Jeton Kelmendi, “L’Età Mitica” published in Italy (I QdB, 2019)

Jeton Kelmendi is a rich personality, with multiple interests, a tireless explorer of the reality, a poets who wants embraces the breath of the world, who want to capitalise every experience to fan the flames of his poetry. In this poetry book, L’Età Mitica” (I QdB, 2019). the poet moves mainly within two opposite dimensions: love / life and war / death. Kelmendi fought during the Kosovo war, experiencing firsthand the fear, the anxieties, the sense of precariousness that every war brings with it. But he has treasured this experience, trying to survive thanks to the power of love. He wrote in the poem  “Love in tome of war” :“If I confided to a friend / That I want to love / In time of war, / He would take me for a fool, / But even in the most violent clashes / A soldier never stops thinking about love”. And in light of love, a feeling without which the life of every human plunges into a dark abyss, the poet relives the past, the places that marked the path of his life (Pristina, Volos, Ljubljana, Brussels, Tirana, Milan, Budapest). In light of love he lives the present and dreams of future. In his  verses the readers can find feelings, affections, the shiver of existence. Kelmendi’ s poetry is rich in metaphors, analogies, images by which the poet writes about tragedies, sorrow, enchantment, wonder, beauty. He often uses intense metaphors and the reader is fashinated by an “other” dimension, sometimes surreal. The Italian literary critic and poet Dante Maffiaobserved in the afterword of the book: “it is very beautiful when his surreal vein finds the right figure to show the clarity of his imagination and places withinshort circuits the ideal adhesions, the ferment of the soul, the desires”. Kelmendi’s poetry also has an important, significant civil vein:  many texts are about his homeland, finally free after a long and bloody war. He never falls into rhetoric, because he enriches his verses with the warm breath of existence. He recounts the tragic experience of the war, that he faced through the love. In some poems he addresses to a female figure never identified, whose presence is fundamental for the author: “With you, I walked on the blade of the world, / With the loves of our earthly game. / In our meetings the light was born … “.

The book “L’età mitica“, as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 Ernesto Kahan wrote,  makes known to the one of the most significant voices of modern Albanian and European poetry.

Laura Garavaglia