Moikom Zeqo
trans. by Loredana Mihani & Wayne Miller
Two Stories
The Griffin Fish
The life of Pjetër Budi [1] belongs to the earth; eternity belongs to the water.
On Christmas Eve, 1622, Pjetër Budi was traveling with four abbots. He was hoping to cross the turbulent Drin River in a small boat. The surrounding hills were pocked with caves, like in distant Bethlehem. A dog was traveling with the men.
The youngest abbot was named Nicolle Leka. He was the first one to climb into the boat. He reached out to pull Budi aboard. The other two men and the dog followed.
Just a few feet from shore, the boat overturned, and they all fell into the water. Budi was holding onto Leka’s sleeve, begging for help. Leka hardened himself and slipped out of reach, never to return.
With a bit of torn sleeve in his hand, Budi was swept away by the current.
The other abbots dragged themselves ashore. They were soaked. The dog clambered out, too, and began to run alongside the apocalyptic current, chasing a human image sealed in memory by the Drin River. As the dog disappeared from sight, he yelped with pain and was never seen again.
It was snowing, and the cassocks of the four abbots were icing over. It had been their sacred task to protect and keep the bishop, Pjetër Budi—but, idiotically, they’d let him drown. As they walked, icicles hung from their cassocks, cutting the tops of their feet. They kept walking—but to where? Every road was now circular, pouring back to the place of Budi’s drowning. They would become prisoners of this event, this crime, consumed by shame for the rest of their lives, even in death.
—
“Oh, my son—Leka, Leka,” Budi cried out inside himself while drowning in the Drin River. “Now let me die.” The cold sealed him up like a redemptive catafalque spinning around him at great speed. The Drin is not the River Jordan, nor one of the rivers of Hades—but for Budi, death came in the form of screaming waters, followed by golden, blinding eternity.
His nose, mouth, and lungs filled with water. Water surrounded him like a turbid, nightmarish, all-encompassing mirror. He remembered the Latin of Saint Paul: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem. Nunc cognosco ex parte: tunc cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum: “For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror; but afterwards we shall see face to face. Now I know God partly; then I shall know him fully, just as He knows us.”
The terrible pain of drowning was fading. Death is always fleeting, was Budi’s final thought.
His limbs were nearly frozen, as were his eyelids, sealed wide open around his eyes. A branch in the water hit against his forehead (as if it had arrived from the cross of Golgotha). He became part of the Drin River. For three days the river channeled Budi’s body toward the Adriatic. Slowly he reached the sea’s bottom—as though he were inside the clear, dimensionless sphere of God’s tear. God’s universe.
Small fish gathered around Budi’s exhausted body. Among them was a bigger fish, the king of these soundless animals. The fish began to nibble at the body, swallow bits of its flesh, muscles, ligaments. Three months later, Budi’s skeleton had been picked clean. The biggest fish had eaten his brain and eyes.
Only his ceremonial robes and his crozier remained among the coral.
Now, because of some strange force, the school of fish could no longer separate from each other. Together, they carried Budi’s body. After that, these griffin fish could no longer eat. And the other fish—sharks, octopuses, squids, crabs—seemed afraid of them, steering clear of Budi’s fish-cluster.
For nearly a century the griffin fish drifted around the north of the Adriatic, a single divine entity. Then the school started moving south, where it lingered for another century along the Mediterranean coast. From there, it crossed through the Strait of Gibraltar and moved into the Atlantic for another century.
As this fish-school was swimming toward the coast of Mexico, it suddenly encountered another, similar school of fish. This school had swallowed the body of the nearly insane American poet Hart Crane.
From then on these two groups of fish couldn’t separate from each other—they joined to form a mysterious unity of fragments.
Hart Crane had drowned willingly, having jumped off the deck of a ship. His metaphors, filled with dismay and horror and modern prophecy, had attracted these fish, assigned by God to join his exhausted and besotted body.
How strange and surprising are God’s plans! Only He could have conceived this surreal plot; only He is fully aware of hidden meanings.
Why was it that the fish of Pjetër Budi—an ecclesiastical, baroque, and temperate poet—became connected to the fish of Hart Crane—a modern poet, about as famous as anyone in world literature?
Of course they were unknown to each other—but their respective schools of fish quickly recognized one another, though three centuries lay between them.
These griffin fish remain unknown, unrecorded in the books of marine zoology, the infinite ichthyofauna.
Indeed, in the end we can only repeat the lines in clear, sacred Latin: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate . . .
Thus things that seem incongruous can become united, the dark can become clear, the lives of long ago, completely unknown to each other, can become reflections of each other. What is not understood on earth can be understood underwater. Common anthropomorphic forms become symbolized by these strange, immortal fish of memory—which are full of significance, but which are also an oversight of immeasurable eternity.
1 Pjetër Budi (1566–1622), Albanian bishop and author.
Monk ZRC
Robert Guiscard was waiting in his royal tent on the beach below Durrës Castle for Monk ZRC to arrive from Sicily. Without even turning to look at the monk when he entered, Guiscard declared, “I have assigned you the task of writing my story.
“Don’t forget, wretched slave of God, that everything you write will imagine yourself as me. Listen carefully. You’ll write all your thoughts in first person, on my behalf. When you write, ‘I, Robert Guiscard, king of the Two Sicilies, who will, by the Grace of God, be the future emperor of Byzantium; who, on March 3, 1083, went hunting and killed seven deer; or who, on June 12, 1083, conquered traitorous Durrës, killing 7,000 people and capturing 17,000 slaves,’ the word ‘I’ will be me, not you.
“This means you will become me—though, of course, not really. You’ll write down my stories and my feats of valor; you’ll express my ideas and feelings—those you think are fitting, those that only I, in fact, could ever have thought or felt. You’ll write a story that you imagine I would like; you’ll be inspired by my majesty and my endurance. Just write—I won’t get in the way of your imagination if you want to mention, say, Homer (whom, of course, I’ve never read). Choose the most appropriate and convincing bits; if I’m conversing with other kings’ envoys and I quote Arosel [1], you will write in an elevated, embellished style (rack your brain to recall every book you’ve read in your life). Don’t write that I sometimes experience terrible hiccups, that they can last for three days, that I suffer from diarrhea, that when I’m drunk I sometimes roar like a bear, like a cat, even like a devil. Write beautifully and magnificently about physical strength (which I possess), about erudition (which I do not); write about my victories (but not my defeats), and don’t for- get to include scenes that demonstrate my sexual power.
“Also, don’t forget: Every chapter and paragraph should start with the word ‘I,’ because this is and will be my book.”
Then Robert Guiscard fell silent. He turned around, and in the torchlight he could see that Monk ZRC was standing right in front of him. The monk’s Aristotle.
face looked strangely like his—except the monk was only a monk, and he was the king.
The king said loudly, “You’ll be rewarded.”
Then he tossed three bags of silver at the monk.
—
Monk ZRC was hesitant. He shouldn’t have any illusions: he would write about the king as though he were the king himself—but obviously without actually being the omnipotent king.
Long ago, right here on the coast of Durrës, Julius Caesar began his memoirs, speaking of himself in the third person—not saying “I, Julius Caesar,” but saying, cunningly, “he, Julius Caesar” to create a maximum sense of objectivity.
Thus, in the messy and ominous eleventh century Monk ZRC found himself confronted by a complex and divisive decision of modern literaure-to-come—that of the two main approaches to literary writing: first person or third person. Writing in first person tends toward the lyrical, while third person is better suited to the epic.
Poets prefer the first person, being more at ease with the meditative mode. Novelists prefer third person, since it enables detachment from the story and allows for detailed analysis. But here we also find a confluence. Flaubert wrote Madam Bovary in third person but said that “Bovary is me,” declaring that there is no difference between the first and third person—that they’re the same, which still frustrates the more solicitous, orthodox critics.
Literary practice shockingly challenges theory.
Monk ZRC was ahead of his time—but in the eleventh century he was a novice, under orders. He started to write, obviously in Latin.
His book-to-be would be understood as the manuscript of Robert Guiscard himself. The king would be visible; the monk would be invisible.
While he was writing, the monk became the king—but when he read what he’d written he was simply the monk. He didn’t dare identify as both people at once, since he could only be just one of them. There can be only one individual, after all (though the body, of course, must be distinguishable from the soul).
Writing in first person, while being the monk in third person, phantasmagorically clotted, King Robert Guiscard became the synthesis of both “I” and “he.” The determination that, for future chroniclers, the king would just be “him” was frustrating, whereas the fact that the monk was simultaneously “he” and “I”—or that he was only the king and not the monk at all—wouldn’t matter in the least to the curious and oblivious public.
Eventually Monk ZRC was in the midst of a masterpiece, wherein his perfect falsifications were more dignified than the unpleasant truths. He realized that the situation was luckier for him than for the king. He could put his mind, experience, and soul into the king’s name. Certainly every slave aims high—toward what today we call freedom—and every ordinary person sometimes dreams that he’s a king.
While writing, Monk ZRC came to feel that he was a king; his existence as a useless monk was inconsequential. He felt that he could conquer cities, raze castles to the ground, be blessed or anathematized by the Pope, toast spectacular victories, threaten and conquer Jerusalem or Constantinople; he felt he could have 1500 concubines, be adored by Homeric poets at great banquets among the heraldic flags, sit on a golden throne surrounded by docile lions, both figurative symbols of royalty and guardians of eternity.
—
Thus Monk ZRC challenged Herodotus, Tacitus, and many other famed fathers of world history. His royal manuscript came to an end on August 15, 1085, while he was being escorted by one of Robert Guiscard’s guards through Akra Fortress in Jerusalem during a Crusade. In an unexpected battle with the Seljuk horsemen of Sultan El Kemal Ugur, an arrow hit Monk ZRC in the chest, right where he kept his manuscript wrapped in parchment.
He died immediately, thanks to the mysterious vengeance of God (which the warring Christians and Muslims never understood). The monk’s escort just barely managed to escape the deadly ambush. That evening the triumphant Seljuks cremated all the Christians who had died in the battle.
Thus, in one of those fires, Monk ZRC’s body was reduced to ash, along with his manuscript—which would have astonished the centuries to come as both a prescient forerunner and an experimental imitation of the official speechwriters of modern presidents and other leaders—for whom the first person is always written by a third person, which is not a morphological confusion within the writing but, rather, indicates the endless and unchangeable essence of power.
1 Monk ZRC was mystified by this strange name, until he realized the king meant Aristotle
Moikom Zeqo, a prolific author of poetry, fiction, children’s books, and monographs on history and literature, has published over 100 books, including more than two dozen collections of poetry. He served as Albania’s minister of culture in 1991 and as a parliamentary representative in the Albanian Popular Assembly from 1992–1996. From 1998–2004 he directed the National Historical Museum in Tirana; he has since worked as a journalist, artcurator, and freelance writer.
Loredana Mihani received her BA in 2015 from John Cabot University in Rome, followed by an MSt in English from Oxford through the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme. Her own translations of poems by Moikom Zeqo have appeared in Asymptote. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Graz in Austria.
Wayne Miller has published four poetry collections, most recently Post- (Milkweed, 2016), winner of the UNT Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award. He has co-translated two books by Moikom Zeqo, most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation, and he has co-edited three books, including Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed, 2016), and New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits Copper Nickel.