The Black Box of My Life

In the final months of Xhevdet Bajraj’s life, he produced nearly 300 poems, writing exclusively in his native Albanian, not employing the language of Mexico — the country of his exile — as he had sometimes done. This book is the first of a trilogy dedicated to these poems.  

He had given the manuscript a title: Angelus Novus, after a monoprint by Paul Klee. Walter Benjamin interprets it like this: “A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating . . . His face is turned toward the past . . . where he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage . . . The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.”

Bajraj contemplated Kosovo fixedly and added to his gaze the suffering he witnessed in his place of refuge. Unrest is the essence of his work, unrest and dislocation, but his poetry does make whole, and as if to awaken the dead.

This series bears a name borrowed from an earlier poem: COFFIN/ When I die/ I hope they will look/ for the black box of my life/ among my poems.

Xhevdet Bajraj (1960–2022) was a poet, dramatist, translator, and professor. His works of poetry, 29 volumes wrought in both Albanian and Spanish, have been translated into English, German, Danish, Serbian, Slovenian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Polish. He was the recipient of many awards, among them, the prize for poetry, conferred by the Kosovo Writers’ Society in 1993, 1996, and 2000; the Goliardos International Prize for Poetry in 2004; and the Ali Podrimja Award in 2019 and 2021. His monodrama, Slaying the Mosquito, received the 2010 Katarina Josipi award for best original drama written in Albanian, and the Ptemio prize, given by the National Theatre and the Ministry of Culture of Kosovo in 2011.

Bajraj and his family were deported from Kosovo in May of 1999. Through the International Parliament of Writers and their program for persecuted writers, he was granted asylum and a fellowship at the Casa Refugio Citlaltepetl in Mexico. In the years that followed, he became a full professor of creative writing and literature at the Autonomous University of Mexico City and was inducted into the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.  

Albanian-born writer Ani Gjika is the award-winning author and literary translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, among them Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize. Most recently, she is the recipient of the New Immigrant Writing Prize for her memoir, An Unruled Body (Restless Books, 2023), which was a 2023 Foreword INDIES winner and on the 2024 Massachusetts Book Awards longlist for Nonfiction.

Gjika moved to the U.S. when she was eighteen, earning a BA in English at Atlantic Union College, an MA in English at Simmons University, and an MFA in poetry at Boston University. Her translation from the Albanian of Negative Space by Luljeta Lleshanaku was published in 2018 by Bloodaxe Books in the U.K., where it was Poetry Book Society’s Recommended Translation and shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. It was published in the same year by New Directions in the U.S., where it was a finalist for a PEN Award and Best Translated Book Award. 

Gjika is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the NEA, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, the 2019 Pauline Scheer Fellowship through GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and residency fellowships from Banff Centre, Ledig House, and Millay Arts. Having taught creative writing at various universities in the U.S. and Thailand, Gjika currently teaches writing, social studies, and literature to English language learners at Framingham High School in Massachusetts.