The great loner, Frederik Rreshpja

From: Bedri Islami

Rarely has Albania had such a poet, with his strange and tragic fate; rebel in gene and peacemaker in spirit; fallen into the abyss by his soul and lifted up to heaven temporarily, only to fall once more into his abyss, this time definitively; master of speech and incorrigible arrack; adored and cursed at the same time; with his head cleared like a Lermontovian demon and ready to be a duelist of the past; gentle as a child fallen in the mother's lap and sunny in words to friends.

I was very young when I met him for the first time and, together with the late poet Toni Shtjefni, he invited us to his house, at one of the first turns of the alley of Gjujadoli, one of the oldest in the city of Shkodër, half basement, with the small courtyard, full of flowers, where the roses were lush and which Frederik's mother took care of, with the same longing as for her rebellious, carefree son, who at that time was a teacher and who only he and her heart knew that this was only a moment of rest.

In his small room, with windows surrounded by iron ornaments, was the mess of a poet who had just started publishing his first book of poetry, "Albanian Rhapsody".

In him, strangely, to double the pain, suddenly, to create the illusion of temporary calm, sadness gave it color, while the bright morning light could only be an outlet from his soul.

Often times, as if returning from another time, he spoke with big words, mentioned the many languages ​​he knew... and in fact at that time he only spoke his wonderful Albanian, full of allegories, light, fragile nights and garden spirit; to tell about his loves left on the brink, and we didn't know if there was anything real in this flowing love dream.

He was and remained to the end a faithful host. For his friends, many of whom betrayed him, gave him false witnesses, eavesdropped on him, insulted him, burned him, treated him as a stranger, unworthy of his native city, when he was a continuation of Mighen, who had lived in the same neighborhood, only in the opposite direction, he, even when the times turned upside down and his figure could now be mythical, remained an open door.

In fact, it could not be otherwise. He remained, in himself, an idealistic Christian, but also an experiencer of human pain and, knowing that poverty had been stronger in some of his friends than the desire to stay, he forgave them.

After 1990, when he could now walk calmly through the streets of the city, that is, pass through the alleys in the evenings or on silent nights, when he did not want to burden anyone with his meetings, in the middle of the Square, there were enough people who they avoided him, already out of a sense of guilt.

On one of these days we were walking along the main street, and then, as he walked, with open hands waving wildly, we passed in front of the Great Cafe, in the square in front of which many people were sitting, enjoying the spring.

Suddenly, close by, he caught sight of one of his accusers, a journalist and publisher, who, perhaps in the same suit he had worn solemnly when he had gone to give his testimony, was sitting and talking animatedly.

Frederick saw him and stopped. The other stopped speaking, lowered his head, he would have wanted to disappear at that moment, the word he wanted to say froze on his lips, he brushed his many hairs, as if he wanted to create a curtain.

Frederick called them by name.

He raised his head and looked anxiously.

- Why don't you talk to me? Frederik told him. Why? If I don't talk to you, that's understandable, but if you don't talk to me...?

The other had remained like a frozen statue and only slightly, in one corner of his mouth, he smiled, freezing.

– I have forgotten what you did to me and I don't know if I did well to forget or if I am wrong. You, don't forget the bad and mention, that men are mentioned!

He remained to the end with an invisible Christian spirit and no one, or rather, very few, thought about his soul.

Amazing and different from everything. It was like that the last few days. He left like those wounded deer that carry the moonlight in their antlers, longing for his mother and his legendary loneliness.

From the world of writers, Skënder Drini, Moikom Zeqo and Arben Bllaci were at his last departure. Further, Myftar Gjana, Shpëtim Kelmendi, Ledia Dushi, Fatima Kulli, two literature lecturers, Hasan Lekaj and Alfred Çapaliku... it seemed as if the city had forgotten him, while boasting about him.

The others, accepting his silence as an apology, did not have the courage to go and ask for their forgiveness from the great-souled man, who, all his life, had been in his misery and oblivion.

Where did this loneliness come from... there was no more to see this city with the old streets, nor the castle raised above the eyes of a woman, neither the living nor the dead.

***

Frederik Rreshpja is one of the greatest modern poets of Northern Albania, of the magical city of Shkodra, together with Ndre Mjeda and Migje. Meanwhile, he is the most tragic poet of Albanian literature. Tragic from his lonely life and cracked by the lack of longing; tragic from the bans that have been made to him through imprisonment in monism and the "forgetfulness" of the plural state; tragic from friends who betrayed him in an instant; tragic even in his solitary death.

Lonely to the extreme, with a forgotten childhood, no youth – because it was taken from him, blackened white age, he would later write that:

I saw the children on the street. laughter,
Beautiful and delicate like precious vases
Where mothers hide their dreams.
They saw me and were sad. thought,
That I was never a child

His tragic loneliness would be the haunting of his wintry spirit, falling drop by drop, one here - one there, like dead roses, in an airy dusk, under the silent rains of the old city. He felt this loneliness even after the years of his imprisonments, just when it was thought that he would already have another, more frantic rumination, worthy of his rebellious character, but, as in the ancient legends, it would be precisely this rebellious feeling that would repeat his loneliness.

The wood of the old gate blossomed
Ah! The dead tree bloomed!
You plucked and made a crown with them
For me to wait for you until death!

"However, this morning will die in my hands...", though the roses seemed to bloom in the morning, with petals the color of lightning, and again, he knows, he knows very well that "roses glow in silence for my woe", I know that, once again, this is how the night has taken him, like waiting statues, in an air that slowly dies and winters, ... where in the landscape of the night, as in a dream, the trees with words and leaves and flowers disappear their colors fall...

His loneliness was elegiac… no one could undo it… he remained under the winter of this great loneliness… bringing us his poetry like a new season falling from the heavens to the old window panes of our dear world …

In fact, he could not have gone away except as a hermit, leaving behind us a pang of sadness and an incomparable sense of guilt for abandoning him.

His solitude was of an almost biblical dimension, as were the betrayals against him. Elevated to the top of the poetic Olympus for a brief moment, he would feel the roar, surrounded by his friends.

***

- Fred, where are you? - asked someone who was eating.

- I am going to be nailed to my cross.

This was the man who made me miserable... I would rather he cut my throat. I've tried cuts: they don't hurt like the betrayal of a friend. I have been betrayed more than they have cut me.

So, my most ruthless enemies have been my friends. Praise God, now I have no friends.

***

No one has climbed the unusual Golgotha ​​of a life that was interrupted by imprisonment and had to start over.

Stubborn, denying and affirming at the same time, great friend and foolishly betrayed, silent and many words in another moment; unshakable modesty and a little later a harmless braggart, broken by the poetry that weighed on his soul, but unbroken by the wonder that opened him to the landscapes of his soul; mystical and open; worshiper of God and his denier; above all he would be the poet who had a single idol and a single saint: his Mother.

His main figure was his mother. Frederik's mother, whom I have known since early youth, was a woman with a dignified, proud and very authoritative attitude. She spoke little, she said kind words, but she was strict and domineering over her children.

Frederik, as his closest friend, Moikom Zeqo, remembers, could fight with everyone, disobey, and even swear at everything, but in the presence of his mother he was an almost angelic being.

Everyone, almost everyone, abandoned the poet, the mother never did. The poet could have forgotten them all, but never his mother.

He who did not fall between the feet of power, kissed his mother's feet; the poet who had not moved his eyelids in the long nights of the investigation and the absurd questions had made him laugh, which had been accompanied by other curses and the torturous inquisitor, was moved to tears by the suffering of his mother.

Often times he had thought of leaving life, even as a private silence, but he had never approached her: until she was a mother. In the narrow alley towards his house, in whose yard you could always find roses, Frederik hurried his steps...his mother was waiting for him. Careless in his appearance, he was in fact the beautiful ugly, all the more careless in the days of his imprisonment, he, two days before the meeting with his mother, who came from afar grown over years and troubles, began to beautify ...to become Frederik all-day and bright.

Two of his most excellent books, which best of all convey his great loneliness, covered under the snow of the seasons and the coldness of time, he will dedicate to his mother, making the dedication "To my mother, who suffered a lot after me in prisons, exiles and hospitals. With compassion, Frederik Rreshpja".

Frederik Rreshpje's poems about his Mother are shocking, marveling at the feeling of a great fluidity, which seems as if it is not present, but comes from Ajkuna's longing for her sons and, further still, from Rozafa's desire for her son…a hand out to caress him…an eye out to see him…a breast out to give him her milk..still flowing on the walls of the old castle.

My mother also left under a shower of marble
From the archeology of falling gods.
Hail, my mother!
Only in you have I trusted,
I have never had another God, Amen!

Further…

Come with me to the garden:
Now that winter is gone and all the snow has fallen
Some air statues descend from the trees
And the eyes of the sleeping flowers open.

But now that the mother is not
The doors of the shadows open and the Illyrian gods come out
With tunics cut from ancient mists
And the roses are closed in their sorrow

Let's go out to the garden,
But the mother is no more!

Further…

Ah, where have you fallen like this, where are you wasted!
Mother, mother! The snows will come,
They will fall on the grass that has sprouted from your voice...

"Some black birds were running in the air as if scared by a coming winter. I felt sorry for the birds. Suddenly a terrible fear came to me: mother!

She needed constant care. He slept. Beautiful, a little pale, with long black hair swept aside.

Oh, mother, if you run away to the stars, I don't know what I'll do in this world!

It wouldn't be long before I would kiss the hands of the man I loved as God by the grave!"

***

I well remember the little yard in Frederik's house filled with roses. Colorful and ubiquitous. From low windowsills, at the edge of the stone wall, in the paths between the garden, by the entrance gate, on the walls - lush with the seasons. As a rare poet, he has roses as part of his poetry. Maybe they also entered that part that did not betray him and that silently saw his loneliness.

The roses bloomed in the morning,
With petals in the color of lightning..

The roses are burning in silence to my chagrin…

It's always a rose
Maybe even from the cloud
Or made by my voice..

I am sad. Your roses
They remained on my hands like wounds...

They appear at dusk
Roses woven with sunshine
Ah, now even the roses remind us of the trucks with the murdered boys
How beautiful and young they were, oh my god!

No one dared to touch the roses, except his mother. I was young at the time and did not dare to think that a rose could be touched. Even more at the house of an idol who, while he had amazed us with his poems, made us even more curious with the stories of his tribe's descent from the Clementines, from Vermoshi, dated from the year 1100, a papal tribe and it seemed to us like an oracle .

He was an oracle when he spoke, when he was silent he turned into a statue.

I also knew his brother, a doctor, and his sister, but they were, so to speak, the anteroom to go to the room of his feelings. There were roses there too. The first flowers he placed on his mother's grave were roses plucked from the little garden in the courtyard, the very ones no one had dared to touch.

Then he fled to Tirana. The roses would bloom for a little while. He would return to the old house, where he said that Ded Gjo Luli and Hilë Mosi had once lived, only to die.

Abandoned. Hungry. Betrayed. Like a saint.

No one put garden roses on his grave.

These days I went to the outer gate of the old house. The street had remained the same, the stone walls were the same, some white roses had climbed over them, of those that are placed on an archmort. Silence everywhere.

I don't know why I remembered a long conversation with him, when he thought he had finally found his Ithaca, and he told me that often, on prison mornings, waiting in the courtyard surrounded by high walls and thorns, his bowl was filled with snow and he remembered exactly these streets, which, on winter days, as if to defy everything, bloomed the last roses.

They hatched at the beginning of December.

On another December day, newly alone, under the last roses that had bloomed, he would burn all the manuscripts worked on in two decades, and he had known that he was doing a wise thing.

Then he would write:

"Every day has its own December, and that's enough."

I was curious to see if the roses were still in the yard of the old house. I had a few steps to get there, quite a few. If it were roses, it would be the poet. Like a lonely winter-covered willow, forsaken by friends, birds and leaves… where happy nights like zilka rang in the branches of memory…

I also remember the special pomegranate, planted by the poet Hilë Mosi in a corner of the yard and its seeds that hung like chandeliers. Then they also planted a laurel, which, when the mother was gone, did not grow green, Frederic wrote, only his boyish voice echoes on the yellow leaves, while the laurel crowns the twilight glory.

It was a whole world when you were there
But there came this great loneliness that swept away everything.

***

Often, what seems impossible, is not so. There are words that sadden rather than surprise. A photograph of Frederik Rreshpje is a concentration of pain. It is the pain of a man in captivity, with absolute innocence. Seldom have the features of a man expressed a constant state, as it did with Frederick. After the 90s, he will be among the first to realize that, in fact, the freedom of creation was simply an illusion of freedom. Sick and delicate, several times crashed into the concrete of the dead with a terrible guard over his head who demanded to know how a man dies, when the impossible happened, that is, the right of life, the moment when his day would come and he had certainly always known that his Day would be far away, so when in front of the glassless window, in many, many nights, he had waited for the impossible, he had not thought that she would again have her disappointment of big.

He would write that "No one has needed islands more than I have. But all the islands are fake."

"In ancient times, Lucian asked: who are you, beloved, and how do you seek to become a god while barking? This aristocracy also calls the artist to bark. If the pharaohs change, the way of barking also changes. It's not just socialist realism that barks. All the political poetry we read every day is bullshit. There are newspapers that when you take them in your hand, you feel as if they will bite".

What had caused the great heretic to have another grief, again of the proportions of an Ithaca he had sought all his life, and when he thought he had arrived, she was gone again?

Here begins what can be shamelessly called the tragedy known as the League of Writers and the poor people around it, the talentless, the petty revengers, the Lilliputians who never grew up and who took pleasure in the misery of others, misery that they themselves had prepared for them. .

The history of this League is one of the most enigmatic in the history of communism and the most unknown. With a mythical effort, some miserable, disgusted poets would create, immediately after December 1990, an impassable wall, so that the scorching secret would always remain closed, mysterious and thus even more dangerous.

Frederik Rreshpja has called this, on both occasions, the Criminal-Literary House of the Labor Party. He called him that even when they did not accept him in its ranks, even when, after the changes that seemed impossible, he was quickly offered a large salary, which he, of course, refused, although in those days he was among Tirana without money and without a place to sleep.

The great drama of his life began precisely on these stairs, then it moved further into the corridors of grudge, to go to the comfortable halls and the deadly denunciations.

I don't believe there was any other room, so comfortable, where so many crimes were prepared, and, moreover, against the people with whom they had spoken. Only the great hall at the headquarters of the Central Committee had seen and prepared such dramas, but this one of the Writers' League was even more despicable, meaner, it was like a kind of wild cat that sprang from a murderous tiger.

Before he was sentenced in a trial, Frederik, but not only him, was sentenced in this hall, in these corridors, in its staircases, in the offices, where in the typewriters commissioned to write down the beautiful words of this world, poor people were crouched to prepare future denunciations.

"I got up. The crowd of E. writers stared at me with hostile eyes. Stranger! Enemy!

Woe to Albanian literature! - I thought. Woe to De Rada and Fishta! Wretched wretched crowd! Curse forests and pulp!

I turned my head and saw Ismail looking at me. He got up. Where are you, Ismail, De Rada? We didn't mention Paris at that time."

He had thought that maybe one day he would return to these halls and maybe then this mess would be over. He knew that the trouble had come from here, just as he knew that the men of letters of his city, even those who turned out to be false witnesses, were too insignificant to do him any harm.

The return would again be tragic. It was, so to speak, the second part of a tragedy, where, in the first, he had been the expected mortal, while in the second they wanted to turn his suffering into a grotesque one.

When he came back, Jakov Xoxa was dead, Petro Marko was sick, Lasgushi was no longer alive, the last leg in his magnificent flight had fled, Ismail was somewhere far away as if beyond time, Moikomi was preparing the column of his life, Xhevahiri was filled with pain.

Year 1991. He, for the first time, after so many years, meets again with a crowd of writers. Now gloomy and grumpy. Braggarts and "dissidents" announced in the columns of the newspaper "Drita". He had left them madly in love with Enver, he found them furious anti-Enver. He said to himself a famous verse of De Rada that he loved most: "The world had changed", but the reeds of the League had not changed anything from the rape of their lives.

"Only these rabid, wretched and mediocre anti-enverians, as always ready for hymns and dithyrambs, through the stairs and corridors, had gone too far. If I meet Dhimitër Xhuvan, then God will love me"!

In truth, Frederik Rreshpja was like a sad sleg, unfortunate like Serembe and who burned his creations just like the Arbëresh poet. An icy crystal has been over his life. He has had more days with winter and less than a spring that froze again.

He was and remains the missing poet. A soul that surprisingly brought to others a sense of beauty.

It was impossible to be angry with him. Even when he cursed. I knew he loved you in that special way of his. If he opened the door for you, then you were sure of his friendship.

When he left the house and walked along the big promenade, which at that time we called "Piacë", he took the edge of the houses, leaning one shoulder to the left and unfazed by the rains, it seemed as if he was calling them. In love with rain, as one of the common things of the city surrounded by water. More than anything else, Shkodra was in him. His sense. Human size. His love had its roots in the autumns of the city, when the yellow light of the leaves falls and the branches of the rains sway, in its engraving that hangs in his soul; for its legendary grace.

***

All the stones of the mosaic of memories I have of Frederik can be broken and lost. Like many others, meetings with him have been difficult, and many times, he himself made them even more difficult.

He, as a special poet, the most prominent modernist poet of the North City, had himself erected a pyramid of memories, which you could not easily be a part of and whose enigma was difficult to understand.

I have not understood about something else.

Although after 1991 the meetings with him were more frequent, especially when he started making the newspaper "Ora", the title of which I proposed to him when we were called by Shaqir Vukaj, at that time the leader of the socialists in Shkodër, he never has spoken about his whistleblowers.

He never mentioned them, he never appeared as a whistleblower for his whistleblowers, "the world had changed" and he never tried to create a suffocating environment around them and for them.

Only once did he abuse a well-known figure as a writer in his town, and more than that, not for the past, but for the days to come. It was not enough for him to have been a witness at Frederick's trial, then, when the pluralism began, he put on a new garment and attacked the imprisoned poet, hiding behind other names.

In his verses, he has returned several times to denunciation, but as a phenomenon, as an event, as a phenomenon that tarnished Albanian literature, but never with a specific name.

He did not do this out of his poetic spirit, or because he thought that everyone should pay for his own sins, I never learned that.

Perhaps the denunciations and days of early imprisonment were part of those memories that he did not want close to him. How do you know? The soul wanted to be freed from the anxiety of evil and from the grudge that burns poetry.

Frederik's modern lyrics are unlike any other Albanian poet. Although in life he was a modest man, extremely sad, unjustly persecuted, in poetry Rreshpja will remain one of the most serious and authoritative creators.

Frederik Rreshpja also belongs to that part of the Christian, Catholic creators of Shkodra, who were prominent in the cultivation of culture and who, until 1944, had been one of the halos of Albanian literature.

The literary and cultural world of the Catholic part of Albania has been for many, many decades, also for known historical reasons, one of the most western and most connected to the roots of the nation. Its well-known names include not only Fishta, Koliq, Mjeda, Prendushi, Shtjefë Gjeçov, Ndoc Nikaj, but it is much, much earlier. In fact, it has been the trunk of the awakening of national consciousness and the powerful link between the civilized world and the Albanian philosophical and literary thought.

If in the field of literature it had only a few peaks, the studies of these clerics in enthology, folklore, philosophy, archeology, political science, etc., had unattainable peaks even in many, many years after.

In general, it has been a culture closely connected to the country, and many of its spiritual leaders have paid for this powerful connection, religion-homeland, with their lives.

You can say that, more than anything else, they have written the history of Albanian culture with their blood.

After 1944, this is an even more inherent and easily recognizable truth, which has done honor to that creative and emancipating elite.

The Albanian creative world actually opens with this literature, highly cultivated, humanitarian and connected to the nation. The example of Marin Barleti, with his two masterpieces, "The Siege of Shkodra" and his major work on life and the Deeds of Skanderbeg, are among the threads of this literature, to go further with Budi, Bogdan, Buzuk - as founders of of the beauty of our language. To go further to Koliqi, Fishta, Nikaj, Prendushi...

Their world is so wide that it cannot be summed up in just one name.

However, as he would claim himself, Frederik Rreshpja has never seen himself as a Catholic, since, he claims, the nation is above religion. He, although well acquainted with it, has struggled to detach himself from their influence, because "if I followed them, I would remain the epitome of an out-of-time literature".

Being a particularly good acquaintance of Fishta and Mjeda, who were also friends of his father, Mark, it will be difficult to get out of their influence, but he values ​​this as necessary. This was not a betrayal of tradition, but a continuation of it.

And he, perhaps even without his awareness, but from what he had inside himself, because since the age of 4 he reads from this literature, he will bring this spirit of peace, even to his interrogators, to those who imprisoned him and tortured. The spirit of freedom of the soul through forgiveness is in the poems of Frederik Rreshpje much stronger than any other feeling.

We are all shipwrecked,
I myself stand on my feet at the bottom of my sea.

***

One of the ancient, laconic Chinese proverbs says that "Inner wisdom is also the Outer Kingdom".

Frederik had begun to cultivate his inner wisdom since he was four years old, listening to and then reading the Holy Books, but his greatest influence would be his Mother.

He didn't trust anyone like Her, and no one else, like Her, would inspire him with mercy and forgiveness. Although still with the marks of the nails in his hands, burdened with all the sadness of the world, he will be more like the Jews wandering in the desert, he walks and walks to reach where he started, wrapped in the winter of pain.

Now that I'm dying I only dream of a cross on my head
And forget that I don't want even after death
May the curse of Art follow me.
Don't let anyone have this fate!

***

Frederik Rreshpja has only made a self-portrait for himself.

He did it in just five lines.
There is everything a poet can say.

It is the air that rings, the voices of the dead left in the memory, the rains that he never knew, the glory that closed through the bars, the solitude that raised its walls, the trees that become spirits and the seagulls that die on the horizon, the long range of hours of waiting, streams of moon that often flow through the streets from the air.

In five verses it's a life, looking for a place where pain can rest its head.

FOR MYSELF

The lonely nightingale sang achingly
But no one heard his voice
Because he was missing the cage.

On a pedestal of silence
My profile has been pouring since the birth of the stone.

***

Frederik Rreshpja was an imprisoned poet. Several times. And yet, unlike many others, there are no prison poems. Then, in his short freedom, he wrote, more in his poetic prose, about moments in prison, but he did not write real poems.

No one knows how this happened. At the beginning of his frequent exits as a political prisoner, when he was more burdened by the long investigations, he did not carry with him the poems of a prisoner.

Apparently, he also experienced the time when he was free, as a prisoner of the soul and, when he was locked up, twice unfree, he preserved the feeling, that of his heretical and demonic soul, convinced that, walking, the he had forgotten it in a fog, perhaps even in the garden of his childhood, where it seemed to him that they tended the dead and warmed their hands over the flames of roses.

Once, only once, I asked him why in his occasional imprisonments, he had not written poetry, that is, why he had not done what many others had done, since a well-known name of Albanian letters, Arshi Pipa e down to the most minor poets?

"I was waiting for my day, the day that I knew was impossible, but that it would come. Many nights, in front of the glassless window, while I looked at the stars like a fool, maybe completely crazy waiting for a word from the Mother, when the waters had frozen, disobedient, wrapped in a blanket of inquiry, I looked more like a Franciscan monk, I thought verses different, came to me like the rains of my sorrow on a seashore.

Then the day came, the stars disappeared, the word from the Mother did not come, I waited for the sunset like a murderer with knives in my hands and I knew that death would not come to my prison.

People in prisons write because their hope has been killed. To poets in prison, even the lights of the prison fences sometimes seem like oranges swaying in the wind at dusk. Because poets are called to this world to sing the beauty of the human spirit, shocks and goodness, the moment and eternity.

I was a disobedient poet, because I was a disobedient person. I always knew my day was somewhere, it was a space where I could finally get into literature and tell people how much I loved them.

In prison I felt this space, but I did not grasp it. I had invented my time, my Ithaca and my word. Time was not important."

Like many other poets, imprisoned like him, he never sought revenge. The myth of revenge was contrary to his human faith. He could have made dozens of denunciations of those who lynched him, but he contented himself with contempt and, at times, a severe beating, in the old prison way.

"Twenty years ago, in one of the investigation rooms in the old prison of Tirana, I was confronted with a stubborn witness. He insisted that I had insulted Enver Hoxha. When I saw him crying about the holiness of EH I hit him. They handcuffed me and broke my wrists.

Now, after twenty years, he came and shook my hand.

- Careful - I told him. I have a broken hand, you know.

– I heard that you are not a member of P(X).

- I am very determined in the freedom that I have earned myself. I have lost everything in life for this freedom.

- Then, you are an Enverist, - he told me.

I hit him very hard, in the old prison way, there on the steps of the League. It fell backwards. He had blood in his mouth. I felt ashamed. I wanted to help him but I couldn't touch him. Disgust!

Even his poetry has no revenge, screams, shouts, quarrels, even poetic quarrels. Although suffering, he started his comeback from time zero. He was looking for his Sunday, and, when he felt that the end would be merciless, he wrote with pain that “I can now say that, in truth, I have never had a Sunday in my life. I was very unfortunate in the calendar of days, especially I felt the absence of Sunday very much.

He didn't allow himself the luxury of self-deprecation. Even in the most exhilarating moments he never got drunk on the power of his art; he felt death closer than life; more often he was a demon than a wise man; he postpones the last hours of his life under the silver light of a poetic world, always created in the grip of death.

Paraphrasing Stevan Zweig, in his book about the poet-philosopher, Nietzsche, who never wrote poetry, I would say that, his lyrical and demonic soul simultaneously went away into a land of secrecy and into a solitude of the holy.

Two inimitable northern poets, Migjeni and Rreshpja, strangely living next to each other, whose space was separated only by a Franciscan assembly, would have much in common with Nietzsche, with his spirit, with the clear, cold and foggy light , alike in poverty and neglect, simultaneously forbidden and loved, seeking the Superhuman and, finally, dead and resurrected several times, going from death to resurrection, from oblivion to the pedestal, from lynching to worship and, as to be the same in everything, even solitary death.

Sreshpja, the same as Migjeni, feels himself a poet from the moment he tries to enter forcibly, to some extent violently, among the modern times of poetry, therefore, neither one nor the other have anything in common with the precursor poets of the Northern city; they take the unbroken road of rumbles, proclaim their poetic creed, and, like Nietzsche, are unwilling not to be tragic and premature. They are, easily, tragic men and tragic poets; lonely, their poetry cannot be understood without the phenomenon of collision; at different times they have the same mission, but the sacrifice is different.

For them, more than anything else, Nietzsche's saying fits, that "If you keep your eyes on the precipice for a long time, then the precipice also starts looking at you".

They gazed long, long at the human precipice at two different times, and, as in a tragic foreshadowing, the precipice kept its eyes on them until they fell into the embrace of their short lives.

***

When Frederik died, tired of life, the greatest recluse of Albanian letters, the poet like a wind over the dreams of the forest, with the words he had left unsaid, with the desire to climb the stairs of this night with someone to the moon , where he would go alone, he had said his preface, "O evening air, wrap me up, the hour has come to die again".

It was February, a fog-shrouded cold and human loneliness. Winter was not yet gone and not all the snow had fallen.

All death fell on the rainy field…

February 17, 2006.

His death anniversary, as well as his birthday, have been forgotten by many.

On the verge of death he looked as if he had come out of the Guernica of a long night.

He looked older than he was. In all his years there had been no new season. Repeated autumn and winter.

In the valley of death the horses of March awaited him, the colors had turned to spirits, while the barbarians seemed to have temporarily fled and returned.

He was making peace with himself! Now, in his nights, he would not see a white ship. In the morning, a red rose had bloomed at the gate of the house. Farewell piece? Hand outstretched through the petals? Wasn't the mother's tear transformed into a rose?

The pomegranate planted by Hila Mosi was still there, as if it was looking for and waiting for its testimony about the poet's escape.

In the winter sky of his life he was fleeing like a last leaf, meanwhile the moon had faded.

He didn't have time to say goodbye. Apparently, he had said it a long time ago. After him there were no more birds, the flights were wiped out, in which hand of the world would the sleep beyond life occupy?

Some time ago he wrote:

There in the blue isles,
I saw your portrait on the horizon.
What are you doing so far, and why did you notice?
I will remain in this land called Albania.

That day you come down and bring a rose from the rain!

***

Often times, while I'm on the streets of my city, Shkodra, and I walk down the narrow street that leads to Frederik's house, where the roses are still blooming and the shermasheks have grown on the walls, I like to think about the poet, while I feel the steps of the man, that I loved him more in his sorrow, perhaps because I did not know him, except very rarely, in moments of joy.

In my youth I was his disciple, Frederik's poetry shocked me and for a long time I said it to myself.

Later, when the reversal had happened and everything had been great at first, but never complete, I wondered what it was that special, very special thing, which was conceived in his poems, what made him a rebel poet , after all he had a motto, which should be above all.

Hemingway wrote that "Great literature is born from the knowledge of injustice".

Frederik Rreshpja knew this earlier than many others. And he had followed it, knowing that it might crumble.

I don't want anyone to be sad about my fate
That I am sad about my fate
Shattered Marble of the God of Destruction
All my glory this has to be…