I

On 22 June, 2022, I lost my poet. He wasn’t really mine, and I didn’t really lose him, but we belonged to one other in that particular way that translators and poets do, and his death extinguished a partnership between us that had once fizzed with possibility. Just like that, an oeuvre that only days before had been setting frantic new shoots was set in stone. Where before my task had been to sift through new work – long, staccato manuscripts that my poet would email after his latest nocturnal fit of inspiration – now it would be to help extricate his unpublished poems from the messy entrails of private notebooks and computers and arrange them, grimly, into a selection of posthumous poems.

II

To translate a person’s words is to claim possession of them. The translated poem becomes mine, even as it remains his.

Do I speak through the poet, or does the poet speak through me? Who is possessing whom?

III

My poet, Xhevdet Bajraj, died of complications following treatment for a brain tumour. He was 62. We were two days shy of sharing a birthday, and I wonder if some Piscean magic first drew me to the poem of his that I found, by chance, in an online Mexican journal, and felt compelled to translate in a single sitting.

A different magic swept in, years later, to place my translation in the hands of an independent publisher in North Carolina, who contacted me out of the blue to propose I work with her on a chapbook. So began a four-way long-distance relationship: me in Naarm, the poet in Mexico City, the publisher in Chapel Hill, and a second (or rather, first) translator in Boston. Xhevdet wrote in both Albanian – his mother tongue – and Spanish, the language of his adopted home. I translated from the latter, homesick poems populated by haunted, chain-smoking angels.

IV

The moment he set foot on earth

Apenas puso los pies en la tierra

First thing he did was walk into a cantina

Entró en la primera cantina

He drank two whiskeys, then he died

Bebió dos güisquis y murió

And the angels have night terrors

Y los ángeles tienen pesadillas

(Xhevdet Bajraj, “The Angel’s Dreams” / “Los sueños del ángel”)

V

Xhevdet was born in Kosovo. He was celebrated there, as a poet and playwright. In 1998, when Serb military and paramilitary forces began a campaign of forced displacement and extermination of Kosovar Albanians, Xhevdet was deported to Albania. He was to consider himself lucky: other men were being murdered in cold blood in their living rooms, in front of their families. Xhevdet’s status as a poet saved him.

His wife Vjollca and their two young sons stayed behind, until they were able to flee. They took a bus to the Albanian border. When the view from the bus window showed the dead being tipped into ditches by the side of the road, Vjollca covered her youngest son’s eyes.

The family reunited in Albania, and were evacuated to Mexico by the International Parliament of Writers. They became the first residents of Mexico City’s Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl. They never returned to Kosovo.