Ismail Kadare - The File on H.

In order to compare a real event with its Homerized version, we looked for the most recent event we could find that had been turned into ballad material All we found were twelve lines, no more, referring to the Congress of Berlin of 1878. Like some cold-weather hydra staying hidden in the fog, not daring to come any closer to our times, epic poetry seems to have stopped in that year. Why 1878i What prevented its moving forward? What has frightened it off?

It seems that oral epic had long been wary of approaching the shores of the modern world, which is so foreign to it .

We compiled a very detailed file on the Berlin Congress: the agenda, the statements of the participating governments, the attitude of the Great Powers to the Ottoman Empire and to Albania, the decisions taken; and we even made notes on the maneuvers behind the scenes. The real events seem like a still-warm corpse beside the mummified version the ballad gives .

We are looking without success for a more recent event. We are astonished to find barely a line in the oral epics about 1913, the black year of Albania’s dismemberment, a year that ought to echo through the whole of the rhapsodes corpus! Which suggests very firmly that the art of oral epic has indeed become arthritic with age .

March, at the Inn

What shifts and what stays fixed in epic poetry? Is there an unchanging core of material that ensures the integrity of the art form over the centuries?

Up to now we believed that the anchoring role was played by the figures of speech, the models or fixed forms of the language, or, to put it another way, the basic molds into which epic material was poured .

So we were convinced that the ancient laboratory’s linguistic equipment, which was itself unchanging, guaranteed the homogeneity of its poetic production .

However, the more we progress with our research, the more we come to see that, like the laboratory itself, figures of speech and linguistic formulae are also subject to change. Except that the rate of change is so slow as to be imperceptible, just like our own aging .

BILL AND MAX FELT EXHAUSTED by the superhuman perspectives that their research sometimes opened up, and so they came back to simpler and more concrete issues, such as the potential influence of a rhapsode’s personal life on the omissions or additions that he made to his ballads. If a lahuta player stressed the jealousy motif in the rape of Muj’s wife, for instance, then the explanation was to be found hidden in the player’s own soul. It would have been marvelous to be able to conduct a fully detailed investigation of that kind, but it was a lost hope since, as they had come to realize full well, highlanders would not allow any questions about their private lives. How wonderful it would have been to clarify everything! To elucidate a passage where, for instance, a bridal procession is caught in ice as it crosses the mountains, it would have been desirable to have the details of the rhapsode’s own wedding, of the dangers encountered, of whatever worries he had experienced, and so on. Comparing all such information provided by different rhapsodes would have allowed the scholars to establish particularly valuable criteria for measuring the "tragic quotient” of each version.

As the days went by, they began to notice strange correspondences between the epics and memories of their own lives. Half joking, half serious, they started talking about everyday episodes from their respective pasts. Some had taken place in their homes in lreland, others in telephone booths and bars in New York, then there was the route the taxi took the day Max got married, and his feelings one weekend the previous summer when his wife left a note saying she had gone to see her parents, whereas he suspected her of an affair with an old flame, Bill, for his part, recalled his mother’s remarriage, a painful memory that was still torture for him fifteen years after the event. Little by little they hammered out their entire lives on the formidable anvil of the oral epic, and by dusk, they could see the green pastures of the Emerald Isle as well as the skyscrapers of Manhattan against the now familiar backdrop of the Accursed Mountains. on which they had still not set foot.

Had it begun to snow again outside. or was it just an impression caused by his weakening eyes? Bill went closer to the frosted windowpane. It really was snowing. A thin sprinkling of snowflakes. Max was busy with the tape recorder.

Ever since Shtjefen had told them that all sorts of rumors were flying around about their machine, they had tried to keep its volume turned down as low as possible. On one occasion. the screech of the tape rewinding had terrified one of the guests downstairs, who started to scream that a murder was going on upstairs, that someone was being strangled, having his neck wrung. The innkeeper had tried in vain to calm the man by explaining what the noise actually was. But the man only got angrier.

"So our bards' voices are being put through that torture? Those aren’t human voices now, they’re the voices of demons! Do you mean to say that you are allowing your inn to be used for such an abomination? Shtjefen, you should be ashamed of yourself!”

As he departed, he yelled out again from the road:

"Take care, Shtjefen! You have allowed the devil into your house, do you hear?”

Although the innkeeper told them about only part of this exchange, they were very annoyed. Then, calming down, they persuaded themselves that they could not have expected anything but such disapproval of their work. The publication of part of the corpus of epic poetry some years previously and now their recording heralded the rhapsodes imminent disappearance. They were becoming increasingly dispensable, and soon, as the days went by, there would be fewer and fewer ballad-carriers, until finally they would become extinct, just as in everyday life technological progress would soon make street sweepers redundant.

They were discussing this topic (Bill remarking that the expression "ballad-carriers” might sound eloquent but was actually inadequate, since the rhapsodes were much more than mere carriers; their decline had much more to do with the aging and rusting of the entire machinery of. oral poetry), when they heard a familiar knock at the door: Shtjefen. Even before they could see that the envelopes in his hand were addressed to them, the diagonal red and blue stripes made their hearts leap with joy at the prospect of receiving news from home.

The mail was indeed for them. So the post office had not forgotten them, it had tracked them down to the end of the earth. They tore the envelopes from the innkeeper’s hand and began to open them indiscriminately.

“Look, Max!’ said Bill as he pulled some press clippings out of one of the larger envelopes,

“Newspapers!” Max mumbled as he looked over. Are the stories about us?”

They abandoned the letters for a moment and put their heads together to scan the headlines

IS THIS THE END OF THE HOMERIC ENIGMA? There were pieces from the New York Times and the Washington Post: A BIZARRE ADVENTURE IN A LAND BELIEVED TO BE THE LAST EXTANT CRADLE OF HOMERIC POETRY. Then clippings from two Boston newspapers, and the Chicago Tribune .

“What we’re doing is out in the open now,“ Bill said.

They read it all over several times. Some journalists were appreciative, others were not. One article compared their discreet departure from New York to the way that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza left their village on the morning when their tragicomic adventures began. But it didn’t say which of them was the knight and which the squire.

The inn had its own life, and as they paid attention to it only intermittently, when they needed rest from their work, it seemed all the more foreign and impenetrable to them. What went on downstairs was always muffled by whispering and shrouded in mystery. The Albanian high-landers were dour folk, who never talked a lot or laughed out loud. They were rarely seen and always vanished like ghosts at first light.