The Questioned
Was it winter or summer
Was there fog or rain
Had we left or returned
Were we sweating or frozen
Were we clearing the streets of leaves
Or gathering fruit from the sea
Were we flying through the sky
Or were we broken into stones
Did we dream of being born
Or of dying in our sleep
Did we know how to love in the moment
The pulsing emotional landscape of resistance, negation, revision.
Natasa Durovicova
Saraçini joins together the grimly political and the intensely personal, moving through a psychological universe full of impossible geographies, fallible gods, absence and fog and longed for escapes. What emerges from these lines is a space somewhere beyond grief, where one is still vulnerable to the shocks of both individual and collective calamity. The poems in this collection both question and dream, imagine and mourn, displace fear with loneliness, loneliness with occasional calm. Eastern European Poets Series #19.
Valentina Saraçini, born in Skopje, Macedonia, currently lives in Prishtina, Kosovo, where she is known both for her poetry and her work as a journalist and in terviewer. In Dreaming Escape, her second book of poetry, Saraçini joins together the grimly political to the intensely personal, moving through a psychological universe based on a richly evocative system of motifs, embodied abstractions, and symbols. What emerges from these lines is the voice of a worn-out Cassandra in an age beyond either grief or mourning, yet still vulnerable to the shocks of both individual and collective calamity: a voice that will long serve as witness in the development of Kosovar Albanian literature. Poems in this collection have previously appeared in 91st Meridian, Two Lines: World Writing in Translation, and Portals: a Journal of Comparative Literature.
In Erica Weitzman’s resolute translation, Valentina Saraçini’s staccato-grammared voice sketches a double space—the pulsing emotional landscape of resistance, negation, revision, set in a particular place of trees, stones, gods, color, history. A subtle navigational chart to an inner coast of Albania we have not known of until now.
Natasa Durovicova
This collection of Albanian poetry from Kosovo does a wonderful job of bringing a fascinating and important but little-known European literature to a broader audience. The translations are fluid and faithful, rendering beautifully in English both the sense and the sentiment of the original Albanian, which itself is deeply affecting.
Victor A. Friedman
Erica Weitzman has contributed poetry and translations to 6×6, 236, Words Without Borders, The Iowa Review, and Theory, A Sunday (Belladonna*). She teaches at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago.
Flora Ismaili received an MPH in health system management from Tulane University. She currently works as a Monitoring & Evaluation consultant for the United Nations Population Fund Office in Albania.
Rudina Jasini is a lawyer from Albania. She received her LL.M in International Legal Studies from Georgetown Law School, and currently works at the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at the Hague as a Staff Attorney for the Defense in cases relating to the war in Kosovo.
ISBN: 978-1-933254-39-5
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 128 pp, Publication Date: August 01 2008
Distribution: SPD
Series: Eastern European Poets Series #19