Literary Lives
The Two Lives of a Poet
Gjekë Marinaj, Teach Me How to Whisper: Horses and Other Poems, translated from the Albanian by Frederick Turner and Gjekë Marinaj. Syracuse University Press, 223pp., $40 paper.
Albania, on the edge of the Adriatic Sea between Montenegro and Greece, is dim in the minds of most Americans. Many remember the country as a rigidly controlled Soviet outpost, holding tight to Stalinist repressions even as perestroika was advancing in Russia. Most know nothing about its present government (a parliamentary constitutional republic), its language, or its literature. Poet Gjekë Marinaj was born there in 1965. Persecuted after publishing a slyly rebellious poem (“Horses”) in 1990, he fled to Yugoslavia, then received asylum in the United States in 1991. He found his way to Texas, where he enrolled at the University of Texas at Dallas. There he pursued literary studies, ultimately receiving a PhD in 2012.
He has continued to write poems, which are now collected in Teach Me How to Whisper. It is not clear if all the poems in this volume were originally composed in Albanian. Some, such as “The Em Dash of Emily Dickinson,” look and sound as if they might have been written in English. If they were, what was the role of the translator?
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