The Creator of the Modern Ballad

With the poet Koçi Petriti at the Bushtricë bridge

THE CREATOR OF THE MODERN BALLAD

A perspective on Koçi Petriti’s book “Ballads”

BY PILO ZYBA

Many times I have tried to write an overview of the work of our well-known poet, Koçi Petriti. But this time, his newest book, titled “Ballads,” was the catalyst. Furthermore, a shared journey to the place where the author, seeker, and creator forged these national artistic values served as an inspiration. Traveling from Tirana to Korçë, he showed me his house up close in the town of Librazhd, where he lived and worked for a quarter of a century. In this region surrounded by mountains, springs, and greenery, he worked and created in silence, extracting pearls of our literature from his working hive, such as his ballads, while also sketching and carving his creative portrait into our memory.

Koçi Petriti has an observational trait, an ability to grasp artistic themes. His bee gathers pollen from these themes—the names of rivers, bridges, and mines—and then, in his wonderful processing factory, he creates what is called unique in art.

When it comes to ballads, Koçi Petriti is a rare creator who is worth studying to highlight the values of his work, as well as the unique values he brings to Albanian literature, especially in the ballad form.

To all those who know him, he is modest about the honey of his creation, which holds spiritual value for the reader. The author’s portrait and his very life are a ballad to those who know him. The ballad of the author’s life knows blossomings, but also blows; it knows tranquility, but also exhaustion, the struggles to withstand misunderstandings and ambiguities. His footsteps on this long road have left their mark in the villages of Korçë where he began as a teacher, in Librazhd, in Tirana at the former Writers’ League, and in the university dean’s office where he makes his contribution.

THE MIRACLE OF BALLADIC CREATION

All these years, nearly forty years of his ballads, I ask myself, what is the secret of the work and success in Koçi Petriti’s creation?

Koçi Petriti is the creator of balladic bridges. Bridges of thought, connection, expression, and human and romantic understanding. He connects the artistic with the spiritual, the spiritual with the historical, the historical with the epic, and so on. The bridges he has created serve and keep open the path of passage through time, both within and outside it. It is impossible not to understand this when you read his ballad “The Bushtricë Bridge.”

I see all the bridges

From the Bushtricë bridge,

Here, the Kaaba bridge,

Here, the Drashovicë.

And indeed, when I photograph the poet near this bridge, I think that from this bridge he sees all the bridges of the globe, the bridges of thought and understanding (which we often mistakenly tear down). From up high, the poet looks out, feeling the winds of the times that blow, or pass by, leaving behind kindness and understanding, love and grudges. He sees the seasons, the changes, and the days yet to come. The poet’s balladic bridge is the barometer of the times, but also the magic eye and radar that photographs and stamps them to pass them on to the reader. Although forty years old, it seems as if it were created today; why? The author foresaw and knew how to build the bridges of his thought and of the contemporaries he lives with. From the moment of creation, he knows that times laden with changes, blossomings, and upheavals will walk across these bridges, which is why he is careful when he raises them in art. The creative artist’s bridges are like pillars where talent is driven deep into the national bedrock. The past and the new walk safely upon them, and the author is aware that every progression in time, history, and art will remain on the pages of the works he has created. It is impossible not to understand this when you read “The Ballad of the Bridge.”

They reached out their hands, laid stones,

Paved the pain that goes unsaid,

Until over the river they became a bridge

For those who love each other to cross.

So, first and foremost, it is the author who builds these artistic bridges for loves to cross. It seems that only loves will cross, but over the bridges he has built, free thoughts also cross, as do the horses of the wind that batter it with the current of contradictions and strike its pillars, which hold it aloft between banks, between paths—banks and paths that must be understood in our time of changes. Their waves, often swollen by malicious downpours, strike the bridge’s legs, perhaps not to tear it down, because they cannot, but to weaken its resistance. To weaken its structural form, its wonderful architecture, or its historical values and unique genre.

Koçi builds these beautiful bridges in art with great mastery, transforming the folk ballad or rhapsody into the modern ballad of our time. If we consider the legend of Rozafa, the song of Ago Ymeri, or the rhapsody of Rexha, we understand that Petriti builds a bridge between them, in whose spaces flows the river of his thought, bearing no resemblance to his predecessors, yet unseen by today’s poets either, and this spring is called by and bears his name.

THE BRIDGE OF CROSSING FROM LEGEND TO BALLAD

Among the creators of tradition (mostly folk tradition), there is a fact that has rarely been stated and analyzed, but which must be looked at carefully.

In the legend of Rozafa, the creator first takes the legend and elevates it into a song, into a ballad, creating a bridge between truth and legend, between the creation and the reader, or in the case of the song, the manner of hearing or writing it.

Strangely, Koçi Petriti does the opposite!

The author finds the subject, the fact, the theme, and then turns it into a ballad. Here it is worth mentioning his entirely unique ability of observation, to extract valuable artistic minerals from the earth, and to make it as valuable as his creative mine itself.

In all his ballads, finding the artistic fable is a talent, a skill; then the creative work in the factory of processing and enrichment, or the breaking down and separation from other ores, is another exhausting, unique task, which also requires study and attention from critics. Such a discovery can be seen in all the author’s ballads, starting with “The Bushtricë Bridge,” “The General Dog,” “The Mother’s Ballad,” “Kajo Babjeni,” “The Horse,” “Ballad for Sali Butka,” and so on.

The author isolates all these precious artistic minerals from the rich national mine, not only of art, but also of history, love, patriotism, and so on. But what is the difference between the folk balladic art and the unique art created by Koçi Petriti? If the great Paganini enlarged the fingerboard of his violin to fulfill the spaces of his music, Koçi Petriti elevated the values of the national balladic song, and beyond. He did this by giving it more breath, more soul and feeling, and by cleansing it of superfluous words, enriching its lexicon, caressing the word to infinity, and making the thought as clear and graspable as possible.

SURREALISM, THE POETIC VISION IN BALLADS

While translating the work of the great Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos, in whose house I have lived for twenty years, and even now as I prepare his monograph in Greek, I encounter similarities with Koçi Petriti’s ballads.

Today more than ever, Yiannis Ritsos has won love and popularity with his creations. He has been translated and continues to be translated into more than 151 languages worldwide. But what is the connection between Ritsos and Petriti, someone might ask? For Ritsos’s “The Man with the Carnation,” the drawings and cover were done by the French painter, Pablo Picasso, but there is another discussion by the French writer Louis Aragon. In those years, the surrealist painter Naise made a sketch, a portrait of a girl, which he titled “The Blue Girl.” At the same time, Ritsos wrote the very same poem, “The Blue Girl.” The poem and the painting attracted the attention of scholars and critics at the time. They resemble each other like two drops of water; in one the colors flow, in the other the verses. The same art, the same value, the same artistic mission. It is known to everyone that the artists never saw or met each other, but they held the same thoughts on art, its power, and its values. It is known that at the time, Ritsos was exiled to the Greek islands by the dictatorship. What I am recounting also relates to the work of the poet Koçi Petriti, particularly his ballads. But this happens with the sole difference that the Albanian poet sets this surrealist painting in verses into motion, in an artistic, visionary, graspable, and highly original way of seeing, so much so that many times it leaves you speechless from the emotions it creates, with his creative power and imagination. I will not go on; here is one of them…

Her heavy breast in passing

She tossed over her shoulder,

And she ran at a gallop

With the flight of a dove.

The thirsty infant reached out,

Caught the soft breast,

And mid-run

Drank the sounds of war.

The narrative vision of these verses is a perfect artistic surrealism, which, dissolved or broken down into a single thought, makes the ballad, the stanza, and the verse a babbling brook with a unique poetic sound. But the versification also elevates it to the highest degree of value it can hold. This is something entirely Petritian and unalterable. We also see this in “The Mother’s Ballad.”

“Come!” she told him without words, without tears,

And her breast was clad in flames.

“She might be the best in the world,

But what is she worth if she isn’t Albanian!”

Koçi Petriti is the poet of great artistic visions. He starts from the simple, the beautiful, and climbs up to the unattainable. To understand this artistic-figurative vision, or the surrealist paintings that come through the imagination of reading, scholars must be careful and look at them in a special way. These are easily distinguished in all the ballads, but we are taking the most unique ones, such as “The Mother’s Ballad,” “The Bushtricë Bridge,” “The Ballad of the Bridge,” and so on.

All the author’s ballads are a living, artistic, cinematic fantasy, a vivid moving picture built through the art of the word. Carved by the masterful hand of a talent, which stays in your mind even after you have closed the curtain on his book. This makes him unique in his genre of ballads, but also the only one on this difficult path, yet one so beautiful and so desired by the reader.

THE DISCOVERY, THE THEME, AND THE ARTISTIC COSTUME

After the discovery and the theme, all that remains for any author is the creative work in his laboratory, to finish what he thinks and seeks to express. For this, every artist first chooses the form, the method of construction, and the artistic span or flow of the source of poetic inspiration, so that the rich mineral, transformed into verses, can emerge from his creative mountains. But over the centuries, versifications and forms may be the same, yet the expressive power, the depth of thought, and the crystallization of the creation can be entirely different.

To draw a parallel in Koçi’s work, I will take two authors of lyric poetry, or of balladic poetry in particular. To do this, I have in mind Koçi’s similarity to the two German poets Heine and Goethe, and then to be convinced of his unique qualities in the ballads we are analyzing.

Here is how Goethe writes

My heart beats fast upon my horse,

I hurry and I do not stay.

The night pressed high into the hills,

And evening rocks the earth away.

An oak tree clad in mist stands tall,

Like a proud giant over there,

Where the thick darkness spreads its pall,

With a hundred black eyes it stares.

And in the poet Koçi Petriti

He had come from other lands,

The most wicked of wicked newcomers,

As winter comes and bites into spring,

As the snake comes and treads on the hedgehog.

Or below with Heine

From the deep water you hear there

Strange and sudden groans,

It was like a man’s harsh cough,

A sob and a moan.

Koçi Petriti

The lake with the fingers of the wind

Lifts its wave-like hair,

The lake’s wave, among the poets,

Beats the castle, beats it there.

These two small parallels were drawn on purpose to understand once again the musicality, the purity of expression, and the depth of thought or the lyricism that Petriti’s poetic art possesses. His verses sometimes approach and sometimes distance themselves from the creation of world classical forms and structures. He does this depending on the discovery, his poem, or his ballad. He dresses them in the costume that suits them best, whether contemporary or classical as the case may be, according to the manner and style he deems appropriate.

The coloring and musicality in the flow of thought, in the power of expression, in the growth and generalization of the scope of vision, are another characteristic. The stanzas with their leaps and resonances, in tonality and rhythm, or musical rhythm, give his ballads their birth and blazing, or the glow of a candle seen from afar, approaching or departing from the poetic discourse. The musical and ever-mounting gallop shows the tempos he sets in his poetic scores, the harmonization of the artistic instruments that take part in its execution, masterfully directed by the author-conductor. One of his primary skills is also the simplicity with which he builds them, sets them on their way, or carries them to the end of his poetic thought (this is understood, of course, for the reader and not for the author himself). To get where he wants to go, he applies the maximum distillation and the maximum refinement in his factory of thought and processing.

The poet lived for a long time in the Çermenikë region; he has Tomorr, Sofra e Skënderbeut, Mali i Vashës, and the Shkumbin river right before him, and he has filtered all these artistic streams that flow from them, bringing them into his work like rarely anyone else, not to say no one else.

Finally, I want to add that I do not want to believe that the critics, or the wind instruments of their poetic or critical orchestra, fail to understand this musicality, individuality, or the special personality of his art.

Often, figures and artists are part of the national wealth, which is why we must value them and elevate their values to the proper level, for they are simultaneously the values of the nation…