VI

We want other people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense. […] It forms a lock against oblivion. Does it?

(Anne Carson, Nox)

VII

In a 2018 interview with Mexican writer Carmen Ros, Xhevdet says (and I translate):

I come from two small languages, Albanian and Serbo-Croatian. I’ve been bilingual since childhood. Two languages like two quiet streams, which suddenly emptied into this vast ocean that is Spanish. It’s like I’m a fish from two streams, a fish that was injured in the Kosovo War. I came wounded into this sea, my wound still bleeding, and I have poured my blood into this sea. All my efforts writing in Spanish have been to translate that blood.

VIII

Etymologically speaking, remembering is not the opposite of dismembering, although the image is eager to suggest itself: re-membering as a re-assembling of ghostly limbs, a re-stitching. And there is something in the macabre imagery of dismemberment that calls up a particularly urgent function of memory: the preservation of history, especially of its most violent chapters. Impossible not to invoke Walter Benjamin here: ‘For every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.’

Translation is its own special mode of remembering, one that holds the potential to literally transfigure (change the shape of) and transcend (go beyond) the original text. Telling, that both words have predominantly spiritual meanings. Benjamin made the connection in his 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator”. A translation, he wrote, issues not from a text’s life but from its afterlife (Überleben): ‘For in its afterlife – which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living – the original undergoes a change.’

As a body is unmade and re-made in death, so is a text ushered across some threshold to emerge altered, and perhaps expanded, on the other side.

In her 2007 book Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory, Bella Brodzki describes translation, after Benjamin, as a ‘redemptive mode’, an enriching process of transfusion that ensures the afterlives of texts across time and space. Translation, she writes, ‘[enables] the source text to live beyond itself, to exceed its own limitations.’ Drawing on the notion of translation as a crossing of thresholds (in its most literal sense, the word means ‘to carry over’), she also likens it to ‘excavating or unearthing burial sites,’ ‘resurrecting a memory’, and ‘interpreting a dream’.

IX

I imagine myself translating, sorting through the bones of my poet’s words – collecting, recollecting, re-recollecting – and forming them into a figure that might, if only briefly, rise from its grave and walk again.

X

Benjamin took his own life in 1940, at the French-Spanish border, when fascist Spain revoked his lifeline – a transit visa guaranteeing safe passage to the United States – and promised to repatriate him to fascist Germany. He died in desperation, a Jewish refugee fleeing genocide.

Xhevdet’s lifeline held: he made it to the New World. He lived there for two more decades, his heart beating but wounded, bleeding poetry, haunted by grief, trauma, yearning. His poems are hands thrust back into the past, returning with pieces of bone and earth to say: Look! This here was my brother! Look! This here was my home!