Monday, December 7, 2009

Literature/Gjuhesi


Identities: Who Killed the Sultan?by Robert Murray Davis


Translations of little-known Albanian oral epics add another dimension to the endless conversation over the Battle of Kosovo.


The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic. Introduction by Anna Di Lellio; translations by Robert Elsie. I. B. Tauris, 2009.

Rudyard Kipling may have been right when he wrote that “There are nine and 60 ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right,” but as Anna Di Lellio shows in the masterly introduction to these translations of eight Albanian variants of the story of Sultan Murat and a Balkan Christian hero, there can be at least as many ways of understanding, interpreting, and using or misusing them.