By a happy coincidence, at the last meeting of
this European programme dedicated to poetry, back in Paris early November 2013,
I started my paper on French language by some considerations on the poetical
beginnings of French letters. As a matter of fact, the literary language, the
first productions pertaining to literature, including the epics on the
extravagant adventures of the Round Table knights, were written in verses, sung
and orally transmitted thanks to ingenious mnemotechnical processes. Prose came
only at a later stage, only to nowadays rule at the extent that some believe,
hardly exaggerating, that there are more poets than poetry readers to be found.
This time, in Venice, I will go to the other
end of the process, where the journey seems doomed to end, where the extinction
of a language looms, as it is attacked by some and abandoned by the others. I
will speak about a small tongue, the Aromanian, originally spoken in a
geographical area divided between four nation states: Greece, Bulgaria, the
Republic of Macedonia and Albania. The Aromanians differ from their neighbors
by their tongue, derived from Latin, related to the Romanian spoken North of
the Danube but having gone through a distinct evolution. It was never taught or
acknowledged as an autonomous entity chiefly because of the pressures exerted
by the Balkan nationalisms.
The Aromanian speakers relentlessly clinging on
to their long doomed language, much less spoken nowadays and with strictly no
apparent public utility is an intriguing matter for observers. Why are they
persisting, as they do speak the language of the countries where they are
living? Seemingly, in order to know better who they are, where they come from,
why they are often perceived as different from the others and, above all,
because the use of this particular language and none other is to them the sole
means to fully express themselves and to enjoy themselves. They do it by
singing and dancing, by telling anecdotes and jokes during the rare joyful
moments when they can assemble and share their common ground, apart from the
others. They are quite successful at it sometimes, as their folklore is one of
a particular type, the more so nowadays. Indeed, such a minority traditional
culture does not have to go through the nationalist patterns and is less likely
to suffer the unavoidable deformations when marketing aims are at work. All
these secure a certain freshness and authenticity, which are quite rare these
days.
The most motivated and, obviously, the most
gifted among those who keep on practicing a language they know only too well to
be doomed are those who write poetry. This literary genre is by far the most
honored, far ahead of the novel or theatre. I hereby think of poetry in the
modern sense of the term, involving an aesthetic quest and critical conscience,
a self-sufficient poetry, not meant to accompany other arts, like singing and
dancing. A poetry not always easily fathomed which nonetheless finds regular
readers, which is easily understandable, given the limited supply available to
the speakers of a small language.
In order to illustrate my purpose, I will tell
the edifying story of some of these poets.
In 2007 was
published in Charleroi, on the spur of the Belgian committee of the European
Bureau for less widely spoken languages and anthology of Aromanian poetry in a
bilingual Aromanian-French edition, featuring reproductions of artworks
signed by Aromanian contemporary visual artists[1]. Some 30 living (at that point)
writers coming from the diverse above mentioned Balkan countries had been
selected. The result was surprising given that the potential audience of such an
anthology was counted in tenths and not in hundreds of thousands as in the
aftermath of World War II. Quite an amount of the poems were written after
1990, when the Aromanians succeeded in regaining some visibility on the public
stage. The case of three Albanian contributors is worth noticing as it stands
out as a good prelude to the « condition » of the Aromanian poet, and
of the Aromanian individual nowadays.
Born in 1943 in Andon Poci, a village some 17
km distant from Girokaster, Ilja Colonja is the eldest of the three. His ID
card bears the name of Lia Rapush, the patronymic doubles not being infrequent
for these people who willy-nilly have Slavicized, Albanized or Hellenized their
names. He owes his recent poetic debut to Spiru Fuchi, born in 1964 in the same
village. « Why not write in Aromanian, some have already done it? »
one day the latter told him, who had just come across a magazine published in
Aromanian in Freiburg, Germany. Their first volumes were published in
Bucharest, Romania, in the same year, 1997. After having worked in the
construction works in Greece for several years, Spiru Fuchi settled in Tirana
where he published several new volumes, all in Aromanian, which had been simply
unimaginable before. His younger brother, Dimitri, born in 1967 in Andon Poci,
only started writing in Aromanian in 2004, after having previously written in
Albanian. He started doing so in Greece, where he settled after the fall of
communism.
Two quick notes on these authors, waiting for
them to be discovered in other languages.
Albanians, brought to writing in Aromanian by
the acquaintance with publications of the Western diaspora, to working in
Greece and publishing in Romania, they share one geographical point. It is
Andon Poci, this one thousand strong tiny recently founded village, by the end
of the 50’s by Rrãmãni, the branch of the Armãni having kept the most of all to
the semi-nomadic way of living paced by the moving of the livestock to
different pastures. This village is the one and only to be exclusively
inhabited by Aromanians, this people with no particular status in Albania which
would count as many of them as one hundred thousand.
The other thing worth noticing is the modernity
of their writing, resolutely contrasted to the pastoralism of their predecessors.
The gloomy mood of their poetry about the future of their community and
language is much more in line with a critical introspection than with the
celebration of a « victim of History » posture.
Post scriptum. « Dimineatsa alãximu strajili a ipocriziljei »
[At dawn, we put on the clothes of hypocrisy] is the title of a Spiru Fuchi
poem dealing with the condition of so many Aromanians born in Albanie,
immigrants in Greece, speaking to their children in Albanian while sending them
to Greek schools, oblivious about their non Greek origin when they submit a
file for a work permit and, at night, calling back home in Aromanian the family
remained in Albania.
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