ABSTRACT
"A land within sight of Italy and less known than the interior of America". This is how the British historian Edward Gibbon described Albania in the eighteenth century, and Robert Elsie recalls the quip in his introduction to Lightning from the Depths, a pioneering anthology of Albanian poetry cotranslated with Janice Mathie-Heck. The same remark is even truer of Albanian poetry, and the reasons are essentially political. The mountainous Balkan country was ruled by the communist dictator Enver Hoxha from the end of the Second World War to his death, and the terror continued for about five years thereafter. The excellent Mihal Hanxhari, for example, published nothing during his lifetime. His short poems show a refined sensibility that is about as far as one can get from the extreme militarization of the country during Hoxha's reign, symbolized by countless armed bunkers and weapon-filled sea caves.
