look at slender arms,

And again I hear throaty charms,

In her eyes full of blue,

Wide awake I drown anew.

SERGEI YESENIN

The Maple

Maple, you are bare again, freezing once more,

Hunched beneath the blizzard, your head bowed low.

I don’t know what you see, what you hear in the snow?!

Have you gone for a stroll past the village row?!

Walking down the road like a drunken guard,

In the drifts of snow your feet have frozen hard.

Ah, and I myself, feasted with my friends,

Will never reach my doorstep before the night ends.

Somewhere I grab the pine, here I meet the willow tree;

In the blizzard about summer, I start singing with glee;

I feel like a maple myself, with roots and with leaves,

But I am not deciduous, I am the green that breathes.

Dazed among the trees, oh, how foolish we became;

Like a stranger’s wife, I embraced the birch’s frame.

MARINA TSVETAYEVA

I kissed the young man on the head,

I couldn’t find his lips, I don’t know why!

And yet, as has been known for ages,

You are so good, oh love!

A little bit of merry wine

And you throw off your fur coat, fling it away,

Oh, as it is said and written,

Madly you will ignite, oh blood.

No, no, for the time that we had,

Love could not become a woman!

Venus herself, taking up the axe,

Strikes splinters everywhere in the cellar.

In the hell of ice and plague,

She wedded the winter cold,

Love in her arms

Needs sturdy boots for the snow.

Just look, what an adored creation,

Weave me the rope, what a fate,

And sit down according to the old rite

Where the girl lies in bed.

And goodbye, sooner or later,

We will meet again together,

When we learn that boys

Are better kissed than on the head.