Here and everywhere, our Albania- Corriere.it

In the chaos of a book fair beaten by the rain, by controversies and political manoeuvres, amidst the inconvenience of endless queues caused by the sudden unavailability of open spaces and publishers who are starting to give sales numbers (one can already venture : all happy), there is a world that can only be discovered by going through an open door in the red rock. It encloses the stand of the host country, Albania, where some of the most interesting writers are passing through these days who have left that country by changing their language, even in writing, or who instead have remained anchored to their mother tongue. "Albania is one of the oldest nations in Europe and its past is often denied, which saddens me because it is unfair," said Ismail Kadare, the most beloved Albanian writer in the diaspora, via video link , referring to the ancient culture of the country that falls under the literature of its authors. And all the writers who pass by this stand continually return to the more recent but also more distant past, with a diversity of gaze that also constitutes the richness of all literature.

Naturally, the philosopher Lea Ypi, author of Free (Feltrinelli), who spoke with Ornela Vorpsi on Friday on the theme of "telling and testifying" starting with their autobiographical books. Saturday 20 Vorpsi, an author with a «double estrangement» - as Andrea Cortellessa defined her - also due to her dual nature as a writer and painter, explained how not always leaving one world implies entering another ("It's simple but also profound, it is like detaching oneself from oneself, it is the feeling of profound anguish»). Born in Tirana, she Vorpsi moved to Italy in 1991 where she began writing novels in our language, and then to Paris, also adopting French as a literary idiom, in a triple linguistic leap. That estrangement, that "out of this world" which is the title of one of his books published a few years ago, is also present in the new novel released, not yet translated into Italy, Above all don't die at the Ritz: "Inside there is the filter of a existential anxiety, expressed in a tragicomic style. Today we talk a lot about the social, but we forget the existential, which instead is more important » she explains.

If Vorpsi is the best-known name of the authors of Albanian origin who write in Italian, Julian Zhara is also at the stand. Born in Durazzo in 1986, he moved to Italy 13 years ago, lives in Venice, speaks with a Venetian accent and has published the collection Vera must diein which our language mixes with the Albanian of the unconscious and of childhood. "A good part of contemporary literature in Albanian is an attempt to understand where our weakness lies: whether it is individual or collective" explains Besnik Mustafaj, writer and politician (he was ambassador to France after the fall of the regime) who published in Italy Little prison saga (Castelvecchi): «After independence from Turkey, in 1912, we experienced three political systems: the monarchy, fascism and communism. The only institution that never changed anything, not even the place, was the political prison. In this novel I try to understand why during Enver Hoxha's regime there were only 1% of political prisoners among the prisoners. Maybe because 99% were afraid».

The writers of the diaspora also deal with the past but, says Mustafaj, with a different filter: «Whoever writes in a different language has a different relationship with the truth, this does not mean that it is not true, but it is another perspective ». Mustafaj has never been tempted to leave Albania: «I could have written in French, but I don't want to use the words I know, but the ones I need. And only Albanian gives me this freedom, because the language changes, evolves, changes with life». Bashkim Shehu, who has been in Barcelona for some time, also speaks of prison, which he has experienced directly. Saturday 20, talking about his book The revenge (Rubbettino), recalled his story: son of Mehmet Shehu, prime minister and right-hand man of dictator Enver Hoxha later accused of high treason and induced to commit suicide, Shehu was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for subversive propaganda and released after fall of communism. “With the regime – he explained – the atheist dogma also fell. I tried to believe in God but I didn't succeed: reason had always been my only weapon to know reality".

Tom Kuka spoke of religion and esotericism, pseudonym of Enkel Demi, who in Italy has published, with Besa Muci, two novels, The hour of evil And flame. The first, with a gothic, sometimes surreal atmosphere, is set in a region of Albania that is now Greece: «It is said that Homer - he says - created his poems in this place. My roots are there. This is how we tell stories, as if they were epic fairy tales in which there is always a character who goes against fate and often doesn't win. All the writers in the world have helped me because I am a reader first and foremost, but in particular I have always been interested in the orality of Albanian rhapsodes. I want to convey this musicality. I have always worked with my feet on my land and I cannot tell these stories in dry language. Here the line between mythology and reality is very thin». The rhapsodes, on the other hand, are also at the center of Kadare's new novel, The O file (The ship of Theseus), where O. stands, precisely, for Homer, in which the writer probes the mystery of artistic creation.