World Literature Today

34 WLT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2016 luta : v . l . l . constantine : annette hornischer Peter Constantine: Kosovo’s international festival of literature in Orllan has over the last few years attracted a number of Kosovar writers and international literary figures. Do you see a new energy in the Kosovo literary scene? Ragip Luta: Yes, there is definitely new energy on the Kosovo literary scene, no doubt about it! Although it is a small scene, it is colorful, vibrant, and exciting, with many more opportunities than there used to be for poets, writers, and playwrights to publish and interact directly with the public. I guess this new energy is natural in a young country with the youngest population in Europe—people experiencing for the first time the early years of liberation, freedom, and independence. If we take as our time frame the fifteen years since the Kosovo War, hopefully this could be something like the onset of the 1960s for the Kosovars, with all its creativeness. And all this, of course, compared to the situation before the Kosovo War. PC: The Albanian writer Ismail Kadare has described historic Kosovo as a land of different languages and cultures. What is the scene in young literary Kosovo today? RL: Writers in Kosovo continue to write in Albanian, Serbian, Turkish, Romani, and even Gorani, a South Slavic dialect. And the scene has been enriched following the war in 1999, with more Albanian writers in Kosovo resorting to Gheg, which is the dominant spoken dialect among Albanians in Kosovo and northern Albania. The Gheg variant of Albanian had been neglected for several decades following the adoption of Standard Albanian in Albania in 1972. PC: From what I have heard, the dictator Enver Hoxha had actually made Gheg illegal in Albania, though it was the language of the great northern Albanian epics. RL: Well, it was practically “outlawed” and reduced to “reactionary” status during Hoxha ’s regime. For example, Gheg was only used in movies in communist Albania “to typecast ‘bad guys,’ reactionaries, traitors,” according to Migjen Kelmendi, a Kosovar rock musician and author who was the first to publicly break the taboo of using Gheg in the media just before the 1999 war. He now runs the only TV channel in Gheg. Or to quote Primo Shllaku, a poet from the northern Albanian city of Shkodër, a frequent The Young Literary Scene in Kosovo A Conversation with Ragip Luta by Peter Constantine Kosovo is a young and vibrant country striving to prevail in a harsh new Balkan reality. Ragip Luta is the director of Kosovo’s Festival of Literature in Orllan. The festival is held annually in July by Lake Batlava, bringing together Kosovar and international writers and artists. The festival’s theme for 2015 was “Writers and Writing in Exile.” It brought back to Kosovo exiled writers such as Xhevdet Bajraj (Mexico) and Skënder Sherifi (Belgium). Peter Constantine Ragip Luta Q&A WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 35 guest at our festival, “Gheg was banned the way free speech was banned.” PC:Youalsomentionedthatthereareauthors in Kosovo who write in other languages. RL: There are Kosovar Serb writers who make use of the local Serb dialect, too, and then there are those who write in Turkish and in the Romani/Roma language . But these literary scenes in Kosovo are not unified, and you can hardly find Kosovar Albanian and Serb writers getting together, as would have happened occasionally before the 1990s. Small steps have recently been taken to foster some kind of cultural cooperation and exchange between Prishtina and Belgrade, but this can’t be said of the Albanian and Serb writers in Kosovo. PC: Who would you say are the interesting writers in Kosovo today? RL: Traditionally, Kosovo’s forte has been poetry. Personally, I like Ndriçim M. Ademaj, who—I can’t help mentioning— looks a little like a bearded Jim Morrison. In one of his poems he has said that his head is a “mental hospital”; in another poem he sees himself as a “ricocheting bullet wandering around the world,” unable to pierce his own head. Hardly any sunnier is the world of another of my favorite young poets, Shpëtim Selmani. Last year one of his...