The Universal Values of the Poetry of the Albanian Poet Mujë Buçpapaj
By Prof. Dr. Vasil Toçinovski (Skopje/Rijeka)
Mujë Buçpapaj, The Invisible Victory, published by Interlingua Publishing House, Skopje/ Мујо Бучпапај, Невидлива победа, Интерлингуа, Скопје.
The poetic work Invisible Victory by the contemporary Albanian poet, essayist, and literary critic Mujë Buçpapaj is a valuable illustration of how the author and his work represent an inseparable whole. Over the past fifty years, Buçpapaj has been one of the founders of political pluralism and free press in Albania (1990). Themes from his many writings, comments, and political analyses—he was the editor of the newspaper Rilindja Demokratike—have also been poured into his active poetic voice.
Engaged in both cultures, linguistic circles, and traditions, through the excellent translation from Albanian into Macedonian by Jehona and Mustafa Spahiu, we are given the opportunity to discover a highly significant creative phenomenon within contemporary Albanian literature and broader culture. This is engaged poetry that addresses contemporaneity—people and the world, life, events, and occurrences that, unfortunately, define and give meaning to today’s unstable reality or difficult times. In this context, humans appear as sowers of evil, hatred, mistrust, hostility, intrigue, and destruction. Hence, recurring artistic signs include the dead, the winds, the barbarians, defeats, and death.
If the mother symbolizes the homeland, kin, and ancestry, the documentary tendency clearly identifies the subjects, time, and space (Albanian, Tirana, Kosovo, the Adriatic Sea, the Italian coast, New York, Manhattan, Gjergj Fishta, Paris, the Champs-Élysées, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Balkans, Europe). The poetic voice, in the first person singular, reinforces this documentary meaning with a strong lyrical presence in direct communication or through the appropriation of names (Letter to Mother, My Imagination, My Homeland, My Fields, or poems like I Love Those Eyes, Wanderings in the Dark, Fields in Childhood). This is the reality of existence from which there is no escape. Life here is a struggle, transformed into a war that must be endured until the final breath. Thus, the title Invisible Victory is far from accidental—the invisible victory is immense.
Apocalyptic images that shape and give meaning to Buçpapaj’s poetic world are revealed already in the opening (programmatic) poem, which also gives the book its title. In nearly idyllic imagery with loneliness and silence echoing as distant warnings, unclear feelings emerge:
Loneliness remained / On the husk of roasted corn / In the hands of children / In the muddy neighborhood.
Here are the misty sun, the wind sneaking through swampy bushes, while the girls have yielded to the grass surrounded by tree shadows.
Through prayers of love / Came / The invisible victory / In the vineyard / Of spoken water.
The poet himself is both witness and participant (I was there too), and his voice declares:
So little life had / Man / To do good.
The unknown imposes itself as fear and terror, growing into an eternal anticipation. The wind spills its colors and seasons, replacing people and lives. A majestic image of freedom is born with The Portrait of the Wind, proclaimed hymnal:
Beyond the mountain / We were birds emerging / From the swamp / Those dreams of bitter gaze // Of the left-side village / There were no more roads / Leading / To the poplar season / Whistling / Of my home.
The path to freedom is the longest and most difficult one. Freedom rises from ruins, from the bottom of the mud, and at that point, fear must unconditionally be conquered. Only then does the dream, severed from freedom, stripped of post-war spirit, celebrate in Democracy Square. The taste of every victory is bitter:
Here rests our torn dream / From the stripped freedom of things / Post-war // To enter / The world / Those raised girl hands / In the torturing air / From the setting of insulted things.
Universal dimensions of poetic interpretations are reflected in the poem The Statue of Wind in the Sacred Land of New York, with prayers to God, the sea and ocean, waves, battle and good fortune, the horse and war. And here come multicolored migrations like an army of a peaceful world—or more precisely, a remnant of the Socialist Fairy Tale. The measure of death and fallen heroes, as a counterbalance to freedom amid the frightening globalization, brings us to the tragedy of Kosovo in 1999.
No human life is beautiful. A person might say that they only had beautiful moments in a single lifetime. So in the poem Life Is a Dream, the poet declares:
Not even the crow / Was blacker / Than those under Slavic slavery / Of memory.
Only a Whisper remains, like a willow in deep darkness—a whisper rising through a blind sky. Evil times uproot people from their birthplaces, separating them from cemeteries so that the cursed, uprooted souls fly like leaves in the sea’s shadow (Sea Gulls). Like an unhealed toothache, the awareness that a stone only weighs in its rightful place persists. Thus, the poem Tainted Imagination concludes with self-awareness:
Oh Lord / It seems I did not leave my Homeland / Behind the airplane door / But a field / Of people / Stripped of sight.
Longing and pain can only be expressed to the closest (in Letter to Mother)—for the black winter in which death finds the lonely man! Here appear The Barbarians, threatening life, but hope doesn’t abandon the man, who in a cell of terror, pleads for his mother to light a fire upon this desolate world and pray for him in Albanian, because he is alive and refuses to be a loser.
The poems shift like photographs in a film reel. With them change the landscapes, moods, characters, and roles—culminating in a devastating realization:
I am bitterly disappointed by this voiceless peace / And it no longer revives me / Over a world,
– the concluding verses of Total Disappointment. Only a free person can be a fortunate person. Hence, in the poem First There Was Fire, an apocalyptic vision unfolds—indeed, a self-portrait:
Like a dog / With thin village skin / My life / Hung on an oak tree.
Can the dead, who cry after the rain, find peace as the empty, mad southern trains cross the lands? In opposition to the existential values of God on one side and the dead on the other, only loneliness is mourned. The memories of believers are lost, like a mute peasant in this tragic, premeditated, and fabricated transition. This poem is considered the most significant in the volume Invisible Victory. Precisely in it:
Man / In transition / Like a roof tile / In a filthy city / The state’s trust / Doubtful / Of the dreamer’s work / That bloodstained edifice / Of ideas.
From here, the invisible victory becomes an eternal victory (conditionally, V.T.) in a time without ideas and ideals.
A person who has been uprooted can never find personal peace or comfort. Like a talisman carried throughout the world, in all directions, he bears with him his homeland and his people. In the poem It Was a Mistake of Faith, the individual is afraid of the dominion over the earthly globe. Beneath the breath of a dry alley, there is a symbolic meaning—a partial attempt to comfort a world of broken illusions, while faith has been born and tied in the blood. Step by step, this brings the individual closer to an exit. That is to say:
We must die to become / Clear / Beneath the ash of the universe / And then…
The ellipsis convincingly affirms that life and the world seem to have no end—or that no one has ever truly known where they end. Hence, poetic expression becomes a space where irony, allegory, grotesque, and dark humor emerge—elements that wound and ache.
In the poem The Rebellious People, the poet rises like a tribune, above all disagreements and defeats, standing together with his people. Individual and collective feeling and action are the only path, through personal struggle and sacrifice, to achieve the long-sought desire and the thirst for freedom. Toward the realization of the people’s age-old ideas and ideals:
He had raised his hand against the traitors / Left behind by the call / The shadow had died / Of those who turned their backs on / The homeland, as an unexplained / State shelter.
The people remember and forgive, just as justice may delay but never forgets. Therefore, the final verses of the poem do not simply narrate—they convey a message: what matters is not who passed away, but who fought to the end:
With feet hidden in the street / The State / The Rebellious People.
The inevitable end is only a new beginning. Man returns to his roots, to his hearth, with the milk of his mother’s nurture and the word of his mother. Thus, the eternal return in the final, closing poems of the book—My Homeland (The End of Tplan), Two Apple Branches, The Light Passes By, A Gloomy Gaze of Trees, The Rest Comes from God, Silent Things, The Brook from Rain, all the way to Fields in Childhood—is no paradox.
And the critic has the right—indeed, cannot exclude his own subjective side—to choose or highlight the poem he finds most remarkable. This is what we wish to do with the poem Mute Motifs. It is composed of quatrains, each image or fragment a complete world in itself, yet together forming a marvelous and harmonious creation. In the first stanza, we read:
The oak does not embrace the oak / As man embraces man / But shakes its beard into the gray mist / Of the mountain.
The grandeur of the oak, the man, the beard, the mist, and the mountain is overwhelming. They are unyielding. Yet, they surrender in the second stanza:
The oak does not smile at the oak / As man smiles at man / But opens leaves at the beginning / Of every Spring.
Nothing in life is accidental. Even more troubling is what happens between what was written and what was once desired or planned. So we read:
The oak does not weep for the oak / As man weeps for man / But sheds its leaves / At the end of every Autumn.
The unrepeatable and the majestic, the beautiful and the sublime, are contained in simplicity. And that is the supreme goddess—wisdom. Only with her, even as we Wander in Darkness, having lost the principle of rebellion, can we shout:
Oh you man, rising to awaken / Freedom / Up in the city there is lightning.
Let us begin to conclude. We call upon Mujë Buçpapaj and his Invisible Victory for guidance, along with the messages in the poem The Road Map. On the road of rebellion, even if prose-like, the word holds essential meaning—like the face of a pine in the fog of autumn’s wind. In a time of death (autumn, fog), man marches, following each step with the desire to overcome dictatorship. Aware that regardless of how every policy and government, diplomacy or political scheme is named or declared, they are nothing but dictatorship.
Against this evil, man and poet Mujë Buçpapaj has raised his voice and walked forward—toward new horizons and futures.
Translated from the original Macedonian
By Mustafa Spahiu (Skopje)