Zodiac

0/5 ( ratings)

Zodiac is a bilingual sequence of poems loosely organized around the signs of the zodiac, which considers the turn of the millennium, the history of Albania and the Adriatic region, and the author's place in the universe as he confronts his own mortality and his decision to remain in his homeland after the fall of communism.

The images of the collection both celebrate and interrogate the history and culture of a country that has been under the control of both the Roman and Ottoman empires as well as Mussolini and later a repressive communist dictatorship. The poems based on the twelve signs of the zodiac as well as a few prediction poems have the reader imagining what it would be like to put butterfly wings on biblical lions, make clay pots from Caesar’s bones, and gaze upon the red and flaky skin of Prometheus’s eczema. With Zodiac, Anastas Kapurani and Wayne Miller have shown themselves to be sensitive and skilled translators of Zeqo’s work, allowing the poems to revel in a mixture of control and abandon.

As the introduction by Miller points out, Zodiac has similarities to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, wrapping the reader in the dithyrambic litany of a knowledgeable man. Zeqo, however, is more cynical than Whitman ever was and carries with him the scholar’s sense of discontent coupled with a postmodern notion that readers should do a little work for their meaning. Those willing to bring patience and play to their engagement with the text will be duly rewarded with lines such as “Tё perditshme e kam alegorinё si kёmishё, / te flokёt e kozmosit sa shumё morra hyjnish!” . This is a text that deserves focused attention. It is a text all Ashbery-loving twentysomethings who think they’re doing something new must read and learn from.

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke
Tallahassee, Florida

Born in Durrës, Albania, in 1949, Moikom Zeqo is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction, as well as numerous monographs on Albanian history, literature, and culture. He served as Albania's minister of culture and directed the National Historical Museum in Tirana.