Happy Clappy
The paperback version of Dan Rhodes‘s Little Hands Clapping (3:AM review here) will take place at The Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Road, London, on Thursday 19th May. The event is free but make sure you book pronto. Barry Yougrau, one of Dan Rhodes’s “all-time favourite writers”, will be making his London debut as a […]
3:AM Top 5: Niven Govinden
Picking your favourite short stories is akin to choosing favourite songs: nigh on impossible. So rather than list my all-time loves, these are the ones that I’m thinking about the most right now. What links them is a quiet, unsettling quality… and the fact that I swore with sheer wonder after reading each one: 1. […]
Maintenant #60: Luljeta Lleshanaku
I adore Amichai… We both belong to countries who have suffered greatly. What is in common? I think he dials into the real world, real history and the collective ego that dominates the individual ego. He never speaks about himself, even when he pretends to do so. His observation exceeds the white circle of private life. And especially there is always a “why” in his air, something which asks a response in history, and its rotation. And he always gives a response, the best artistic solution, through metaphors, through creating parallel realities. Any other solution is more arbitrary. Perhaps, the only way a poet can reorganize all this chaotic life, is making a system from it. And metaphor is the key. Metaphor became an instinct for him… I saw a lot of suffering around and the question “why” became an instinct for me too. There comes a moment when I can’t wait out the destruction to understand the “why”.
In the 60th in the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku.
Eight Poems
Because of threatening water
they broke the statue of Ramesses into blocks
and moved it to a safe and dignified place
far from where it was created.
For some hours
his Egyptian nose
hung between sky and earth
drawing the attention of a derrick-man and a part-time porter.
His scepter hung there too, the scepter of a man who once said:
“I carried away those whom my sword had spared
as numerous captives pinioned like birds before my horses”.
By Luljeta Lleshanaku.