From: Visar Zhiti
Books have really changed my life. I would say luck, because I have been punished by them. In the case, besides my poems, I also have the books I had read.
And I was sentenced to ten years in prison. I fell into hell. So, I will remember from those hostile books, as they called them, when the book alone cannot be an enemy.
I would single out Dostoevsky, a banned writer, when he only had one book in Albanian, his first, "White Nights".
I had found the novel "Notes from the House of the Dead", I read it secretly, as a teacher in the village, but I had written about it in my diary. It is the book that helped me a lot to understand the prison and when you understand, you know how to stay. It was of first-hand importance to me.
I had read the forbidden Father Gjergj Fishta and the Canon of Lek Dukagjin, with prefaces by Fishta and Konica.
I was accused of having read the book "Yabloko" (Apple) by the revisionist poet Evgeni Yevtushenko, I was even shouted at because I had translated his poems, as well as for a Japanese poet, Isikawa Takuboku, who died at the age of 27 from tuberculosis, like Migjeni ours. I had translated his entire book from Russian with my fellow student, the poet Skënder Rusi.
The prosecutor in the trial openly called Takuboku "Taketukja"... Likewise, the investigator asked me about the French poet Jacques Prever, etc.
Meanwhile, in prison, when it had not yet been published in Albanian, I read all seven tragedies of Sophocles. I was amazed. Of fate and fatality. I copied them. I took Franz Kafka orally first. One of my fellow sufferers, Engineer Ismail Farka, knew him very well. He had graduated from St. Petersburg; he told me with pathos, parables, stories.
I'm not lingering. Books become life and life becomes books. They want freedom and give freedom.
