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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Incessant Funeral

Visar Zhiti

Translated from the Albanian and Introduced by Ani Gjika

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Incessant Funeral portrays a vast crowd carrying the weight of a dead past on their shoulders like a coffin, never stopping at any cemetery. It universalizes the metaphor of totalitarianism, where people cannot free themselves from myth, absurdity, and grotesque reality. The centered lines of this fiction resemble the shape of a funeral procession.

Visar Zhiti, one of Albania’s best-known contemporary writers, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for poems condemned as “hermetic and sorrowful, against Socialist Realism.” After communism’s fall, he published poetry and fiction that has been translated into many languages and honored internationally. Green Integer published his poetry collection The Condemned Apple in 2005.

Ani Gjika, award-winning author of An Unruled Body (2023) and acclaimed translator, brings Zhiti’s work into English with clarity and strength.