Ani Gjika is among the most prolific and renowned translators of contemporary Albanian literature today. Translator of a wide range of Albanian authors, sensibilities, and literary genres, and a poet herself, her work is a testament to the versatility, cultural mediation or brokering, and nimbleness that is central to the translator’s craft. In this conversation with Gjika, we will discuss some of her most recent translations, including Julia Gjika’s Memories Pretend to Sleep (Laertes, 2020), and Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space (New Directions, 2018), and will address the particular considerations that go into Albanian-to-English translation, and the translator's role in making legible and advocating for “minor” cultures and languages in the global literary arena.

Shown at the National Theater of Kosovo and internationally to wide acclaim, Jeton Neziraj’s plays address a constellation of challenges and social issues affecting Kosovo and Europe today—the traumas of war, postwar reconciliation, corruption, gay marriage, shifting gender roles and dynamics, and the Roma experience. A prolific playwright with a long list of productions to his name, including The Hypocrites or the English Patient, Department of Dreams, and 55 Shades of Gay, Neziraj will let us into his creative process, the arts and culture scene in Kosovo, and the upcoming New York premiere of his play Balkan Bordello. A longtime resident of Kosovo and a translator of Neziraj’s plays, Alexandra Channer will speak about her experience of translating and bringing this work to Anglophone audiences.

PART OF DEPAUL UNIVERSITY'S HIDAI "EDDIE" BREGU LECTURES: Join professor and literary translator Peter Constantine (University of Connecticut) on the preservation of Corinthian Arvanitika and his translations of Arvanitika poetry, alongside professor and translator Karen Van Dyck (Columbia University) on Gralbanian in contemporary Greek fiction, and novelist Gazmend Kapllani, author of A Short Border Handbook and My Name is Europe, who will speak about his fictional work dealing with themes of immigration, borders, and border-crossing.

In this session, we will discuss Constantine’s efforts to preserve Arvanitika, Van Dyck’s new work on translingualism and Gralbanian, and Kapllani’s fictional work, which originally appeared in Greek, focusing squarely on the interface between Albanian and Greek.

Please join us for the third session of Albanian Literature Today: Meditations on the Craft of Literary Translation Across Genres and Spaces, a monthly virtual series of Hidai Bregu Lectures hosted by DePaul University, where we welcome author and translator Wayne Miller, in conversation with translator and historian Suzana Vuljevic. Miller is co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), a bilingual collection of poetry the author wrote in the late 1990s amid the struggles of post-communist transition. In this discussion, Miller will speak about his experience of translating Zeqo’s Zodiac, and together we will examine the impact of the fall of communism on Albanian literature.

PART OF DEPAUL UNIVERSITY’S HIDAI "EDDIE" BREGU LECTURES: Join translator and literary critic Janice Mathie-Heck and Suzana Vuljevic in a discussion of Gjergj Fishta's Highland Lute.

In their long awaited translation of the Albanian national epic, published in 2005, Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck made a foundational text of the national tradition legible to modern audiences. On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Fishta’s birth, we reconsider this work in light of recent tributes and reassess the author’s significance to modern Albanian literature.

PART OF DEPAUL UNIVERSITY'S HIDAI "EDDIE" BREGU LECTURES: Join translator Ani Kokobobo and Suzana Vuljevic in a discussion of Ismail Kadare's Essays on World Literature.

Please join us for the inaugural session of Albanian Literature Today: Meditations on the Craft of Literary Translation Across Genres and Spaces, a monthly virtual series of Hidai Bregu Lectures hosted by DePaul University, where we welcome Slavicist and translator Ani Kokobobo, translator of Ismail Kadare’s Essays on World Literature (Restless Books, 2018), in conversation with translator and historian Suzana Vuljevic.

Ismail Kadare, winner of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2020, the Man Booker International Prize in 2005, and frequent contender for the Nobel Prize, has risen to a coveted position as the sole and uncontested representative of Albanian letters on the world stage. As a result of his extraordinary literary success, modern Albanian literature has largely come to be understood through the prism of communism and the specter of totalitarianism. In this conversation, Kokobobo will speak about the experience of translating Kadare’s essays, Kadare’s influence on world literature (as well as how his work has been influenced by classical literature), and the role of translation in the dissemination of world literature.