Translated from the Albanian by Vlora Konushevci. Cover art: Photo by Rose Vekony.
Tickets
We buy tickets at prices set by the market.
We calculate feelings, boredom, and joy;
love minus its absence,
and we see how mathematics leads to incorrect results.
Confused in stations of arrivals and departures, we lose our way.
Waiting for the train that leads to joy,
but it takes us to the doors of sadness.
Then, confused, we turn back and see that we’ve lost so much:
a work deadline, a coffee with a loved one we’ve been waiting for,
or the last part of a novel we left unfinished.
We end the day and throw the tickets in the trash,
but tomorrow we need a new ticket again:
a journey to see magnificent paintings at the Louvre,
a walk through the wonders of Rome,
or an evening hug by the sea of good memories.
When the week ends, we rest for two days.
And on Sunday evening, we do the math, like a child doing homework:
the money is spent, but the month still has some days left.
We need to buy the monthly ticket for more love;
or for longer pain.
At the end of the month, the calculator of feelings falls to the ground,
and suddenly we spring up.
The coming month is better—spring arrives and the days are long,
or winter’s sorrow falls and the nights are sad.
We buy tickets at prices set by the market,
and confused, we wander through stations of waiting,
hoping for the new day to close the wrong doors.
We go to the theater and buy the ticket for entertainment,
but Tartuffe tells us that the miserly spirit of the world lives in every era.
Then we tickle ourselves and do not open our eyes to see
the truth, because hypocrisy is in fashion.
Another day Hamlet takes the stage,
spoiled and with a sharp gaze, he bursts with rage.
He sees many ghosts scratching the clothes of freedom,
and a sheet with crumpled notes,
saying it always depends on us what statistics we make,
where we plant the flag of sadness and where that of joy.
We are being punished for our sins
The picture doesn’t lie, yet it seldom tells the entire tale,
Paul Auster wrote,
and according to his advice,
whenever we have beautiful sights before us,
we smile and turn feelings into pictures.
The leaves this fall are a spectacle to behold.
Colourful background, golden landscapes, boats on the shore
and a couple kissing, madly in love.
Reminders of a summer gone by.
I wander through memories, leafing through the pages of nostalgia.
We have turned beautiful memories into photographs.
We laughed, we wrote lyrical poems.
And the bad ones, where are they?
We burn them or hide them in the hidden corners of our hearts.
Yet when the waves of nostalgia become heavy,
there is no boat that can save us.
Books say the story of grace is old.
In Eden the beautiful and the ugly were reconciled
to live together in the same garden.
Since then, we speak in the language of the past,
but we never learn enough from it.
Any time we want to gild ourselves, we see that every day
we make mistakes like those that were made before us.
We depart from Eden and find ourselves in Hell.
We eat the forbidden fruit and lower the voice of conscience.
(Sometimes to its demise).
We applaud crazy leaders and erect statues in their honor.
Then we spit on them, throw stones at them and ruin their appearance.
We were counselled to tend to our own gardens,
nurture roses and soulful pines,
but we are tempted to look elsewhere,
to which the sad Ingeborg Bachmann said:
“history teaches, but there are no students.”
There was no yesterday- the prophets say there will be no tomorrow either.
And this judgment is no coincidence,
nor an invention of the imagination of a poetess with a troubled soul.
Before she wrote this she witnessed ships of sorrow sink beneath waves,
touched the fresh blood of the abeles along the great boulevards
and the books of false prophets that are given away.
(Crazy ideas are always given away.)
She had big eyes and could see
how people entered the darkness and became small.
(People are afraid of the dark,
but they go deep into it and become shadows.)
Ingeborg said something similar to what our elders have said:
we are punished for our iniquities, our perverted desires.
The ones from yesterday when we crossed the bloody streets
and we did not clean the stains of history,
when we ran away from pain and found refuge in ourselves.
We bear the burdens of our ancestor’s sins upon our shoulders.
They left us ugly memorials and we didn’t destroy them.
They left us bad books and we didn’t burn them.
They sowed our land with weeds and we didn’t clear them away
They left us dusty archives and we didn’t clean them off.
And we march weighed down, laden with the book of nostalgia,
with longing, pain, resentment,
transformed
and for millions of years we tell
the same stories to those who come behind us.
A piece of paper
A piece of paper can be more important
than the weight of your desires, of your dreams,
of all the pain you carry in your chest,
on your burdened shoulders;
more important than the blue eyes
where ships full of wishes sail in and out,
more important than a heart pierced by storms and tsunamis.
It can magnify your pain or lessen it.
A piece of paper can decide:
where you may go and where you may not,
a paper that’s called a border crossing permit,
where the laws on that side are dictated by someone,
just as on this side, they depend on someone else.
A human life is filled with borders, obstacles, temptations.
Sadly, a piece of paper can lighten the weight of your body,
the weight of your pain, your loves,
your desires, your dreams, your sorrow,
a paper can diminish the amount of joy,
the amount of happiness.
A paper can measure the rhythm of your breath,
the oxygen in your body, the tension, the pulse.
Because we are always surrounded by borders
that appear and disappear unexpectedly in our lives.
We know there are controls on them,
police and soldiers ready with weapons in hand, enforcing orders,
yet we never take the right steps to replace them
with clover flowers,
with beautiful sculptures and springtime dreams.
Because the true borders lie in language,
in morning dreams and dark night desires.
Strangely, people don’t like borders,
but they’ve never learned to live without them,
so they rarely understand the weight
of a paper that defines how much you weigh,
who you are, and whether you can pass to where you wish to go!
Borders are a burden and people are condemned to suffer
within them,
and that’s why they find it hard to expand the dimensions of their heart,
their language,
their soul,
their dreams,
and establish the beautiful kingdom of love.
People
“What is human in a person
cannot be burned.”
Kjell Espmark
Our time has been baptized as modern
and everyone agreed to this.
Even those who were never asked.
Modern people, armed with smart tools,
wander dazed through the virtual world,
they see things they like,
yet are more tempted by the things they dislike.
The sky opens and closes like a grand stage,
where voices intertwine and pigeons in sorrow gaze.
People often believe they hold enchanting formulas in their hands,
and equipped with smart tools they wander, dazed,
in the virtual world scattering virtual feelings.
They see things they like,
but are more tempted by the ones they dislike.
And each they day get surprised by things
that have existed for millions of years.
People today have smart phones,
and navigators to lead them to their desired destination.
They cross the borders of states and continents unnoticed,
sometimes like white clouds, sometimes like somber clouds,
yet they don’t know the way to a tender heart,
a soft and humble heart,
or a sorrowful, lonely heart,
whose tremors are stronger than a tsunami.
Those who feed on the sludge of words
and have learned the tricks of time
never plant their own garden.
Experiments are carried out in laboratories
insisting discoveries are made daily,
but no one bothers to discover an atom of love
that could heal a wounded heart
or free a heart consumed by hatred.
There’s no formula on happiness
Once, I wrote about things I didn’t fully understand.
About physical phenomena,
but the matters of the soul strip you bare of all the lessons,
schools, doctrines, statistics, and mathematical equations.
Even today, I’m not sure I’ve understood many equations,
but I know that all the schools in the world
aren’t enough to explain the phenomena of the soul.
Once, I carried dreams on my back and said:
the world is small, and my steps are large.
Now, I see the years around me,
and carry the vast world on my back,
measuring it with my small steps.
Today, the days are short and the nights long.
And I no longer wish to write about grand things,
like dreams of conquering galaxies.
I’ve told you: we never truly know what we lose or gain,
though each day we love to raise the banners of triumph.
It is said, the gods of loss know no defeat.
Turns
Turns are not merely winding roads,
a landscape we leave behind, and another that unfolds ahead.
Turns are not merely a change of mind,
a late regret,
a return home,
a cry in the night,
a whispered prayer for forgiveness in the lonely hours,
when the unity between yesterday and tomorrow
deforms, and dreams melt among the clouds.
Turns are not merely serpentine paths,
like the roads of life or the roads of my land.
(The roads of my land are serpentine,
lush, worn down by the footsteps of wary travellers,
the feet of scoundrels, and often watered by tears of sorrow.)
You know there is no path nor human life without turns,
and perhaps that’s why
we learn their tricks too late,
the need for caution
whenever we take a turn and head toward a new road.
A new road is a new turn, a landscape brimming with colours,
where confused gazes drown and people chase after their dreams,
like a child searching for something lost.
You, drowsy, ask: where does this night road beaten by fierce winds
and travellers clothed in strange attire lead?
I am no weather forecaster,
nor a prophet to calm storms and rough waves,
I cannot predict the tricks of life and its grand turns.
I have learned to grasp their significance quite late,
the need to find a new path,
a return to the harbour of memories
or a sail through tumultuous waves.
We know that a ship in harbour cannot fulfil its purpose.
So why all this unease
each time we lose a road and find ourselves in a new space,
amidst daunting waves?
Again, you ask questions shrouded in the unknowns.
Turn. Fog. Drowsiness. Enchanted eyes.
A landscape ahead and one left behind,
and you say that walking through turns means walking through mist.
I slip through your words
as one slips on old cobblestones wet from the August rain,
and I see many roads that lead to the valley of sorrows.
You grow wistful and fall silent,
silent as the calmed oaks after the storm has passed.
But the storm of the soul does not pass easily,
and the branches of life are not spread like the wings of birds,
who, though frightened, always know how to fly.
When the sky clears and its dome appears endless,
memories weigh upon your neck like a millstone,
and you cannot see the new horizons.
When you find yourself in the valley of sorrows, a turn is not enough,
you need laboured breathing, a sigh, and an ascent upward,
for in life, we must always rise.
Geographical maps say that at the end of every road,
there is a new possibility,
but the maps of the soul are not aligned with the geographical ones.
The maps of the soul say that in the turns,
there are endless dangers but one cannot move forward otherwise,
for turns are as inevitable as the paths of rivers.
Rivers swell, recede, cross fields and mountains, and flow into the sea.
But what happens to the waters that don’t reach the sea?
Waters that rot!
What about ideas that rot?
Ideas have the power to preserve life, to sow mist,
and to scatter sadness.
And in the turns they are guiding signs, warning beacons.
A turn is a great road that reveals a new view,
a beautiful memory,
eyes full of longing or slender hands,
waving like clouds as they bid a tearful “farewell”.
A return pulls behind it a cart full of memories,
soldiers who have survived adventures,
and generals who parade triumphantly in the squares,
declaring victory.
But in life, there is always the other side,
like the opposite side of the earth when it bids farewell to the sun
and is cloaked in darkness.
They are the others, the defeated,
pulling another cart, inevitably called the cart of loss,
with desperate travellers, heads bowed,
stern-faced generals, and tattered flags.
(The people of my land have pulled many carts of losses,
and often confused them with those of the victors.)
And the elders like to say that a turn always comes late,
when we emerge from a wasteland or, conversely, rush into it,
as a lonely boat rushes into the storm.
When we stop, we remember the hours of joy,
the nightmares, the sorrowful things,
an escape from hell
or an eternal entry into it.
Ndue Ukaj was born in Kosova. He is a writer, essayist, and literary critic whose voice resonates through contemporary Albanian literature. Over the years, he has published six poetry collections, two volumes of short stories, a novel, and two books of literary criticism. His work, marked by depth of thought and lyrical clarity, has earned him numerous honors, including the National Award for the Best Book of Poetry published in 2010 in Kosova, the Award for Best Poem at the International Poetry Festival Days of Naim in North Macedonia (2011), and the Best Writer Award at the book fair Libri të bân mirë in Shkodra, Albania (2025). His poems and essays have appeared in distinguished international anthologies and literary journals, and his writings have been translated into many languages.
Vlora KONUSHEVCI (poet, translator, and essayist; Kosovo) is the author of the poetry collection Lavdi Vetes and the editor-translator of the bilingual anthologies Poetry Without Borders (Albanian–Serbian) and Magma (Albanian–English). Her poetry and translations appear in The Common, Songs of Eretz, and European Literature Network. A winner of multiple literary awards and a contributor to Kosovo’s cultural press, she also works as a certified translator for national and international institutions. Her participation is made possible thanks to the University of Iowa’s Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate College.
