Gjekë Marinaj

Gjekë Marinaj
Born 26 May 1965 (1965-05-26) (age 46)
Brrut, Malësi e Madhe District, Albania
Occupation

Pedagogue, Poet, Translator

(Richland College)
Period 2001 – present
Literary movement Postmodern literature
Notable work(s)

Mos më ik larg, 1995
Infinit, 2000)
Ana tjetër e pasqyrës, 2003)
Ora e paqes, 2005)
Në Shpellën e Platonit, 2006)
Poezia Amerikane, 2006)
Lutje në Ditën e Tetë të Javës, 2008)
Protonizmi: Nga Teoria në Praktikë, 2010)
Occurrence on earth, 2011)
Vendi i pazbuluar: sonatat e një shtegtari, 2011)

Sung Across the Shoulder: Heroic Poetry of Illyria, 2011)
Notable award(s) Pjetër Arbnori
2008
Reunion: The Dallas Review
2006
The Golden Pen
2003
www.marinaj.info

Gjeke Marinaj is a Poet, Writer, Translator, and Literary critic.

Contents

Early life and career

Gjekë Marinaj was born in 1965 in the small town of Brrut located in the Malësi e Madhe District of northern Albania, half-way through the four-decade rule of communist leader Enver Hoxha. Raised within an authoritarian state, Marinaj aspired to a writing career early on and studied journalism in Vlora. He wrote for several media outlets, first for local newspapers in Shkodra, the capital of his native province, then for a series of national publications including Zëri i Rinisë (The Voice of Youth), Luftëtari (The Fighter), and Vullnetari (The Volunteer).

Marinaj quickly tired of shaping his reporting to meet the ideological standards of the censors. Though he kept his job as a restricted correspondent, he started pouring his energy into poetry where his thoughts ran free. He describes his early efforts as well crafted but juvenile ruminations on his own love or joy or sadness; but his poetry turned outward as his political awareness grew and he began to recognize the fundamental injustice rooted in the Albanian state and the pervasive fear in which the people lived.

He kept his more controversial poems to himself for good reason: Speaking out against the Hoxha regime usually resulted in severe punishment. Losing favor with the regime would mean years of manual labor. A single misstep of one member of a family often ruined the whole family's prospects for generations. Worse, one did not even have to speak out against the government to be nullified. In 1977, government agents hanged poets Vilson Blloshmi and Genc Leka in the street not for criticizing the government but for not being zealous in their support. The agents left them hanging in full view as a warning for passersby. One of those passersby was Marinaj.

Though Hoxha died in 1985, the government maintained its repressive ways. Even so, Marinaj showed some of his poems to a sympathetic group of editors at Drita, the official publication of the Albanian Writer's Union and the country's foremost literary publication. One of those poems, the twenty-two lined "Horses", was a thinly veiled sneer at the government. Marinaj used the horse as a metaphor for the Albanian people: bridled and confined, abused until broken, and robbed of free will. The poem appeared in Drita on August 19, 1990, and the response was immediate and overwhelming. The sheer audacity of publishing such a clearly subversive poem in a national publication amazed the Albanians (and soon after the international community as well). It tapped into a vein filled with decades of pent-up resentment and anger, the same resentment and anger that had accumulated in communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. Within hours, copies of Drita sold out across the country, so people took to scrawling the poem on scraps of paper and passing it to one another in the subways and on the streets. Months later, protestors chanted the poem through megaphones during anti-government demonstrations which, according to some international political historians, helped a great deal to start the anticommunist movement in Albania.

Escape and eventual immigration to the United States

The totalitarian hammer fell soon afterwards. One day, an agent of the secret police approached Marinaj during his lunch break and informed him that he was to show up at their headquarters the next morning. Marinaj never learned what his punishment would be because he left that same evening, gathering a few books and a blanket and hiking all night through the mountains. The urgency of his situation left him no time to say goodbye to family and friends. In the morning, he crossed into the former Yugoslavia near Podgorica, Montenegro. He spent several months in a refugee camp near Belgrade and was later moved to Hotel Avala, a mountaintop tourist resort that had been converted to a refugee camp by the United Nations. He secured work installing telephone lines, spending his free time studying Serbian. Though relations between ethnic Albanians and Serbians in nearby Kosovo at that time remained in crisis, Marinaj's Serbian neighbors firmly embraced him.

While at Avala, Marinaj met with U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann seeking permanent residency in the United States. Already familiar with Marinaj's situation after rereading a copy of "Horses", Zimmerman shook his hand and welcomed him to America.

He arrived in San Diego in July 1991 with little money and no English. Within six months, he moved from California to Richardson, Texas where he earned an associate's degree in science from Brookhaven College. Marinaj continued his education at the University of Texas at Dallas where he graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2006 with a bachelor's in literary studies. He followed that effort with a master's degree in the same subject in 2008. He currently teaches English and communications courses at Richland College as he nears completion of his humanities doctorate at his alma mater. His doctorate focuses on literature and translation as well as certification in the UTD Holocaust Studies Program.

While perusing his education, he continued working as a freelance journalist for the Albanian media. His freelance work includes interviews of President George Herbert Walker Bush, the ninth and current President of the State of Israel Shimon Peres, and world-renowned soccer player Pelé.

Translation and literary work

Marinaj has established himself as a prolific and accomplished author, editor, and translator since arriving in America. He edited more than a dozen books and translated two books from Albanian into English: Sung Across the Shoulder: The Heroic Poetry of Illyria (translations with Frederick Turner) and Occurrence on earth, a selection of Preç Zogaj's best poems. Marinaj has also translated four books of poetry from English into Albanian: Ora e Paqes (The Hour of Peace) by Rainer Schulte; Në Shpellën e Platonit (In Plato's Cave) by Frederick Turner; and Poezia Amerikane (American Poetry), an anthology of major contemporary American poets that includes Ted Kooser, Gary Snyder, and Maya Angelou. As of 2011, he is in the process of publishing his translation of Elie Wiesel's Night into Albanian.

Published books

Marinaj has published collections of his own poetry as well as collections of his journalism and literary criticism.

His three books of poetry include Mos më ik larg (Do Not Depart From Me), Infinit (Infinite), and Lutje në ditën e tetë të javës (Prayer on the Eighth Day of the Week).

In addition to his poetry collections, he published a book of author interviews titled Ana tjetër e pasqyrës (The Other Side of the Mirror), a book of selected articles and essays titled Ca gjëra nuk mund të mbeten sekret (Some things can’t be kept secret), and one book of literary criticism titled Protonizmi: nga teoria në praktikë (Protonism: theory into practice).

Recognitions and critical reception

Marinaj received the Pjetër Arbnori Prize (the Albanian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) for literature from QNK, part of the Albanian Ministry of Culture, First Place (Poetry) for Recurring Daymare awarded by The Reunion: The Dallas Review, and The Golden Pen from the Society of Albanian-American Writers in journalism for The Other Side of the Mirror.

He continues to write both poetry and prose but has focused much of his time and study on translation. He views it as a greater service to reveal an existing but unknown masterpiece than to produce an original but inferior work of his own. Nevertheless, his poetry, prose, and literary criticism remain popular in the international community and have garnered praise from several literary critics and authors of note. Speaking of his poetry, Nobel Prize candidate in literature Ismail Kadare said, "Gjekë Marinaj is one of the most distinguished Albanian poets of our time. He belongs among Europe's best poets. In his poetic universe, there transpires a superb harmony between the high spirit of the Balkans—the continent's most storied region—and the Earth-bound reality of existence.... As often happens with true poets, the poetic spirit moves from his life to his verse and vice versa."

See critical reception of Marinaj's work.

Literary theory of Gjekë Marinaj

In 2005, Marinaj started developing his literary theory of "Protonism" in earnest. Recognized by numerous relevant international literary institutions and described at length in his book Protonizmi: Nga Teoria Në Praktikë (Protonism: Theory into Practice), protonism (or protonismiotics) describes a linguistic perception of artistic works as rooted in the fields of chemistry and physics. Protonism, in its simplest form, is a literary criticism theory which holds that there are positive and strong as well as negative and weak points in every piece of literature, but it argues that these positives and negatives are often constituted by a critic's personal interests, moral beliefs, and attitudes. Accordingly, literature is best studied and interpreted by concentrating on the positive elements of a work formed in response to natural law theory and paying little or no attention to its weakest points. One approaches a work this way because, as this theory postulates, if one looks only for the bad, then one will find only the bad based on whatever one's definition of "bad" is.

Personal life

Marinaj, an American citizen,lives in Richardson, Texas with his Romanian-American wife Dusita, a registered nurse.

Bibliography of Gjekë Marinaj

Essays, articles and published papers

Interviews

The Albanian Dictionary of New Words

Other published poems

References

External links