The Siege

AFTERWORD

In 1968 Soviet tanks overwhelmed Czechoslovakia and put down the liberal government of Alexander Dubček. Albania, the only European ally of Mao’s China, felt the icy breath of the colossus on its doorstep, almost as close to its borders as the decadent bourgeois world of the West. In a mentality of siege, Enver Hoxha, the country’s dictator, ordered the construction of hundreds of thousands of concrete pillboxes across the countryside to defend his tiny country against all imaginable (and imaginary) aggressors. In such a context of national paranoia, Ismail Kadare, then in his early thirties but already a celebrated novelist and poet in his own country and abroad, imagined a novel about a great siege — a siege as evocative of the present as it was radically disconnected from it.

The Siege tells the story of a generic siege of an unidentified Albanian fortress by the Ottoman Army in the earlier part of the fifteenth century. The siege fails. As a result, Kadare’s story had at least two meanings when it appeared in the last days of 1969. It could be read as a politically correct assertion of Albania’s impregnability; but because everyone knew as a matter of historical fact that Albania had been overrun by the Turks and incorporated into the Ottoman Empire by the end of the fifteenth century, Kadare’s novel is also the story of an insignificant victory which only delayed the inevitable breaching of the walls. Critics were therefore not too sure what to make of this double-edged sword.

Kadare does not count The Siege as a historical novel, a kind of writing which in his view does not really exist. His imagination of the past was nonetheless fed by a well-known source, the Latin chronicle of the 1474 siege of Shkodër (De obsidione Scodransi, Venice, 1504) by Marin Barleti, one of the earliest works to come out of Albania, prior to any surviving literature in Albanian. Barleti’s first-hand account implies that chronicles of earlier sieges had been written in the vernacular, and Kadare reproduces imaginary fragments of just such a lost chronicle in the “inter-chapters” of The Siege, which seem to come from the pen of a cleric within the besieged community.

Barleti was also the historian of George Castrioti, known as Skanderbeg (or “Lord Alexander,” in Ottoman dress, Iskander Bey), who led Albanian resistance against the Turks until his death in 1468. In The Siege, Kadare does not portray Skanderbeg directly, but by alluding to his presence in the mountains, he sets his novel in a time which Barleti could only have known from Albanian chronicles. Skanderbeg defended Albania against the Ottomans in the name of Christendom. Credited with having saved Western Europe from Islam (in part thanks to Barleti’s biography, which was translated into every European language), Skanderbeg was treated as a hero in Rome, where he still has his statue in a piazza bearing his name. From the time of the rilindja, the Albanian national renaissance in the late nineteenth century, and throughout the pre-war monarchy of King Zog, Skanderbeg was promoted as a national hero, and the cult persisted even under the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha. Tirana’s central square was renamed Skanderbeg Square, and the fortress at Krujë where the warrior made his last stand was rebuilt as a national museum. This explains why Kadare stops short of portraying Albania’s national hero in a novel set in Skanderbeg’s time. The only acceptable portrait of the Dragon of Albania would have been an encomium, a genre entirely alien to Kadare’s repertory.

The Siege was first called Duallet e shiut, “The Drums of Rain,” but the Albanian publishers decided on a more heroic title, Kështjella, “The Castle,” which also served to redirect attention to the Albanian side in the struggle. When the novel appeared in French in 1971, in a fluent translation by Jusuf Vrioni, the original title reappeared “as if by chance,” according to Kadare. The name of Les Tambours de la pluie, “The Rain Drums,” has thus remained attached to the book in France, but not elsewhere. The third of Kadare’s longer works to reach a wide international audience through the medium of French, after The General of the Dead Army and Chronicle in Stone, The Siege confirmed Kadare’s rising reputation as a universal storyteller.

Kadare left Albania for France in 1990 and set about revising all his novels for republication in a bilingual Complete Works, of which sixteen volumes have appeared to date. The Siege was partly rewritten for this definitive publication. Many references to the Christian beliefs of the Albanians, cut by the censors in 1969, were restored, some politically motivated passages were deleted, and the dialogue and descriptions were tightened up in many places and in other parts expanded. This new English translation is of the Complete Works text. (An earlier translation by Pavli Qesku, published in Tirana in 1978, reflects the Albanian text of 1969.)

Ismail Kadare asked me to invent an English title that would collectively signify both the besiegers and the besieged. Alas, despite its huge vocabulary, the English language cannot oblige. Like The Castle and The Rain Drums, “The Siege” is not exactly what the author wants this book to be called: it is just the least unsatisfactory name that he and I could find.

Kadare’s story is more focused on the world of the besiegers than on the vestigially pagan mindset of the Catholic population of the city under siege. It is the first room in the sumptuous wing of Kadare’s own castle of stories devoted to the Ottoman past of his native land (The Three-Arched Bridge, The Blinding Order and The Palace of Dreams are not sequels to The Siege, but other rooms in the same wing). Kadare provokes wonderment at the coloured ceremonials of the Ottoman Army at the peak of its splendour, and also horror at its “oriental” inhumanity, especially towards its nameless foot-soldiers and the women of the harem and of the surrounding countryside. Using a central character whose role of chronicler provides a writerly perspective on events, Kadare assembles a cast of the Ottoman elite, from the Pasha to experts in logistics, artillery and medicine, who slowly come to resemble figures out of modern rather than medieval history. The intentional anachronisms in tone seek to achieve a two-sidedness characteristic of all Kadare’s fiction. The use of show trials, of banishment to “the tunnel,” the unquestioned authority of the Pasha and the shifting chain of command beneath him — all these details make the Ottoman world, ostensibly the very image of Albania’s Other, merge into an evocation of the People’s Republic that Kadare could not possibly tackle directly. In a magical way that perhaps only great writers can achieve, Kadare’s Turks are at one and the same time the epitome of what we are not, and a faithful representation of what we have become. The Siege is therefore not a simple transposition or blending of medieval and modern history, but a complex symbol of a divided and suffering nation besieged by itself. The miracle is that this exotic tale, translated twice over from an obscure Balkan tongue and dealing with a far-off and largely forgotten past, echoes on every page with the clashes and issues that burden us today. Kadare’s chronicle of ancient battle is not a historical novel, as he rightly claims. It is an anti-historical one.

David Bellos

Princeton, NJ

11 September 2007