Stavri Pone

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stavri Pone (born 1942) is mostly known as a writer for children. He was born in Albania, Fier, where he finished high school and continued his education in the Tirana University, majoring in the English Language. He has worked as a high school teacher, a literature theory researcher, editor of books for children and a scriptwriter. He has also translated several books from English. His main vocation has been fiction for children. His books in this genre include: Aventurat e Kokëkashtës (Strawhead’s Adventures) and Kokëkashta në Ishullin e Gurtë (Strawhead in the Stony Island), for which he was awarded the Silver Quill 2003, the novel Aventurat e Qerosit dhe Eramlit (The Adventures of Baldpate and Eramli), and several collections of stories, fairy-tales, and screenplays for animated films. With the fall of the Communist dictatorship he’s been engaged mostly in translation, but has also written two novels: Nuk Ishte Vetëm Ëndërr, (It Wasn’t Merely a Dream, 1995) and Lotët e Trëndafilit (Rose’s Tears, 2005, 2006). The former deals with a series of events involving some high-school students during the dictatorship era by providing, through a pleasing narration, interesting pictures of real life by stressing the lack of liberties among people, especially the young. Rose’s Tears develops the same theme, but much more broadly and deeply. It opens with two significant quotations, one from Sigmund Freud, The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, and one by Hannah Arendt, Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.

The novel encompasses a large-scale panorama, centering on the oppression of free thinking and involves wicked and conspiratorial plots against a young intellectual which result in his arrest and conviction to 12 years’ imprisonment for what he writes in secrecy against the dictatorship. Under some extraordinary circumstances he commits a crime by killing an inmate, and after having been squeezed severely under tons of massive mineral chops in the underground gallery where he works like a slave, he goes insane, with moments of clarity and turbulence, and when he is clear, he shows a keen sense of realism and a high potential for in-depth analyses. In prison and after the release from it, he continues to write essays of a liberal democratic spirit.

With the collapse of Communism and now at liberty, his crises of insanity intensify, he is admitted to a mental hospital and an American professor, coming to Albania under a humanitarian project, checks his mental condition and confirms the diagnosis. After being discharged from the hospital in a relatively clear state of mind, he works as a translator and through the Internet engages himself in a virtual discussion on the history and meaning of freedom with Orlando Patterson, a real personality in the field of historiography and humanities, the author of Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, winner of the 1991 National Book Award. In this discussion, the protagonist manifests a profound sociophilosophical erudition and insightful skills into the history of freedom in its perpetual and universal perspective by dwelling on the history of the Albanian people as well. His essays are marked by a sense of realism, deep analyses, contention and witticism. This correspondence, however, remains imaginary, as his emails never reach the Prof. Patterson.

Love theme takes an important place, too, which the author depicts with fine and lyrical brushes by rendering the novel a touch of romance and beauty, employing felicitous expressions and imagery, stressing the stream of consciousness and carving a statue of love with masterful chiseling in its diverse comprehensiveness – emotional, physical and dramatic. This line includes a number of the protagonist’s love stories, but the sole and the greatest love of his whole life is that for a confinement-sentenced young girl, which ends tragically.

Being a multidimensional work, the novel includes a whole array of characters, relationships, conflicts and encounters which have been given through achronological lines. The style of writing is graceful, figurative, at times poetic, at times philosophical, and at times contemplative while featuring a sincere confession of the protagonist and thereby catching hold of the reader’s interest up to the end. From start to end the novel is a colorful mosaic with filmlike depictions and scenes, all of which breathtakingly portrayed, a work wholly dedicated to the dignity and the rights of the individual, freedom and love, which are trampled upon in a dictatorship.

The novel is a magnum opus, marked by an aesthetically high presentation, and as I've noted in a previous article, it is “a sociopsychological novel, with elements of the novel-essay, and can be pigeonholed as belonging to the contemporary novel trend by extending to the dimension of the subconscious, which little known in the Albanian novel, but preferred by modern and postmodern writers. The novel bears remarkable elements of modernism. It carries its special note, its particular and unrepeatable color in the dynamic genre of the contemporary novel”.