"How does a writer translate war? And when the war is over, how does the individual reconstruct his world from the ruins? Bajraj lives in Mexico, in exile since the war in Kosovo, and a lot of his poetry is equally attentive to both the desire and the loneliness inherent in that fate. -- Ani Gjika (translator) Bajrajs poems capture the troubled voice of the foreigner in a strange land; a place tethered, painfully and inextricably, to the past. Bajrajs Mexico City, populated by fallen angels and the ghosts of the poets war-torn past, is an uneasy place, one in which even the most mundane of activities is tinged with darkness. Visions of violence intermittently break the flow of words, rendered all the more forceful by their sparse simplicity. This selection of short poems, like small windows into a world in which neither the reader nor the poet is entirely at ease, allow us to contemplate the brutal melancholy of war, exile, and their lingering effects. -- Alice Whitmore
Xhevdet Bajraj, a Kosovar poet and dramatist, has published more than twenty books of verse, which have been translated into many languages. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them, the prize for best book of poetry (both in 1993 and 2000), conferred by the Kosovo Writers Society; the Goliardos International Prize for Poetry in 2004; and the 2010 Katarina Josipi award for best original drama written in Albanian. In May of 1999, Bajraj and his family were deported from Kosovo. Through the International Parliament of Writers and their program for persecuted writers, he was granted asylum and a fellowship at the Casa Refugio Citlaltepetl in Mexico. In the years since, he has become a professor of creative writing and literature at the Autonomous University of Mexico City and been inducted into the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.
"Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born writer, literary translator, educator, and author of eight books and chapbooks of poetry. Her translation of Negative Space (New Directions, 2018) was a PEN Award finalist and shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. She is an English PEN winner, NEA fellow, Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, and Pauline Scheer fellow at GrubStreet."
