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- Title
'Go Back to Homer's Verse': Iliads of revolution and Odysseys of exile in Albanian Poetry.
- Authors
Goldwyn, Adam J.
- Abstract
During the Albanian independence movement (1887-1913), Albanian nationalists sought to forge a new European identity to contrast with their former Ottoman one. The Homeric epics, as canonical Western texts that also reflected an East-West (metaphorically, in this case, Ottoman-European) conflict, thus became a locus for constructing this new national identity. As part of this Europeanizing nationalist project, Naim Frashe¨ri published the first translation of the Iliad into Albanian, while Gjergj Fishta published The Highland Lute, an epic which cast Albanian revolutionaries as Homeric heroes. The Homeric epics retained this association with revolution, and were thus reconfigured in subsequent generations by dissident poets under Communist dictatorships in Albania and Kosovo (then Yugoslavia). The exiled poet Bardhyl Londo compared Albania to Ithaca, thus making him a wandering Odysseus and the dictator Enver Hoxha and his circle the suitors wasting the country. At the same time, the political prisoner Visar Zhiti compared himself to Homer, poor and oppressed. Valentina Sarac¸ini's 'Antimythic' poems, by contrast, offer a twenty-first century vision better suited to a post-revolutionary democratic Albania: Sarac¸ini suggests that to overcome Albania's violent past, Albanians must also abandon the martial ideology that celebrated fratricidal murderers as revolutionary national heroes.
- Subjects
ALBANIA; AUTONOMY &; independence movements; ALBANIAN history; NATIONALISM; ALBANIAN literature; REVOLUTIONARY literature; ILIAD of Homer; ODYSSEY of Homer; COMMUNISM; NINETEENTH century; HISTORY
- Publication
Classical Receptions Journal, 2016, Vol 8, Issue 4, p506
- ISSN
1759-5134
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/crj/clw003