Visar Zhiti; The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry

Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie

Preface by Robert Elsie, Introduction by Janice Mathie-Heck

A Bilingual Edition

Series No.: 134

ISBN: 1-931243-72-7, Pages: 276

Albanian Literature, Poetry

Visar Zhiti is Albania’s greatest living poet.

He was imprisoned from 1979 to 1987, one of many scapegoats selected as a means of terrifying intellectuals under Enver Hoxha’s Communist dictatorship. Allowed neither pencil nor paper, he continued to write his poems in his head. His fellow prisoners helped him memorize the poems, in part to keep their sanity and to brighten up the terrible lives they were forced to bear. Only when Hoxha fell from power, and the political prisoners were freed, was Zhiti’s poetry brought to print.

Now, for the first time, English-speaking readers can share in the remarkably gentle and imagistically rich poems produced out of Zhiti’s years of suffering.