6/28/2023 0 Comments The Siege by Ismail Kadare![]() ![]() The Siege is certainly a calculatedly ambiguous and ambivalent novel, and yet it’s hard not to see politics everywhere in it. Heather McRobie asked last month why we need our eastern European writers to be dissidents at all politics is at the heart of writer’s reception, even if it is not at the heart of his oeuvre. His position is in part a response to the controversy at the heart of his slow introduction to the Western canon. I am dubious about the idea that any writer can avoid politics (indeed, previously Kadare has argued that merely the act of writing made him a dissident in Enver Hoxha’s totalitarian Albania), but Kadare in particular might find it hard to achieve this enviable separation. ![]() The second most interesting thing about reading The Siege comes in light of Kadare’s own insistence that he is not a political writer. and, of course, it’s the best your monoglot correspondent can manage. This is literary Chinese whispers, and yet both Vrioni and his English translator David Bellos seem to enjoy excellent reputations, and in a fascinating little essay Bellos has been admirably up front about his own problems with the process. I always preface any remarks about a translated novel with the admission that I feel uncomfortable making sweeping claims about prose style when I cannot read the author’s original work in the case of Kadare, almost all of his work – including this one – is available in English only through translations of Jusuf Vrioni’s French versions. I’ve been reading Ismail Kadare’s The Siege. ![]()
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