Personal reflections on Ismail Kadare

Translator David Bellos shares a series of revealing, funny and moving memories of the giant of Balkan literature, who died earlier this week

Ismail Kadare © Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Getty Images

Between 1995 and 2014, David Bellos translated from French a number of works by Ismail Kadare, Albania’s best-known novelist and poet, including The Siege, The File on H., The Successor, The Pyramid and Twilight of the Eastern Gods, as well as revising earlier translations of Chronicle in Stone and The Ghost Rider. When Kadare won the inaugural International Booker Prize in 2005 for his entire body of work, he shared the award with Bellos, who at the time was his most recent translator. Following Kadare’s death at the age of 88, Bellos recalls some of his favourite memories of the author.

‘In the summer months, on doctor’s orders, he would take a 30-minute walk every morning on the beach that spread out in front of his summer dwelling. The Communist-era bunkers had been covered with graffiti and filled with trash; some were sinking at odd angles into the sand. There were wisps of plastic here and there, and the tidal seaweed didn’t smell too good, but on we strode nonetheless, with him in his brown worsted trousers and 1950-model walking boots, and me in sandals and shorts.

‘The beach wasn’t very crowded, but it was very extensive, and many people were swimming or playing with their children in the warm water of the almost-Ionian Sea (I think it was still technically the Adriatic). One by one, men and women, young and old, started to look at us, then to stand, then to walk towards us, stretched out in a wide arc. There was nothing remotely threatening about the approaching crowd of people in wet swimsuits. In fact, they were unbelievably disciplined as they formed a line to the side of us, smiling and stretching out their hands, to receive the hand of the Great Man.

‘For his part, he muttered words of greeting to each as he passed by. I realised that he did this every day, and that every day different retainers, worshippers and loyal servants came out of the water to stand in line to be honoured by the touch of his fingers. It’s the only time in my life I have felt close to royalty.

‘In 2008, the Scottish National Gallery was the location for the grande soirée celebrating the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where he had spoken to an audience of many hundreds about his newly translated novel. Forewarned of the dress code by the invitation which said something like “Formal Glitter”, he had hired a coat-and-tails and the requisite trappings, and he walked or rather waddled up the steps beneath photographers’ flashlights more like a penguin than most who try.

‘The host of the splash was none other than the actor Sean Connery, the unforgettable first of the James Bonds in film. He was wearing a kilt and spangled smoking jacket and was quite as tall, handsome and smooth-voiced as his screen self. He sat with Connery for a while and had his photograph taken. Twenty years ago, he said to me with a rare grin and almost a giggle, that photo would have got me shot as an agent of MI5! He was so delighted to have left all that behind.

‘But the most curious part of the evening was the late-night return to the hotel. It was too far to walk, we had not booked a car, and taxis were rare. So we got into a pedicab and off we went down Princes Street, full of the festival crowd, not one of whom could have guessed that the old fogey in ill-fitting evening wear in the back of a three-wheeled pedal-powered jitney was the greatest writer of the age.’

Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, writes:

When Ismail Kadare won the inaugural International Booker Prize in 2005, he shared it with his long-time translator, David Bellos.

Kadare had defected from Communist Albania and lived in exile in Paris since 1990. His work was translated from Albanian into French by the much-lauded Jusuf Vrioni, and then from French into English by Bellos. When he was first asked to ‘retranslate’ Kadare, Bellos had reservations. As he later put it: ‘Enough damage can be done in one language shift to make a double shift seem like a recipe, if not for disaster, then at least for pretty thin gruel’. But the more he read of Kadare’s work in French, the more he realised he was ‘a writer of the first importance’.

Bellos, then the distinguished translator and biographer of Georges Perec, now also translator of many others, and the biographer of Jacques Tati and Romain Gary, is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. When he first met Kadare in Paris he realised that Kadare had read and appreciated Vrioni’s translations into French. Sometimes he even thought the translations were better, and altered the original as a result. Beyond that, Albanian copyright restrictions – or rather lack of restrictions – plus political censorship meant that there were no reliable original versions in Kadare’s native country anyway. The French versions had become, to the exiled Kadare, more authentic. As Bellos explained:

‘What I had translated, then, when I produced my English version of The File on H., was something more than a book by Ismail Kadare. It was a book by Kadare co-produced by one of the strangest but most effective translation pairs of all time.’

Over time, the linguistic landscape changed along with the political one. Kadare’s later works went on to be translated directly from Albanian by others, including John Hodgson, who was longlisted alongside Kadare for this year’s International Booker Prize, with A Dictator Calls.

But Bellos’s translations – which include classics such as The Siege, The Successor and Agamemnon’s Daughter – first introduced English-speaking readers to the work of this great, lamented, world-class writer, whom Bellos remembers above with fondness and wit.

We feel very fortunate to be able to bring you his unique recollections.