Pergatiti: Naum Prifti
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While working on the translation of THROUGH MIRDITE IN WINTER in 1979, I had the privilege to work closely with Prof. Richard C. Bartlett, then Director of Publications at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He had a gracious way of encouraging me throughout the process of translation. Twenty years later, I had the good fortune to work with Tim Cullen in his capacity of Manager of Publication at Peabody. It was he who gave “the green light,” so to speak, for the publications of the English translation, believing that it made more sense to publish the manuscript, than to let it rest in the Peabody repository (where it was placed, after I completed the translation).
Thanks are due to Philip Hubbard, Professor of Linguistics, for his assistance in the preparation of the Glossary of Albanian words and phrases; and to S. Van Christo, currently President of the Frosina Information Network in Boston, who took a lively interest in the manuscript from the start and made vigorous efforts to publicize it.
I wish to note here the helpful comments and suggestions regarding the manuscript, of two other scholars: Joel Halpern, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst; and Antonia Young, Research Associate in Anthropology at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York.
While researching the book, I benefited from consultations with Sulejman Spata, Tomor Zavalani, and Gjon Pepaj regarding the idiom and customs of Mirditë.
To Naum Prifti, renowned Albanian author of books of short stories, plays, children’s fables, etc., I owe a special debt of gratitude for editing the manuscript. It was a responsibility which he handled with diligence and the skills of a seasoned editor.
My warm appreciations to Rafaela Kondi, a scholar of anthropology, for writing the introduction to the book, which is at the same time a “short essay” that pay tribute to Dr. Carleton S. Coon and Stavre Frasheri.
I acknowledge also the contribution of Julika Prifti who assisted in the typing of the manuscript.
Finally, I have been gratified to work closely with the affable and urbane Prof. Stephen Fischer-Galati, respected editor of the East European Quarterly, and Director of Publications in the East European Monographs series, an established institution for the diffusion of knowledge.
Proffesor Peter Prifti
FOREWORD
Stavre Frashëri had no way of knowing that he owed his chance of writing THROUGH MIRDITA IN WINTER to the desire of Professor Earnest A. Hooton of Harvard to experience vicarious adventures through the person of one of his students–myself, at first, later to be accompanied by my wife, Mary Goodale Coon. Hooton followed me, and then us, through four expeditions into the Riffian tribes of Morocco, the last of which ended only a year before our trip to Albania, in the Fall of 1929.
Accompanied first by a 1929 Harvard graduate, Frederick E. Farnsworth, and later by Mary, I went to Tirana to visit the ten tribes of feuding and fighting white North Albanian mountaineers living on either side of the twin rivers, the White and Black Drin, and of their tumultuous joint outlet to the Adriatic Sea near Shkodër (Scutari).
My main objective was to measure the Gheg (Giants) with at least 100 men representing each tribe, some Muslim, some Catholic, and others including members of both faiths. I went north from the capital Tirana three times, first with Frederick Farnsworth and Anthony Stevens, a one-armed, horse-riding guide who was a clerk at the US Legation going on holiday to his birthplace in the tribe of Has, then and still a part of Yugoslavia. Our route took us through the eastern Gheg tribes of Puka, Dibra, and Luma to Has. Our second trip, with Mary, who had just arrived, led us through the tribes of Mati and Mirdita into Puka, whence we came down to sea-level via Scutari and returned by automobile to Tirana. Stavre Frashëri was our interpreter on this trip. He had been teaching at an American Missionary School in Durrës (Durazzo) and was allowed leave to go with us. Although a Tosc he was not afraid to travel among the supposedly wild Ghegs who spoke a different dialect or language (a problem we both prefer to leave to linguists).
After our second trip, Mary departed and was replaced by Mr. Farnsworth with Mr. Frashëri continuing as guide-interpreter. We went up the eastern route again, then crossed the Drin into the northerly and least accessible tribes of Malsia e Jakovës, Dukagjin, and Malsia e Madhe. This was a much longer trip than the one to Mirdita but Frashëri says nothing in his book about it except for a few parenthetical anecdotes. It was not easy for Farnsworth or me, both used to climbing snowy mountains, but it must have shaken Frashëri, who took it like a man without complaint.
He credited both Mary and me with knowing only three words of Albanian, meaning “Very good!” and “Have a long life!” He did not seem to know that I had been studying Albanian before we left and understood much more of what was being said that I let on. On the other hand he must have remembered some of the silly things I did and decided to forget them even though my chances of having his book translated were small.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his single-mindedness Stavre Frashëri wrote a remarkably full and enjoyable ethnography of a people and their culture undergoing rapid change, for which we should be forever grateful. Some of his travel scenes, e.g. “the Munella mountain still followed us, as it were, along the way,” remind one of George
Borrow in his Wild Wales, and A Bible in Spain. His collection of Gheg poetry, so beautifully rendered by Peter Prifti, is most stimulating, and makes a priceless addition to the corpus of Bronze and Iron Age orally transmitted songs. The men who composed and transmitted these haunting echoes of emotion were our living cultural ancestors, and Frashëri must have known it, although he larded appreciation of them with didactic admonitions directed toward a more felicitous if duller cultural status, under the then temporary regime of the dictatorial Mati tribesman, Ahmed Zogu. Fifty years have passed since Stavre Frashëri wrote. How many of his dreams have come true?
Rumor has reached me that Stavre Frashëri is still alive and teaching. If, as I hope, this it true, I salute him with one of my two Albanian words: “Tungjatjeta”, meaning “Have a long life!”
As for Peter Prifti, I know that he is alive, and I thank him from the bottom of my ancient heart.
October 21, 1979
Dr. Carlton Coon
Harvard University
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