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.Ani Gjika Xhevdet Bajraj