Narrator, essayist and poet, Kadaré represents the pinnacle of Albanian literature and who, without forgetting his roots, has crossed frontiers to rise up as a universal voice against totalitarianism. Regarded as one of the greatest European writers and intellectuals of the 20th century, his works have been translated into over forty languages.

Ismaíl Kadaré, considered one of the greatest authors in world literature, was born in Gjirokastra, Albania in 1936. As a boy he witnessed World War II, the occupation of his country by Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, until 1944 when the communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha was established in Albania. At the age of seventeen he won a poetry contest in Tirana, earning him an authorization to travel to Moscow and study at the Gorki Institute, from which he was expelled in 1961 because of the break in relations between the Balkan state and the USSR. Whilst attending the Muscovite institute he wrote The General of the Dead Army, which was enormously successful in France. Thanks to this novel, he obtained a sort of immunity in his country for representing national pride, even though he did not submit to communist dogmas. Forced by the regime, he was a member of the Albanian parliament from 1970 to 1982. In 1990, a few months before the collapse of the dictatorship, he exiled himself in Paris, the city where he has lived since, although he visits Albania frequently.

A great scholar of Albanian traditions and the idiosyncrasies of this Balkan state, his works take place around various incidents in his history, such as the break between Albania and the USSR, The Great Winter (1977); Catholic and Orthodox rivalries, Doruntine (1980); and the split between Tirana and Beijing, The Concert (1988). One of the most typical features of his work is that it is permanently open: Kadaré will rework his writings, poems become stories, stories grow and become novels and these, occasionally, will be reduced to stories. Another characteristic is how he recaptures Humanity’s great concerns and debates, taking them from oral tradition and classic literature, from Aeschylus, Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Chekhov, and placing them within a contemporary context.

However, the central theme of his work, expressed in each of his books, is totalitarianism, its mechanisms and the complicities that make it possible. This literary obsession reaches its climax in The Palace of Dreams (1993), published in Albania in 1981, when the communist dictatorship still governed. In this work, the Albanian writer builds an immense parable on despotic perversion, where in an imaginary country, a mammoth machine at the service of absolute power, the Office of Sleeping and Dreaming, controls the dreams of its citizens. Despite the fall of communism, Kadaré continues to give voice to the soul of totalitarian societies, such as in Three Elegies for Kosovo (1999) and In Front of a Woman’s Mirror (2002). His latest releases are Life, Death and Representation of Lul Mazreku (2007), Agamemnon’s Daughter (2003) and The Successor (2005).

He is a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of Paris, one of the five that make up the Institut de France, a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts and an officer of the French Legion of Honour. In 2005 he received the International Booker Prize. In addition, he received an honorary degree from South East European University (Republic of Macedonia).

The Prince of Asturias Foundation’s statutes establish that the aim of the Awards is to acknowledge and extol “scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanistic work performed by individuals, groups of individuals or institutions at an international level.” Consonant with this spirit, the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters “will be bestowed upon the person, institution, group of people or group of institutions whose work or research constitutes a significant contribution to universal culture in the field of Literature of Linguistics.”

This year a total of 31 candidatures from Albania, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Czech Republic, Chile, France, Holland, Hungary, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Macedonia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay and Spain ran for the award.

This is the sixth of the eight Prince of Asturias Awards to be bestowed in what is their twenty-ninth edition. The Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts went to Norman Foster, the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation was given to the World Health Organization, the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences was given to British naturalist David Attenborough. The Award for Communication and Humanities went to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Scientific and Technical Research Award was jointly granted to American engineers Martin Cooper and Raymond S. Tomlinson.

Prince of Asturias Awards for Sports and Concord will be announced in September.

Each Prince of Asturias Award, which date back to 1981, comprises a diploma, a Joan Miró sculpture representing and symbolising the Awards, an insignia bearing the Foundation’s coat of arms, and a cash prize of 50,000 Euros. The awards will be presented in the autumn in Oviedo at a grand ceremony chaired by H.R.H. the Prince of Asturias.
Source: The official announcement

Read the official announcement

“Using everyday language which is nonetheless full of lyricism, Ismaíl Kadare narrates the tragedy of his land, an incessant battleground; giving life to old myths through new words, he expresses all the grief and dramatic load of conscience,” the prize jury said in a statement following the announcement of the award.

“His commitment is rooted in the great literary tradition of the Hellenic world, which he projects onto the contemporary stage as an open condemnation of any form of totalitarianism and in defence of reason,” the statement added.

Kadare was born in 1936 in the southern town of Gjirokastra, near the Greek border. He first studied at the University of Tirana in Albania, and later at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.

During half a century of Stalinist rule in Albania his works attacked totalitarianism and the doctrines of socialist realism with subtle allegories.

A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, his novels and essays have been translated into more than 40 languages. Chronicle in Stone, The Siege, The Three-Arched Bridge, Broken April, The Palace of Dreams, The General of the Dead Army. These are some of its novels currently available in English.

Shortly before the collapse of the communist regime in 1990, Kadare claimed political asylum in France, issuing statements in favour of the democratisation of Albania and an end to single-party rule. Source: Balkaninsight

The Siege by Ismail Kadare was published recently in English, almost 40 years after it came out in Albania. The historical novel, written during Albania’s isolation imposed by the communist regime, is a fascinating allegory of this part of the Balkans in the 1970s– a reality which no Albanian writer was allowed to describe in a more direct way at the time.

Kadare, the country’s most renowned writer, is somewhat of a contradictory figure. After pursuing philology and literature at the University in Tirana and later in Moscow, he managed to give an entertaining twist to Albania’s dismal Social Realist literature. There is a disagreement about whether the writer conformed with or opposed the socialist regime, but the fact remains that, in 1990, shortly before its collapse, Kadare sought asylum in France, stating that “dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible… The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.”

The novels Kadare wrote under Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship were mainly historical, as using allegories of the distant past was a way to address and discuss the present more safely. The Siege, set in the fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire began its long campaign to occupy Albania, makes no exception.

Kadare tells the story of an Albanian fortress under Ottoman siege. The main events occur in a Turkish command centre while the events from the inside of the fortress are contained only on a few pages. The defenders are not individualised and do not differ from each other. They have no names, apart from the superhero, Skanderbeg, who is Albania’s national hero.

In the book, the Ottoman pasha leads a vast army towards Albania, where a lone fortress stands. When his first attack fails, great cannons are cast to smash the walls. The pasha tries tunnelling under the wall, tipping cages of diseased rats over the railings, and then cutting off the water supply, but to no avail. Finally, he hurls his men at the castle in serial assaults, where they break like waves on the stone.

The Albanians’ mysterious leader, Skanderbeg, appears to be invincible. The army is recalled, the despairing pasha kills himself, and the survivors fend their way back to Constantinople through the autumn rain.

In Kadare’s allegoric tale, cannons had become so great that they risks annihilating humanity (a reference to the atomic bomb), and trade cooperation between two religiously antagonistic big powers – Venice and Ottoman Empire, is easily transferable to the 1960s’ peaceful coexistence between the Soviet Union and the USA.

Finally, it is interesting to trace the location where the story takes place. In the book, the fortress under siege is Kruja, which stands 15 kilometres north of Tirana and used to be Albania’s medieval centre and Skanderbeg’s stronghold. The Ottomans failed to conquer it three times and it was almost totally destroyed in 1530 after an uprising. What remains of Kruja today are the seventeenth-century Ottoman fortifications, which are not very inspirational for a book setting.

If you visit the Kruja Fortress today with The Siege in hand, it will be impossible to see any similarity between what remains of the structure and how Kadare describes in his novel. He writes of three defence walls and a very strange entry with a narrow and inner garden, where the Ottoman soldiers died.

That depiction fits the Shkodra Fortress perfectly, which still stands as it is described in the book. Located about 90 kilometres north of Tirana, it is one of the biggest and best preserved fortresses on the Balkans, with three defence walls and the rat-trap gate where the Ottoman soldiers lost their mind and honour, as Kadare describes.

Another reason that seems to suggest that the setting of the book is in fact the Shkodra Fortress is that it is present in several historical accounts. The Siege of Shkodra – a sixteenth-century book in Latin, has been known to inspire contemporary Albanian writers. It describes in detail the 1579 Great Siege of Shkodra, in which Venetians fought and lost against the Turks. In addition, one of the greatest paintings of Paolo Veronese, on the façade of Ducal Palace of Venice, depicts the battle of Shkodra. Meanwhile, the Kruja Fortress is hardly present in any historical records.

Source: www.balkantravellers.com

By Alan Silverman

Will Smith reunites with the director of Pursuit of Happyness for an emotional drama of self-sacrifice, redemption and, above all, love.

Ben Thomas announces at the very beginning of the film that he is about to commit suicide. As the details of his previous few months are played out, gradually, the reasons for his choice become clear …even as circumstances change that should make him cling to life. A successful inventor and entrepreneur, he has made a singularly terrible and deadly mistake and, borrowing from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, who demanded a ‘pound of flesh’ to compensate for wrongs done to him, Ben sets out to give up “Seven Pounds” to make amends for his transgressions.

Will Smith is a movie star skilled at the heightened reality of comic and action hero roles; but, as was the case with Pursuit of Happyness, Smith says Seven Pounds called on him to tap into more genuine, grounded feelings.

“This is a totally new journey,” Smith says. “It’s a place that I’ve been scared of in the past. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to be able to do – to be able to deliver on ideas and concepts that are powerful and meaningful – but it’s definitely a new skill.”

Once again, Italian-born director Gabriele Muccino pushed Smith to keep his performance ‘real’ and unsentimental while dealing with deep emotions.

“Working with such a big movie star as Will Smith, who was coming from huge blockbusters and was totally aware of his own tools to entertain the audience and bring them from this point to this one, I felt I had to start from scratch with him because those tools …those ‘Hollywoodian’ tricks …were not really matching with my philosophy,” Muccino explains.

Central among the seven people Smith as Ben Thomas sets out to help is Emily, a young woman who will die if she does not get a heart transplant. Rosario Dawson plays Emily and says Muccino also pressed her to drop her movie mannerisms.

“It was really incredible to have somebody who was so intensely sensitive to your tricks and behaviors and ‘isms’ and really call you on it,” she says.

“She is dying and she could really get upset about the cards that she has been dealt and use that as an excuse to be really mean to people and they would accept it,” adds Dawson. “She really is not that, though. She really is such a beautiful human being and smiles when she wakes up and goes ‘oh, another great, beautiful day’ …one that she really notices because she is not guaranteed the next one. It was also present to the fact that none of are. That choice is not so special to her; we all have that opportunity. Our mortality is as close to us as it is to her, though she is a lot more aware of it. Her dignity and her courage in the face of that so moved me and I really hope resonates with the people who really are in her position.”

Like Dawson, Smith says the stillness of his role made it a challenge to rein in a natural tendency to be talkative.

“It was exhausting to pull myself down into the mental space of Ben Thomas,” he admits. “It was based on the idea of trauma and that was the part that I couldn’t understand or internally relate to. I didn’t want to internally relate to being broken by trauma. I always play characters like Muhammad Ali and even Captain Steven Hiller in Independence Day: people who have these fantastic reactions to trauma. They stand up and beat on their chests; but that is less than authentic for most of us and truly not authentic for me. So I developed it through research and talking and understanding the truth of what it means to lose everything.”

As the for the character’s quest to counter one terrible act with an array of good deeds: Smith believes it may futile.

“He is looking to ‘un-ring’ a bell and you really can’t,” Smith says. “You can ring a new bell and the sound of that new bell can have a healing effect on your ears; but you can’t un-ring a bell. In his mind he feels like God made a mistake, so he is turning his engineering skills toward fixing something that is totally un-fixable by our standards.”

Seven Pounds also features Woody Harrelson, Michael Ealy and Barry Pepper. The screenplay is by a veteran American TV comedy writer, Grant Nieporte; and the musical score is by Venezuela-born film composer Angelo Milli.

Source: VOA

French Channel 2 presented its first commercial-free night Monday, eliminating advertising between eight o’clock at night and six o’clock in the morning.

All advertising on all four public television stations would be phased out by 2011.

The staff at one French station walked off their jobs Monday to protest the changes. More strikes are planned Wednesday when the French Senate begins debate on the broadcast reform bill. The lower house of parliament has already passed it.

The bill would give President Sarkozy power to hire public television bosses and make funding decisions.

Supporters of the advertising change say broadcasters would no longer have to worry about trying to get high ratings and could put on better quality shows. The government has also promised to make up for lost revenue when commercials are eliminated.

Broadcasters fear job cuts and say the president would control content.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.

Source: VOA