Hermetic Poetry: Understanding and Interpreting Albanian Poetry

Abstract

Modern European lyrical poetry of the 20th century (with authors: Rilke and George Trakl in Austria; Apollinaire or Mallarme, Yves Bonfois, Baudelaire in France; Frederico Garcia Lorka, Rafael Alberto in Spain; Ungaret, Montale and Quasimodo in Italy,and even Anglo-Saxons, such as Yeats, Pound and T. S. Eliot.), also took place in Albanian spaces, within our political, social and cultural circumstances. Dressed in symbols and metaphors, dark and full of contrasts, as an inner expression of the poet, it comes as an opposition to ideologized and politicized literature, as well as to dictatorial power. Hermetic poetry, as we see the poetry of Italian and other authors, which was created in the circumstances of the dictatorial time all over Europe, is dark and closed poetry, based on symbolic language with suggestive and semiotic power, with a complexity in poetic articulation, which brings difficulty in interpretation. The hermetic poets, avoiding the regimes of the Nazi-fascist time, withdraw into themselves and avoid open communication to bring the inner world of creators who put art first, through which they come out against the systems and propaganda of the reality that surrounds them. Along these lines, this poem, which in most cases expresses loneliness, pain and despair, as experiences of wars, losses, feelings and human situations, appears reflexive (of internal reflection), but also a poem of contemplation, emotion and of deep thought. The Albanian researcher, Leka Ndoja, considers that hermetic poetry comes to life or is understood from its reading and interpretation, since it does not communicate directly with the signified. The signifiers of the hermetic poetry are revealed by the interpretations of the poetry within the mysticism of the subtlety of the message. Our authors were also inspired by this poem to hide the message as a new poetic strategy (Ndoja 2012, 5). When it comes to our Albanian poetry, the researcher from Kosovo, Basri Çapriqi, mainly considers the poetry of the 70s as such, as he says in his press release "Poetry of the 70s-Non-communication as communication", at the Academy Conference of Sciences and Arts, with the title "Streams of contemporary Albanian literature". That poem comes with a low level of communication, without transparency of messages and as such is not easily understood by readers.

Received: 7 February 2024 / Accepted: 25 April 2024 / Published: 5 May 2024