The wrong eulogy (of Rama for Kadare)

Alfred Lela

Rama's speech in tribute to the writer Ismail Kadare achieved what the prime minister's gestures quite often achieved: to talk about the details and forget the essence.

The passing on, or encouragement, of Ismail Kadare, the best writer in Albanian and one of the most prominent in the world, should have been the day of the public separation of his readers and well-wishers with him, not the union in vanity, once and for all, with The Prime Minister Sun transgressions.

Sources close to the family say that it was not Mrs. Kadare who offered the eulogy speech, but this was the way for the family to get rid of many speeches since the government's "offer" was for some of the cabinet and courtiers to speak (and God forbid! Elisa herself).

So the sentence "Ismaili would have loved only you, Edi" was an honorable exit from a desecrating situation.

What stood out is that even Rama himself, who has the necessary culture not to fall into the banality that his subordinates fall into every day, was caught not only in his delirium but also in what can be called a 'head battle'. ' He had an imaginary encounter with 'gravediggers'. That tirade might have been for a Facebook post, but it was miles beyond the requirements of a eulogy, which intends the departed, not the departer, the eternal, not the current.

Eulogies are more successful when they also contain doses of humor or irony, such that they aim, without poison, not only at the author but also at the one for whom they are written and who is already in the life of the successor.

Rama directed all the irony towards a third party, imaginary or real, who had no place around the coffin where the master of the grotesque rested.

Mr. Rama wanted to wear it to others (gravediggers), presenting them as characters of Kadare in an imaginary novel that was impossible to write already; in fact, it suited him.

Thus, Edi Rama ended a peaceful relationship with Ismail Kadare (perhaps eased in recent years by his power) that began in 1991. Found in his favorite momentum that of the iconoclast, Edi Rama at that time at the beginning of political persons, together with a group of friends—among them Ardian Klosi—had as their goal the 'overthrow' of the myth of Kadare and the rise of Kasem Trebeshina.

Their friends say that he also called Spartak Njëla to this anti-Kadare lodge, at that time just released from prison. Njjela, cynical as always, responded to the offer like this: "You're waiting. Don't get involved in these things because Kadareja will put you in some novel and take out the ink!"

They didn't end in Kadare's novels, but maybe they did in the romances of his conversations. What did not end during the two decades, however, was a counter-culture (perhaps the first step of cancel culture here in our country) in the debate on Albanian literature, rooted in the movement of Rama & CO to cancel Kadare and elevate Kasem Trebeshina. A naive and out-of-place debate was extended through the pages of the literary appendices of the time about the superiority of Trebeshina over Kadare. A thing that everyone's work had already decided. A distance that is even less read in literature would be understood as an insurmountable gap.

This "head battle" with Kadare, which probably has its roots in Rama's self-consciousness (self-complaints complemented by the courtesans), was completed by a Trashanic mistake. It is not so much the confusion of Agron Tufa's Mayakovsky with Ismail Kadare's that is problematic but the fact that, in the eulogy of the greatest Albanian author, the eulogist does not bring an original creation of the author but a translation.

Helena, for example, knows what Ismaili thought about a writer's 'time wasted on translations.'

For whom did Edi Rama eulogize, for the Russian poet Majakovski or the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, whose original work has thousands of fragments worthy of reading? Rama himself knows what happened in this case. He trusted whom he took it to and did not check, or are these the punishments of chance? He went and read the translation of Agron Tufa, a writer who sought political asylum in Switzerland to escape his government, in the tributes to the writer Ismail Kadare, who, together with a small group of former Bloc and marginals, wanted replace at the top of the Albanian papers with Kasem Trebeshina, an author who, like Rama and his friends, could have a life, but had no work.