Immigrants And Combatants

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Notes

1. The word çorba, by etymologic origin, springs from Persia. That word entered the Albanian language through the Turkish language. The first meaning of it is soup, broth. The metaphorical meaning is a badly made dish; mishmash (synonym).

2. Paul Celan in ‘Todesfuge’ (Deathfugue): “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night / we drink and we drink / we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped / A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes … ”

3. In his famous poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, Cavafy commented on the role which the arrival of the new rulers was supposedly to have: “And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? / Those people were some kind of solution.” The deliberately flat ending parallels with T. S. Eliot's last words in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925): ”This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”

4. A burlesque adaptation of a well-known epigram, of Simonides of Ceos in Thermopylae, forwarded to us by Herodotus.

5. Shlivovica (written form - šlivovica) is a local plum brandy produced in all former Yugoslavian countries.