MOHIMI DHE SHPËRFYTYRIMI I NJË POEME
DENIAL AND TRANSFIGURATION OF A POEM

Summary/Abstract: The poem "Metohija in the great year 1941" of Ali Podrimja, published in 1st issue 1 of the literary magazine "Jeta e re" (1961) is dealing with an explosion of an accumulation which the poet had kept to himself for years. It was an emotional outburst after all those clashes that the Albanian people had experienced for a decade and a half after the Second World War. There was a time when freedom and equality between peoples were proclaimed, an accumulation that had waited for the opportunity to explode in verse long rhythms, which in cases are interrupted by short burst strings. It is an anthemic inspiration, accompanied by heroic and elegiac notes, through which the poet sings to his land, starting from the painful history of the people of this land, but which, in the end, exceeds the norms set by out of inspiration. According to Orwell "The point where literature and politics intersect is the point where totalitarianism exerts the greatest pressure on the intellectual,"19 but what can happen to art when it is subject to the norms imposed by power? This is best understood when we analyze it. Ali Podrimja also works with the poem "Shadow of the Earth", but the history of publication and reworking of this poem differs from the history of other creations of him. He did not publish it in the first volume or in the second, but he kept silent, meanwhile, when he published it in the third volume, "Beautiful Pain", the revision of it was not an aesthetic reworking, but utterly political. The treatment of the non-publication of the poem "Metohija in the great year 1941" as it was first written in 1961, is being republished and reworked six years later. With the new name name "Smart Land", it is also important for analyzing the literary process in Kosovo in the first decades after the Second World War, a time when censorship played a significant role, but also negative and inhibiting in this literature. The case of Ali Podrima's poem, which is published in the literary magazine "Jeta e re", if it is not published in the book, is not a solitary case. What does this case mean? It means that the magazine "Jeta e re" was a bit liberal, while when it came time to publish it as a separate book, the "authorities", both artistic and political, were more careful not to publish anything that exceeded the targets set by politics. The poem "Metohija in the great year 1941" is not only the most voluminous and artistically accomplished creation of the first phase of the poet Ali Podrimja, but also one of the most beautiful creations of Albanian literature written in Kosovo. As it was published in the magazine "Jeta e re" (1961), it was never republished, not even in the set published by the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo. In the non-publication of the poem "Metohija in the great year 1941" neither in the first nor in the second volume, by the poet Ali Podrimja; as well as the reworking and recreating of this poem in the third volume "Awakening Earth", etc., we are dealing with the pressure of censorship, which at that time was not only active, but also quite harsh, rather than the artistic and aesthetic reworking or recreation of the poet of this poem. The analysis of the two variants of this poem, verse by verse and word by word, could lead us to this conclusion. After the publication of the poem "Earth awakening" in the poetic volume "Beautiful pain", in which he transformed the poem "Metohija in the great year 1941", Ali Podrimja returned to this poem once again in 1971, now in new circumstances political, when Kosovo was moving towards an autonomy, and published it, significantly expanded, now also in the irrigated language, with the new title "Shadow of the Earth". My opinion is that, regardless of the revisions that the poet made to this poem, when he returned his first breath to this last poem, this poem no longer reached the height it had in its first edition, in 1961.

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