In the Public Interest: Structures of Feeling in Albanian Literary Production

Abstract

This chapter traces a structure of feeling from the beginning of Albanian literary production in the 16th century to the 21st century formation of the Tirana-based publishing collective Pika pa sipërfaqe. The discussion in the chapter expands the idea of “the small context” of Albanian literature to include the far-reaching work of independent, socially minded publishers who have begun, through networks of transnational actors and institutions, to make a difference in the public life of their community.

Full text

Remitting, Restoring
and Building
Contemporary Albania
Edited by
Nataša Gregorič Bon · Smoki Musaraj

Remitting, Restoring and Building
Contemporary Albania

Nataša GregoricBon • Smoki Musaraj
Editors
Remitting, Restoring
and Building
Contemporary Albania

ISBN 978-3-030-84090-7 ISBN 978-3-030-84091-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84091-4
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Editors
Nataša GregoricBon
Institute of Anthropological and
Spatial Studies
Research Centre of the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences and Arts
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Smoki Musaraj
Department of Sociology and
Anthropology
Ohio University
Athens, OH, USA

25© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
N. Gregoric Bon, S. Musaraj (eds.), Remitting, Restoring and
Building Contemporary Albania,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84091-4_2
CHAPTER 2
In thePublic Interest: Structures ofFeeling
inAlbanian Literary Production
MatthewRosen
M. Rosen (*)
Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA
e-mail: rosenm@ohio.edu
I, doni Gjoni, son of Bdek Buzuku … wished for the sake of our people to
attempt, as far as I was able, to enlighten the minds of those who understand.
–Gjon Buzuku, Missal, 1555
AN: Publishing is not a conventional business. It concerns a product of the
mind. It helps people. It is done in the public interest. Publishing is—.
AK: But there are protable presses.
AN: Okay, but the point is that publishing is in the public interest. Books
are not like other products or commodities. They’re another thing.
–Arlind Novi and Ataol Kaso, in conversation, 2019
In his 1973 book, The Country and the City, Raymond Williams used
examples from English writing to trace changing attitudes toward urban
and rural life in Britain and its colonies. But rather than viewing his exam-
ples just as lines in a play, passages in a novel, or verses in a poem, he saw

26
them as structures of feeling that shaped readers’ images of the past, orga-
nized their value systems in the present, and fed their visions of possible
futures. Starting from a similar perspective, I use examples from a variety
of Albanian sources to describe and analyze structures of feeling in the
eld of Albanian literary production. The sources I draw on include the
colophon of a 1555 missal, the preface of an 1845 primer, the argument
of an 1899 manifesto, and the closing remarks of a 1965 plenum. But the
bulk of the material I discuss is drawn from a long conversation, spread
out over ve summers (2015–2019), with the Tirana-based publishers,
Ataol Kaso and Arlind Novi.1
The particular point of intrigue I pursued through eldwork in Tirana
was to understand how Arlind and Ataol saw their world and the place of
reading, translation, and publishing within it. What I learned through
immersion in their lives was that they viewed these activities as a way to
exceed the limits of their given conditions, to produce new ways of think-
ing, and to create new realities. Reecting Bruno Latour’s denition of an
actor—that is, “what is made to act by many others” (Latour 2005, 46)—
the key actor in this analysis is a small publishing house with an unusual
name. Pika pa sipërfaqe (Point without Surface) was cofounded in Tirana
by Arlind and Ataol in 2009. It has since mobilized thousands of other
agents—including authors, translators, readers, activists, and community
organizers—operating within and across Albania’s national boundaries.
Toward the end of my last period of eldwork, I asked the publishers to
tell me what publishing meant to them. “Let’s put it like this,” Ataol said.
“When we started this thing, we were not trying to do anything in par-
ticular other than keep reading. We just wanted to keep in contact with
good books. And publishing those books came as a consequence of that.
It’s a very simple, maybe childish idea, if you like. If you’re on a trip with
a friend and you nd something nice, the rst thing you do is you call your
friend, ‘Hey, come here, look what I found!’ This could describe what we
were trying to do with publication. We read something really nice and it
seemed logical to try and show this nice thing. This is what publishing
is to me.”
“To share,” Arlind added.
1 I use the term “long conversation” with reference to Maurice Bloch’s (1977) reformula-
tion of Malinowski’s vision of eldwork.
M. ROSEN

27
“It has some other connotations,” Ataol continued. “It’s a complicated
activity, and it has some more important consequences than just showing
something nice to someone, but the basic idea is in parallel to that.”2
The more important and complicated consequences to which Ataol
alluded were bound up with his view of publishing as an activity that could
help people “gure out for themselves how they want to live their lives
and what they want their lives to mean.”3 My goal in this chapter is to
locate this conception of publishing in the longue durée of Albanian
modernity. Reading my eldnotes together with texts from Albania’s
national awakening in the nineteenth century and its twentieth-century
socialist realism, my intent is to reveal a structure of feeling located at the
intersection of the publishers’ ideas about the past and future of their
country.
My general argument is as follows. Arlind and Ataol experienced every-
day life in Tirana as a constant confrontation with stress, violence, and
abuse of power. They saw this experience in relation to the damage done
to the social fabric during half a century of a harsh dictatorship
(1944–1991), when the state controlled virtually every aspect of public
life, including the elds of literary and artistic production. But theirs was
not only a negative view. For if the assimilation of literature authorized by
an oppressive state had the power to perpetuate social problems long after
the fall of a regime, it also made sense to think that a different kind of lit-
erature could help institute a new value system for an Albania yet to come.
By unpacking the structures, meanings, and relationships supporting this
proposition, my aim here is not to draw a straight line connecting the past,
present, and future of Albanian literary production but to show how two
historically situated individuals viewed their own literary enterprise.
Between anOpen BOOk andanUnwritten FUtUre
Arlind and Ataol have managed the everyday operation of the publishing
house since 2009. “Both of us are doing seven jobs at the same time,”
Ataol said. “Translator, editor, distributor, salesmen, maintaining corre-
spondence with the copyright holders, negotiating with the translators,
keeping track of the whole process of printing, pagination, book covers.
2 Inter view conducted on August 9, 2019.
3 Inter view conducted on June 20, 2016.
2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN…

28
We’re doing all of that. Just two of us. With some very important help
from Arlind’s brother, Orges, and Eligers [a mutual friend].”4
In its rst eleven years (2009–2020), Pika pa sipërfaqe produced a total
of 110 titles with initial print runs ranging from 300 to 500 books.5 Of the
110 titles, twenty-six were by Albanian authors and eighty-four were by
foreign authors in translation. To secure the rights to publish works in
translation and to obtain funds to pay the translators, Arlind and Ataol
have formed durable relationships with international institutions and
agencies such as The Polish Book Institute in Kraków, the Sur Translation
Support Programme in Buenos Aires, and the Wylie Agency in NewYork.
The work of translation itself has been carried out by more than fty indi-
viduals with varying secondary linguistic specializations, geographic loca-
tions, and areas of expertise. The translations this collective has produced
so far include works of literature, philosophy, history, and criticism that
were written mostly but not exclusively by American, Latin American, and
European (especially Central European) authors. Most but again not all of
these authors were originally published during the “short twentieth cen-
tury” (i.e., 1914–1991).6
Taking a holistic view of the books in Pika pa sipërfaqe’s catalogue, the
rst question I thought to ask was, “Why translate these particular books
and not others?” When I put the question to Arlind in 2015, his answer
was brief. “It’s very simple,” he said. “If a friend tells us about a book,
we’ll pick it up when we get a chance and begin to read. If we like it, we’ll
contact a translator and make a contract to do the translation.”7
Arlind and Ataol later eshed out another, more intertextual method
using Milan Kundera’s book-length essay, Testaments Betrayed(trans.Balil
4 Inter view conducted on August 9, 2019.
5 It is notoriously dif cult to nd accurate information on the number of books published
in Albania since 1991 (Bedalli 2013). In 2012, however, the Albanian Publishers Association
released rough counts indicating more than 100 publishers, about 380 printers, and a total
of 1200 to 1500 new titles published in that year (SBSH 2012). A year later, one of the larger
contemporary publishers, Toena, which has bookstores in multiple cities including Tirana,
Saranda, Vlora, and Pristina, reported publishing an average of more than 130 books per year
in its rst twenty years (Toena 2013). Whereas Toena’s numbers would place it in the com-
pany of the largest Albanian publishers, Pika pa sipërfaqe’s average of ten titles per year since
2009 is comparable to many other small presses in the country.
6 I use the term “short twentieth century” with reference to the historical period Eric
Hobsbawm took as the subject of his 1994 book The Age of Extremes: A History of the World,
1914–1991.
7 Inter view conducted on July 15, 2015.
M. ROSEN

29
Gjini 2011),to illustrate. In Testaments Betrayed Kundera constructs a
canon of twentieth-century novels that inuenced his own understanding
of the form. The publishers were thus able to pick out at least half a dozen
more recommendations from Kundera himself. These included Witold
Gombrowicz’s Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes,
Ferdydurke, and the complete Diary (all translated from the original by
Edlira Lloha and published by Pika pa sipërfaqe in 2012, 2014, and 2019,
respectively); Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless (trans. Jonila
Godole 2012); a Carlos Fuentes collection titled Natural and Supernatural
Stories (trans. Bajram Karabolli 2017); and Bruno Schulz’s collection of
interlinked ctions, The Street of Crocodiles (trans. Romeo Çollaku 2019).
Each of these works opened onto a dense web of further associations.
Consider, for instance, the metactional link between Schulz’s art and his
real life. That the author was shot and killed by a Gestapo ofcer while
walking home in Nazi-occupied Drogobych adds considerable gravitas to
his surrealist anticipation (in the 1934 story, “The Comet”) of the thesis
that the imagination and equipment of industrial modernity made it pos-
sible both to conceive and to carry out the Holocaust. Reading “The
Comet” one can appreciate the extent to which Schulz’s vivid imagination
resonated not only with the sensibilities of repressed and exiled novelists
like Kundera but also with the sociological perspective of a work such as
Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (trans. Enis Sulstarova
2015), which translated Schulz’s dark conviction into a book-length soci-
ological argument.
In the still expanding list of related translations that issued outward
from Gjini’s translation of Kundera, there are now countless other routes
for other readers to trace. In 2019, for example, at a meeting in Kamëz (a
municipality located on the periphery of Tirana), I spoke with community
organizer Diana Malaj about her work for the grassroots organization,
ATA. Upon entering Diana’s ofce, I noticed an open copy of Pika pa
sipërfaqe’s 2015 translation of Modernity and the Holocaust.8 Seeing the
way the book was left open in front of her computer, I asked Diana if she
was using it for something she was working on.
“I am just back from Poland,” she said. “We went for a seminar of
remembrance and reconciliation. We visited the Gross-Rosen
8 As I have noted elsewhere (Rosen 2019a), ATA’s headquarters in Kamëz housed a small
community library that was established with one hundred books the organization received
through donations and one hundred books they bought from Pika pa sipërfaqe.
2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN…

30
concentration camps … I decided my rst duty on return was to go back
to that book. ‘That’s the rst thing you’re going to do when you go back
to Kamëz,’ I told myself. ‘You’re going to open that book.’ The camps
were a product of modernity and they might happen again. We have a
moral duty –.”
Diana paused, collecting her thoughts before she continued. “I had a
little free time,” she said. “I just came from work. I was preparing the
screening for the youngsters. But I am planning to write an article, and
this will help me.”9
Diana’s example comes close to what I think Arlind and Ataol meant
when they said that publishing can help people. It also illustrates why the
meanings I am after are not just those that inhere in the contents of books
but those that are located in the points of intersection that connect people
like Arlind and Ataol—through Kundera and Gjini, Schulz and Çollaku,
Bauman and Sulstarova—to the youth in Tirana and Kamëz whose futures
may yet be shaped by the article someone like Diana was writing. What
those youngsters might do with the ideas that have passed through the
books published by Pika pa sipërfaqe remains to be seen. In the meantime,
I am content to keep shuttling back and forth, like Diana, between an
open book and an unwritten future.
in theBeginning wastranslatiOn
In the preface of his two-volume history of Albanian literature, Robert
Elsie (1995) depicted his subject as “a tender shrub … sprouting in the
ruins of its own literary traditions” (Elsie 1995, ix–x). The rst attested
Albanian text larger than a single line or short list of words—The Missal of
Gjon Buzuku—was written by a Catholic cleric in 1555. What has sur-
vived of the book contains sections of the Bible translated into Gheg (the
northern Albanian dialect). The Missal was characteristic of the rst strand
of Albanian literature: Catholic-inected, written with a Latin alphabet,
and published in Italy. Between the collapse of the Counter-Reformation
and the rise of Ottoman power in the Western Balkans, these rst shoots
of Albanian literature withered from general neglect by the close of the
seventeenth century.
The eighteenth-century Ottoman-Albanian literature that grew in its
place was written in Arabic script, based on Islamic practices, and created
9 Inter view conducted on June 28, 2019.
M. ROSEN

31
a new language that mixed Albanian, Turkish, and Persian idioms. Because
the intellectual leaders of the emergent movement for national awareness
associated this second strand of Albanian literature with foreign cultural
imperialism, however, the witty and erudite poetry of the bejtexhinj (cou-
plet maker) would soon be abandoned in favor of developing a new,
Western-facing romantic nationalism.
The nineteenth-century Rilindja literature of the Albanian Renaissance
took inspiration—via European mediators such as Johann Georg von
Hahn’s (1854) Albanian Studies—from the ancient oral tradition of
Albanian epic verse (Morgan 2016, 102–3). Modern Albanian literature
thus turned from themes and styles reecting its colonial present to ones
recalling a mythical past. This turn culminated with the publication of
Gjergj Fishta’s (1937) The Highland Lute. Often dubbed “the Albanian
Iliad,” The Highland Lute is an epic narration of the Albanian struggle for
autonomy. According to Elsie, it constituted “the rst Albanian-language
contribution to world literature” (1995, 391).
The established precedent of cutting off rather than cultivating the
roots of Albanian literature was repeated with force after the communist
takeover in 1944. Instead of nurturing the mostly noncommunist writers
who emerged during the country’s brief periods of independence
(1912–1939) and subsequent occupation by Italy and Germany
(1939–1944), the new regime led by Enver Hoxha, Koçi Xoxe, and
Mehmet Shehu deemed reactionary and anti-patriotic any artist or intel-
lectual—including Gjerj Fishta!—whose work deviated from the doctrine
prescribed by Albanian Socialist Realism.
Ofcially adopted at the Second National Congress of the Writers’
Union in 1952, Albanian Socialist Realism adhered to the Soviet model
that linked the “truthful, historically concrete representation of reality …
with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in
the spirit of socialism” (Pipa 1991, 7–8). Noncompliance was subject to
sanctions ranging from demotion and relocation to arrest, imprisonment,
torture, and execution (Pipa 1991, 18–23). Despite these constraints, a
genuine literature again managed to take root, for example, in the best
poems and novels of Dritëro Agolli (1931–2017) and Ismail Kadare
(b. 1936).
In the calamities that shook the foundations of Albanian culture forty-
ve years later, Elsie saw clear indications of the recurring pattern he traced
through his 1000-page history. Writing in the early 1990s, he described
the postsocialist literary landscape in the bleakest of terms. “Virtually all
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32
Albanian language publishing companies have either gone bankrupt or
been shut down. No money, no paper, no ink, no jobs and, worse than
anything at present, no hope” (1995, xiii).
But true to pattern, it was not long before a new crop of publishers
emerged from the ruins of state socialism. Onufri in 1992. Toena in 1993.
Çabej in 1994. Aleph in 1996. IDK in 2001. Zenit in 2004. Pika pa sipër-
faqe in 2009. While these companies also published original works by
Albanian authors, nearly 80 percent of their collective output consisted of
translations. This is a strong indication of how important translation has
been for the book publishing industry in Albania. But the link between
literary translation and transnational circuits of knowledge and imagina-
tion is not something that applies only to small nations. No literature can
develop in isolation. And just as the “Authorized Version” of the Bible
(King James Version, 1611) was both a work of literary translation and a
“treasure house of English prose” (Lewis 1950, 23), so too Buzuku’s
Missal was not only a work of translation, but also the rst Albanian book.
The lines of connection between Albanian readers and the universe of
world literature that extended outward from the sixteenth century were
put under severe strain by the ideology of “self-reliance” that developed in
the last third of the former Communist dictatorship (Mëhilli 2017, 228).
What began after World War II with the persecution of intellectuals seen
as representatives of the old regime (Elsie 2005, 162) extended by the
1970s to the condemnation of any “alien ideological manifestations”
(Pipa 1991, 33; Prifti 1978, 167). Responding to a 1973 report that
young people “wanted to read other kinds of books than those offered to
them,” the Party boss, Enver Hoxha, for instance, said, “No, comrades …
We have nothing to learn from this [European, imperialist, revisionist]
culture … but should discard it contemptuously and ght it with determi-
nation” (Pipa 1991, 74).
To the main subjects of the account that follows, the residual effect of
that contempt was one of the great tragedies of modern Albanian history.
Indeed, of all the statements about the past I recorded in my eldnotes,
the ones that spoke of the damage done by “celebratory histories” of the
state and “narrow views” of the outside world were among the most fre-
quent and, it seemed, most deeply felt. The essential idea about the future
I scribbled in the same notebooks had two parts: First, that changing the
conditions of social life in Albania for the better would require new ways
of thinking; and second, that a new kind of literature could help bring
about that change.
M. ROSEN

33
It was no accident that Arlind and Ataol rendered the tragedy of Albania
in terms that overlapped (albeit in a structurally inverted form) with Milan
Kundera’s (1984) thesis in “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” As we have
seen, Pika pa sipërfaqe has already published translations of many of
Kundera’s heroes. Among them, the Polish émigré Witold Gombrowicz
emerged as a favorite among readers I met in Tirana. In 2018, for exam-
ple, I attended a public lecture billed as “Ferdydurke-interpretime kritike—
a critical lecture on Witold Grombowicz’s novel ‘Ferdydurke,’ brought to
Albania from ‘Pika pa sipërfaqe.’” In the talk, Klodi Leka, then a twenty-
four- year-old activist studying law in Tirana, had the room rolling with
laughter as he read out a passage in which an unnamed teacher begged his
pupils to submit to his circular logic:
A great poet! Remember that, it’s important! And why do we love him?
Because he was a great poet. A great poet indeed! … we love Juliuisz
Słowacki and admire his poetry because he was a great poet. (Gombrowicz
2000, 42; Gombrowicz 2014, 62)
The passage is absurd in any language. But behind the absurdist humor, I
detected in the audience that evening a heightened sense of identication
with the deant student Gałkiewicz (rendered Dybeku in the Albanian
translation). Dybeku’s at refusal, “nuk mundem, nuk mundem” (I can’t,
I can’t), brings the pleading, sweating teacher to “a terrible impasse.”
Any moment there could be an outbreak of—of what?—of inability, at any
moment a wild roar of not wanting to could erupt and reach the headmaster
and the inspector, at any moment the building could collapse and bury his
child under the rubble. (Gombrowicz 2000, 43–44; Gombrowicz
2014, 63–64)
What was it in the sketch Gombrowicz penned in Warsaw around 1937
that the Tirana youth at Leka’s talk in 2018 recognized as true to their
experience? My sense is that it was a recognition of the absurdity—and
fragility—of the totalitarian mindset that has stubbornly persisted in many
sectors of Albanian public life. It was, to extrapolate further, a feeling
about real people—like many of the parents of the youth at Leka’s talk—
who believed, who supported, who were manipulated by the state ideol-
ogy, and who did not know what to do when communism fell. Though I
hesitate to generalize the sentiments of the audience in this way, my trans-
lation of their translation was not something I brought with me to the
2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN…

34
eld. Rather, it was mediated by—and is in fact a paraphrase of—some-
thing Arlind said to me one afternoon as we waited out the rain under the
portico of the Palace of Culture, built on the site of Tirana’s old Bazaar,
facing the temporary concert scaffolding emblazoned with ALBtelecom
and other corporate sponsors’ vision of a then cluttered Skanderbeg square.
“They’ve ruined the city,” Arlind said. (I recalled Ataol making a similar
comment the day before. “It’s not a city anymore,” he said as we stepped
over the ubiquitous hazards of broken pavement.) “There was something
very wrong about conditions under communism,” Arlind continued. “But
rather than correcting that course after the nineties, it was la même chose,
the same mistakes, the same problems, repeating under a different eco-
nomic system.”10
the rOmantic mOdel
One of the forerunners of the Albanian Rilindja (lit. Rebirth) was the
writer and activist Naum Veqilharxhi (1797–1846). Embracing the idea of
Albania as a nation, Veqilharxhi opposed the division of Albanian schools
along religious and linguistic lines. In his view, Albanians had not been
able to form a national consciousness because rather than using Albanian
as the medium of education, the communities classied as Muslim used
Turkish, the Orthodox used Greek, and the Catholic used Latin or Italian.
Believing Albania’s cultural and political development depended on the
creation of an alphabet suited to writing in Albanian, Veqilharxhi began
working on an alphabet of his own invention in 1824. The result of this
work, A Very Short and Useful Primer, was a small book written in Tosk
(the southern Albanian dialect) and published in 1844. In the preface of
the second edition, Veqilharxhi wrote:
Why should it be that we, Albanians, are standing apart … so deprived of
writing and reading in our language? … We can learn properly and work
well enough. But only some of us are lucky enough to prot from this, while
many others live in a darkness that falls heavily upon them … Such consid-
erations, my dear boys, have prompted me to take up this task without fear
of the weariness I knew it would bring, not with an appetite for fame but
with a feeling of duty towards my country and my mother tongue.
(Veqilharxhi 2013, 260–261)
10 Inter view conducted on June 15, 2018.
M. ROSEN

35
Veqilharxhi’s words echo Buzuku’s sentiments. He speaks of his labor as a
duty, carried out not for personal prot but to create durable benets for
a societal “we.” In this, Veqilharxhi’s intimate address also resonates in
some respects with the socially minded vision I would hear articulated by
the cofounders of Pika pa sipërfaqe.
A related structure of feeling that reaches back to the time of the
national awakening appears as a critique of the present which is set against
visions of a glorious past. Located sometime between a writer’s or speak-
er’s memories of childhood and ancient times, these visions recall the
problem of perspective that Williams outlined in the context of British
history (Williams 1973, 9–12). In published works and in statements I
recorded as eldnotes, I found certain analogues to English formulas such
as “Oh, happy Eden,” “organic community,” and “Old England.”
Consider, for instance, the tone and substance of the following example
from Pashko Vasa (1825–1892). In his 1879 book, The Truth on Albania
and Albanians, Vasa wrote,
Up to the period mentioned [that is, until 1831, when Vasa was six years
old], the condition of Albania was brilliant … Unfortunately, the change in
the governmental system … brought disorder to the public mind. Deprived
of its ancient forms by successive governors, Albania found itself the butt of
the most corrupt covetousness, of innovations without consistency, of acts
without cohesion. Thereby the minds of people have been troubled—torn
between the recollection of the past, astonishment at the present, and
uncertainty as to the future. (Vasa 2013, 124)
Between Vasa’s statement and one’s I heard in conversations in Tirana,
there were clear differences. The main one was that my contemporary
interlocutors were far less inclined to speak of a golden age. They may
scoff if you ask them when the country was brilliant, rich, happy, and pow-
erful. But if you substitute neoliberal governmentality and state capture
for Ottoman domination, the resulting picture of public confusion and
disorder remains intact.
A similar vision animated the political writings of Sami Frashëri
(1850–1904). Several themes from his manifesto, Albania, what was it,
what is it, and what will it be? (1899), recurred in changed but recogniz-
able forms in the notes from my eldwork in Tirana. What Albania was
and is, according to Frashëri’s account, recalled Vasa: “Albania was once a
rich and prosperous country. This is no more the case” (Vasa 2013, 303).
From a romanticized narration of Albania’s history and a sharp critique of
2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN…

36
its present condition, Frashëri went on to construct a detailed plan for
moving Albania toward self-determination. The following excerpts are
instructive.
1. Albanians speak one of the oldest and most beautiful languages in
the world … How was it possible that the Albanian language sur-
vived without changes or damage despite the lack of letters, writing,
and schools, while other languages written and used with great care
have changed and deteriorated so much that they are now known as
other languages? The answer to all these questions is very simple:
Albanians preserved their language and their nationality not because
they had letters, or knowledge, or civilization, but because they had
freedom, because they always stood apart and did not mix with
other people or let foreigners live among them. This isolation from
the world, from knowledge, civilization and trade, in one word, this
savage mountain life allowed the Albanians to preserve language and
nationality. (Frashëri 2013)
2. There can be no Albania without Albanians; there can be no
Albanians without the Albanian language; and there can be no
Albanian language without a writing system for it and schools in
which to teach it. Therefore, language is the rst thing. The Turkish
government must be compelled to rescind the ban which it has
imposed upon the Albanian language. It must allow Albanian
schools to be opened and must let books and periodicals in Albanian
enter the country unimpeded. Every Albanian must learn to read
and write in Albanian, and then must learn other languages.
(Frashëri 2019)
It is interesting to reect on Frashëri’s notion of isolation in light of the
history of continuous migrations in this area (Vullnetari 2021). Indeed, in
setting up the juxtaposition of freedom and isolation—of preserving “the
oldest and most beautiful language” and of living a “savage mountain
life”—it would seem that Frashëri was playing at mythmaking on both
sides of the equation. (He himself not only migrated from his native vil-
lage in southern Albania to establish a professional life in Istanbul but also
worked for a time in Tripoli.) Introducing the ctive character of isolation
in this context is even more curious given the recommendation of the
second passage, which suggests that the preservation of the Albanian lan-
guage and nationality, which once apparently depended on isolation, now
M. ROSEN

37
required the opposite—an education that would allow Albanians to bring
the knowledge of the world into Albanian language and literature. And
though this was not something Frashëri could have foreseen, it was in fact
from translations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin in the 1930s that a
new Albanian society would be born.
the stalinist mOdel
Albania emerged from World War II under the leadership of an inexperi-
enced communist party. Drawing on the model of Soviet socialist realism,
the Party made literature an important focus of a totalizing program of
social, political, and economic transformation. According to Arshi Pipa,
who spent ten years (1946–1956) in an Albanian prison before escaping
to Yugoslavia and migrating to the United States, Albanian literature
between 1944 and 1990 “came to be the main channel for the distribu-
tion of Marxism-Leninism, through poems which were versied elabora-
tions of party slogans and with novels eshing out Stalin’s formula that
writers are the ‘engineers of the human soul’ ” (Pipa 1991, iii).
The Party, Pipa wrote, “wanted Albanian literature sifted, eliminating
the darnel from the grain. The darnel included the coryphaei of Albanian
literature, people such as Fishta, Noli, Schiro, Konitza, Lumo Skendó,
Nikaj, Prendushi, Koliqi” (Pipa 1991, 18). Cutting these thinkers out of
the important work of building a new society was particularly damaging
because Albania at that time, again according to Pipa, “did not have many
intellectuals” (Pipa 1991, 22).11 Of the Prime Minister, Pipa wrote,
“[Enver] Hoxha’s level of culture was such that he did not know that the
classics of Marxism occupied themselves with theoretical rather than tech-
nical problems of economy” (Pipa 1991, 22). The basis for this assessment
came from Hoxha himself, who justied his decision against equalizing
the Albanian and Yugoslav currencies by noting, “I completed a real
course for the ‘intensive assimilation’ of economy. For whole days and
nights I read that literature from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin that I
could get a hold of in French, which dealt with the problems of economy”
(Hoxha 1982, 317, cited in Pipa 1991, 22).
11 To substantiate this claim, Pipa mentions that the rst Minister of the Economy, Nako
Spiru, was an economics student who had not completed his studies and the Minister of the
Treasury in the rst Albanian government, Ramadan Çitaku, was a land surveyor.
2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN…

38
Compared to the lack of economic expertise in the upper administra-
tion, the initial situation in the literary eld was considerably better. I say
“initial situation” because many established writers did not survive the
early years of the socialist era. “Nine writers (seven of them Catholic
clergy) were shot, ve died in prison, and nineteen served prison sen-
tences” (Pipa 1991, 22). Some twenty years later, in 1965, Enver Hoxha
delivered the closing remarks of the 15th Plenum of the Central Committee
of the Party of Labor of Albania. In a lengthy speech titled, “Literature
and Art Should Serve to Temper People with Class Consciousness for the
Construction of Socialism,” the Party boss laid down a set of rules and
expectations for developing Albanian cultural production from a “Marxist-
Leninist angle.”
The title of the speech provides an adequate summary of the overall
message. Starting from the idea that the collective morality of a people was
variable and changeable, that it could be improved or degraded, made
stronger or weaker, the Party’s task, Hoxha said, was to develop a new
literature and art that would strengthen and improve the consciousness of
the people. The objective of literature and art, in short, was to prepare the
people to accept the values and morality that were the prerequisite for “a
better, more bountiful and more beautiful life and future” (Hoxha 1980,
836). Before commencing any work, writers and poets were to ask them-
selves, “Does this thing I am doing serve the great cause of the people?”
(Hoxha 1980, 854).
The great cause! Remember that, it’s important! Like the teacher we
met from Ferdydurke, Hoxha insisted that writers and artists should love
and admire the proletarian morality of the working class because the pro-
letarian morality of the working class was great. But for every Dybeku who
refused, many more would accept the charge and would extoll in prose
and poetry the new national virtues of independent life, perseverance, and
social progress.
the pOstsOcialist mOdel
In June 2018, I walked down Rr. Qemal Stafa to meet Arlind. I went a
little out of my way to avoid the torn-up road that ran past his ofce and
entered the outdoor seating area of a nondescript (and unnamed) café off
of Rr. Barrikadave. It was ten minutes to ten, and I was about to sit at an
open table when Orges, Arlind’s brother (also a bookseller), called my
name. He was having a coffee with Elvis Hoxha, a translator who studied
M. ROSEN

39
philosophy in France and was now based in Tirana. I sat with them. We
were joined a moment later by Enis Sulstarova, Lecturer in Sociology at
the University of Tirana who studied political science in Turkey, and Enis’s
daughter, then eight years old, who brought a copy of Harry Potter in
translation. Arlind was last to arrive.
What turned into a good opportunity for eldwork came about because
Arlind had double-booked a meeting with me and two of his authors/
translators. I was happy to postpone that day’s lesson in Albanian language
and literature for the chance to see how Arlind conducted his regular busi-
ness. The reason for meeting with Elvis concerned a translation of Alan
Badiou’s hypertranslation of Plato’s Republic, which Pika pa Sipërfaqe was
interested in publishing. The business with Enis concerned a re- publication
of Democracy and Totalitarianism by Claude Lefort, which was rst trans-
lated into Albanian by the French-Kosovar philosopher, Muhamedin
Kullashi, and published in 1993 by Shtëpia Botuese Arbri, whose copy-
right, I understood, was soon to expire.12
After concluding their business, Arlind, Enis, and Elvis shifted into
casual discussion. (By then Orges had left; Enis’s daughter remained con-
tent reading Harry Potter.) Although I listened with attention, some of
their conversation eluded my understanding. When the topic of Arlind
teaching me Albanian came up, for instance, I was not sure if they were
simply noting this as a fact or lightly making fun of the enterprise. My
uncertainty must have shown because Enis broke in just then, in English,
saying, “We are discussing language, so it’s very complicated.”
Arlind claried, “The philosophy of language.”
“Ska problem (no problem),” I said. “Vazhdo (go on).” Their conversa-
tion from here went into literature. They talked for some time about a
recent book on Migjeni (1911–1938), the Albanian poet from Shkodër
who published mainly in Albanian periodicals from 1933 to his premature
death in 1938. When the name of Arshi Pipa (1920–1997) came up, I
interjected. I had a quote in my notebook I wanted to read out: “Our
inquiry has shown so far that Albanian literature is inseparable from
Albanian politics and that a study of the former amounts to a sociological
study of the various manifestations of Albanian nationalism” (Pipa
1978, 195).
12 Pika pa sipërfaqe published both Alain Badiou’s Republika e Platonit (trans. Elvis
Hoxha) and Claude Lefort’s Demokracia dhe totalitarizmi (trans. Muhamedin Kullashi) in
November 2018.
2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN…

40
“Okay,” Elvis said. “But it’s nothing special. It’s a general statement.
And it’s normal.” In other words, “It goes without saying.” Or, “Isn’t
that true of any national literature? Isn’t it true, for example, if we were
speaking of French, or Russian, or Indonesian literature?” (Elvis did not
actually say these “other words” but this is what he seemed to imply.)
Enis responded by afrming the statement. “Yes,” he said, “historically,
this is true. It’s valid. The emergence of Albanian nationalism was explic-
itly bound up with the emergence of the written language. The literature
was a functional literature. It was not an accidental or an organic connec-
tion, as might be said with Anderson’s [1991] Imagined Communities. It
was engineered. The Congress of Monastir. The establishment of the writ-
ten language. The teaching of the language in Albanian schools. The rst
major works of literature. These all intended to establish the idea of
Albania as a nation. There was an explicit political purpose in all of this.
The purpose was to create and afrm the nation and national
consciousness.”
Elvis debated some of these points. He was making a kind of philo-
sophical argument, talking about the universal, the singular, and a contra-
diction. I had some trouble following his argument but understood it to
be related to a reference Enis made to Pascale Casanova’s (2004) model of
literature divided into major (world) and minor (national) traditions.
According to this division, Enis said, an author like Ismail Kadare would
be seen as a national (i.e., minor) writer, whereas Jorge Luis Borges was a
major writer, concerned with humanity in global terms.
Here I interjected again. “If Kadare is an author of the national scale,”
I said, “are there any Albanian authors you would put on the world scale?”
“We don’t have novelists of world literature status,” Arlind said, “but
poets, we have.” Arlind named Martin Çamaj (1925–1993) as one who
had “something to give to the experience of Europe.” He likewise recom-
mended Mitrush Kuteli (1907–1967). Also mentioned (though by whom
is not clear from my notes) were Petro Marko (1913–1991), Kasëm
Trebeshina (1926–2017), and Agron Tufa (b. 1967).
When I asked about one of the Albanian novelists recently published by
Pika pa sipërfaqe, Elvis looked away with a gesture that said, “hm, I don’t
know about that.”
He then said, “We have writers but not literature.”
After a brief pause, again moving from the particular to the universal,
Elvis extended the “we” beyond the nation: “That’s the problem in the
world today.”
M. ROSEN

41
strUctUres OFFeeling
From conversations such as the ones reported in this chapter, I built up a
picture of my interlocutors’ vision of publishing as a public service that
was at odds with the harsh realities they experienced in everyday life. To
keep that picture grounded in verbatim statements about how Arlind and
Ataol saw things, I arranged in late summer 2019 to record a conversa-
tional interview in their ofce near Sami Frashëri High School in Tirana.
The discussion that follows moves chronologically through an edited ver-
sion of that interview, the full transcript of which came to a little more
than 10,000 words. A few days before recording the interview, I explained
in separate meetings with Arlind and Ataol what I had in mind. I told
them I wanted to try to pin down why they used three specic words in
the short description they posted on their publishing house’s ofcial web-
site.13 The words were i pavarur (which in English would be the equiva-
lent of “independent”), jotimprurës (which translates as “nonprot”),
and social (which is pronounced differently but has the same broad and
multivalent connotations as the English word derived from the same Latin
roots).14
It was apparent to me by then that the meanings of these common
Albanian adjectives diverged in certain respects from my concepts. For
example, when I thought of an independent publisher, I thought of a
small press that had not been subsumed by a big publishing group. But
since there were no big publishing groups in Albania, saying Pika pa sipër-
faqe was i pavarur had to convey something else. Wanting to know what
that something else was, I opened the conversation by asking, “Do you
think it might be misleading for me, when writing about your project, to
translate i pavarur as independent?”15
“The Albanian term has some similarities with the original term in
English,” Ataol said. “But there are some important differences. I know
something of what ‘independent publisher’ means abroad, which is basi-
cally ‘not connected to some business conglomerate.’ This is not the case
here … To me, i pavarur has more political connotations, meaning we are
13 See https://www.facebook.com/PikaPaSiperfaqe
14 Bruno Latour has given the relevant etymology: “[In] Latin socius denotes a companion,
an associate. From the different languages, the historical genealogy of the word ‘social’ is
construed rst as following someone, then enrolling and allying, and, lastly, having some-
thing in common”(Latour 2005, 6).
15 Inter view conducted on August 9, 2019.
2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN…

42
independent from any political party or any other state or public
institution.”
“He wrote that [description for the website],” Arlind said, referring to
Ataol. “But for me, it’s not a problem.”
“But does being i pavarur,” I replied to Arlind, “have some kind of –”.
“Reality?” Arlind said. “This is difcult to say. We are dependent on our
collaborators and our public and many others who support us. Our fami-
lies. Our funders. So, we are dependent. But I think what Ataol is saying is
that we are open. We don’t have an ideology, a program, or a political
agenda. We are independent insofar as we don’t have a ‘hidden side.’
Otherwise, we are dependent. Very, very dependent. Because our families
support us, our friends, collaborators, you, the public … Maybe here i
pavarur has more signicance than ‘independent’ does abroad because,
here, after the nineties, the modern publishing houses were created by
people who were dependent on the old communist regime … So this is
one reason. The second is that the people with the ability to go into pub-
lishing in the nineties were privileged, from the state.”
“They had political afliations,” Ataol said. “Or were family members
of someone with political power.”
“This was the context I think Ataol had in mind,” Arlind said. “And he
chose that word to distinguish from this.”
“This is fairly correct,” Ataol said. “Another way to put it would be to
consider the history. Since the end of World War Two, with the formation
of the Socialist Republic of Albania, and later on, we never had publishers
who established themselves in some sort of intellectual pursuit. We either
had state publishers or commercial opportunists. The activity of the state
publishers depended on an ideology of the modern state. After that idea
collapsed, publishing landed at the feet of the commercial opportunists,
who viewed it like a job. They picked it just like they would any other, like
if they had dealt in vegetables, they would have become vegetable produc-
ers. There were a few exceptions. I don’t consider us to be unique. But
they are mostly like us, independent, small publishers.”
“Before 1945,” Arlind said, drawing the perspective farther back,
“there were a lot of publishing houses, but the quality and the range of the
catalogue was very limited. Publishing in the Albanian language really
only started near the end of the nineteenth century. And from that period
to 1945, the mainstream publishers only published books to spread
Albanian nationalism. There were many translations but few classics …
M. ROSEN

43
After 1945, the situation was as Ataol said. But after the nineties it was
different. Translation ourished.”16
“So you both agree about the state publishers during communism, but
the picture of publishing after the nineties was more complicated?” I said.
“If you want to construct a sort of history or genealogy of book pub-
lishing in Albania right after the fall of communism,” Ataol said, “you
would nd that the rst major publishers were established by the people
who worked in the hierarchy of the old publishing houses [i.e., Naim
Frashëri and 8 nëntori] during communism. You either had someone
working as an editor there or in the lower part of the hierarchy, like admin-
istration, warehouse management, or distribution. These were the main
and major publishers that were founded in the rst ve or ten years after
the fall of communism. Along with them there were some very small indi-
vidual initiatives that you might also call what I mean by i pavarur.”
This discussion helped me understand the specic connotations i
pavarur had for the publishers. But it was still not clear to me whether
Arlind and Ataol thought the connotations they attached to the term were
likely to be shared by other members of the Albanian reading public. So I
asked, “Do you think the word has a positive connotation for your
readers?”
Ataol began his response by reminding me of some basic facts and per-
spectives that, although quite important, were sometimes easy for me to
lose sight of. “We do at best 500-copy print runs,” he said. “300in many
cases. And even those print runs take at least two or three years to run out.
Sometimes four, ve years. So we’re talking about a really small public.
But even though the number is very small, I wouldn’t feel comfortable in
putting all these readers in the same box. Saying ‘our readers.’ That’s a
very broad generalization.”
I appreciated Ataol’s refusal to generalize, not least because it kept me
honest about my own commitments to writing “ethnographies of the
16 Thanks to prolic twentieth-century translators such as Fan Noli (1882–1965), Skënder
Lurasi (1900–1982), Mitrush Kuteli (1907–1967), Petro Zheji (1929–2015), and Robert
Shvarc (1932–2003), many classics of world literature (e.g., Prometheus Bound, Don Quixote,
Gulliver’s Travels, Madame Bovar y, and Anna Karenina, among many others) have been
established as popular staples among Albanian readers. For a sense of the high volume but
narrow range of books published during communism, see Peter Prifti’s (1978, 133),
accounting of book publishing between 1945 and 1960, when the state-controlled publish-
ing apparatus based in Tirana brought out approximately 3000 titles, totaling nearly 30mil-
lion copies.
2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN…

44
particular.”17 I also appreciated that after establishing these limitations,
Ataol went on to answer my question. “For these readers,” he said, “small
number though they might be, I don’t think this word ‘independent’ has
ever played any role in their interpretation of our work. If you ask, I’m
pretty sure, no one will refer to us as an independent publisher. And by
independent I’m using the Albanian conception [i pavarur].”
“For some groups here,” Arlind said, “we seem like Communists. For
some actual Communists, we seem like Liberals. For some religious
groups, we seem like agnostics. But I think they feel something very near
to that word. During our contacts with our readers, I feel that they per-
ceive us as people who are not connected directly with the
establishment.”
After an exchange of anecdotes that helped me get an idea of the kind
of readers that appreciated the work they were doing with the publishing
house, I steered the conversation back to the topic of cultural translation.
“I want to return,” I said, “to the meaning of the phrase, ‘conceived as a
social, nonprot project.’ ”
“Well,” Ataol said, “we wouldn’t necessarily mind being able to have,
by Albanian standards, two good salaries on which to live and keep doing
what we’re doing. But in the last ten, eleven years, this has not been pos-
sible … Again, we might have diverging opinions, me and Arlind, but I
wouldn’t want this to turn into a protable business because then, I think,
at a certain point along the way we would lose control over our ideas con-
cerning publication, why we started it, and why we’re doing it.”
“Prot is not our goal,” Arlind said.
“We’re doing what we’re doing,” Ataol continued, “because we like
books … That was what I meant when I stated, ‘it was conceived from the
beginning as a social project.’ I meant that it was not meant to be prot-
able but to benet society.”
It was at this point in the conversation that Arlind made the statements
I put in the epigraph of this chapter—that publishing was not a conven-
tional business, that it concerned a product of the mind, that it was sup-
posed to help people, and that as something produced in the public
interest, books were not like other products or commodities.
17 As I have noted elsewhere (Rosen 2019b), I use the term “ethnographies of the particu-
lar” with reference to the approach Lila Abu-Lughod outlined in “Writing Against Culture”
(1991). I was rst drawn to this approach because the term “Albanian culture” never seemed
adequate to the task of understanding and conveying what life was like for Arlind and Ataol.
M. ROSEN

45
“I know of conceptions of prot as beneting society,” Ataol said, con-
tinuing the conversation. “But personally, I don’t see individual prot as a
contribution, at least not in publishing. It’s probably a bad establisher of
value. If you want to formulate a set of criteria that will measure what
you’re doing in terms of, ‘Is it in the benet of society or not?’ I don’t
think prot would rank among those criteria. I’m not sure they’re directly
related, like one can be the consequence of the other, or they’re just two
foundational ideas, but if you want to try to formulate what we are, those
two probably stand together. We’re both a socially minded activity and a
not-for-prot organization.”
“But ‘social project’ does not mean we are just socialists,” Arlind said.
“Publishing is a public activity, to spread knowledge. It’s one of the means
to emancipate society. This is why this is a social project … But now, we’re
confronting new difculties. Maybe now it’s time to have more sure steps,
a strategy. I’m more stressed now than I was ve or ten years ago. Ten
years ago we didn’t know what we were doing.”
“Our life quality has been in decline,” Ataol said.
“Yes,” Arlind said, “I think we need to change something. A new expe-
rience or new strategy, a new method. But I nd this very difcult. I like
our way of working, but it has consequences.”
“The workload has become very difcult to manage,” Ataol said. “On
the one hand, the number of books in publication has been growing. We
are now more than one hundred titles. On the other, we are already oper-
ating at very strained budgets … The number of books keeps growing and
the amount of time [we have to work] is being restricted. We both have
small children.”
“Everyday life in Albania is difcult,” Arlind said. “It’s crazy here, in
Tirana.”
“You have to imagine creatures living in very extreme conditions,”
Ataol said. “Like the animals at the bottom of the sea or those living at
very high temperatures in the desert. This is the kind of existence.”
“When we say, ‘the power’ here, ‘the corruption,’ all these things are
bonded with our everyday life,” Arlind added.
“We experience corruption,” Ataol said. “We experience abuse of
power, we experience violence.”
“Everyday life in Albania is the key to understanding all these things,”
Arlind said. “Because in my everyday life, year after year, I’ve had a lot of
difculties, of a kind I never imagined. Never. The politicians and corrupt
people here have colonized our everyday life with buildings, with
2 IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST: STRUCTURES OF FEELING IN ALBANIAN…

46
corruption, with maa, with all their instruments of power. Everyday life
here is very, very stressful. And they say, ‘The only way to improve your
everyday life is to have money.’ To become like them.”
cOnclUsiOn: literatUre’s histOricity
The living social histories of Albanian publishing companies such as
Onufri, Toena, Çabej, Aleph, IDK, Zenit, and Pika pa sipërfaqe remain
largely untold. Outside a relatively small but transnational circle of con-
temporary readers, even the names are mostly unknown. From the stand-
point of ethnographic storytelling (McGranahan 2020), however, I think
the likes of Bujar Hudhri of Onufri, Gentian Çoçoli of Aleph, Piro Misha
of IDK, and Krenar Zejno of Zenit Editions would all make excellent
informants. Drawing from my own eldwork with Ataol Kaso and Arlind
Novi, the cofounders of Pika pa sipërfaqe, my intent here has been to
contribute to the inevitably larger project, which I hope future researchers
will join me in pursuing, of doing literary anthropology with Albanian
sources. Ultimately, my discussion of the ethnographic material in this
chapter sought to show how my interlocutors’ decisions about what and
how to read, translate, and publish in the present have been structured by
their past experiences and future expectations. My argument thus built on
and can contribute to a body of contemporary theory dealing with over-
lapping experiences of past and future times in the present (Koselleck
1985; Lambek 2003; Napolitano 2015; Hartog 2016; Stewart 2016;
Hodges 2019; Musaraj this volume).
Arlind and Ataol had a social vision that was irreducibly their own. But
their conception of Pika pa sipërfaqe as an independent, nonprot, social
project also resonated with earlier public projects in Albania. My analysis
of the projects in question has shown that, despite very signicant differ-
ences, they overlapped in three important ways. First, they all were
grounded in a critique of the present. Second, they all were oriented
toward a vision of a better future. And third, they all operated with an idea
of literature as a means of social transformation. Evidence for these claims
appears in documents authored by the intellectual leaders of the Albanian
National Awakening in the nineteenth century, by the communist Party
ideologues who dominated the public sphere in the second half of the
twentieth century, and in statements I recorded as eldnotes in the present
of the ethnography.
M. ROSEN

47
Viewing these areas of overlap as structures of feeling can help explain
my interlocutors’ views of publishing as a social activity. For even as their
conception of books took shape in a space built on the ruins of a past in
which literature was made to function as a tool of totalitarian control, they
saw publishing as something to be done in the public interest. Publishing,
they said, was a way to emancipate readers by spreading knowledge and
raising social awareness. Operating according to a strong feeling of social
responsibility, Arlind and Ataol did not speak of literature’s function in the
abstract. They referred to concrete knowledge and new realities that were
different from the precarious everyday life they and their readers knew all
too well. And though one cannot necessarily point to a given book or a
collection of books and say, “Here is a new way of thinking,” or “There is
a new social reality,” there are clear indications that among the many
books Pika pa sipërfaqe has published, some have already begun to help
people—including activists and community organizers such as Diana
Malaj and Klodi Leka—overcome the inertia of ambivalence and mistrust
that has long permeated public life in Tirana.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank all of my interlocutors in Tirana, espe-
cially Arlind and Ataol, for sharing their time and experience with me. I would also
thank the editors for their generous reading and helpful suggestions for improving
the manuscript.
BiBliOgraphy
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